Virtue-loving William Bennett defended Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts by likening Trump’s authoritarian move to Abraham Lincoln’s criticism of the Dred Scott decision.

Bennett appeared on Friday’s Fox & Friends to promote his new book but in the middle of the interview, he was asked by cohost Rachel Campos-Duffy about Roberts publicly chastising Trump’s attacks on the judiciary,

The Los Angeles Times explains:

In an exceedingly rare personal rebuke of a president by the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday denounced President Trump’s attack denigrating as a partisan “Obama judge” the California federal jurist who’d recently ruled against his asylum policy.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts said in a surprise statement, a day after Trump had assailed Judge Jon S. Tigar of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco and called the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals “a disgrace.”

The LA Times also notes that Trump has “tweeted disdainfully” about Roberts since 2012. And Trump responded to Roberts by accusing the 9th Circuit of “making our country unsafe!” and admonishing Roberts to “study” the “shocking” numbers of how often that court is overturned. (Spoiler: not the most often overturned Court of Appeals)

But when asked if Trump “is right to pick this fight” with Roberts, moralist (and former high-stakes gambler) Bennett said Trump is “certainly right, but I mean Roberts really picked this fight.”

“That’s true, good point,” Canpos-Duffy readily agreed.

“Talked about the Ninth Circuit and liberal judges - there’s no question about it,” Bennett insisted. “If you have eyes, you can see that. If you read their opinions, you can see that.”

But that wasn’t enough Trump sycophancy for the author of “The Book of Virtues” and other books touting the moral high-ground. Bennett went on to ridiculously – some might say “deceitfully” compare Trump to Lincoln.

BENNETT: But this isn’t unprecedented either, and Donald Trump puts himself here in the legacy of Abraham Lincoln who had a fierce debate with the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney in the Dred Scott decision, and then in the case of Habeas Corpus in the Civil War.

So this is a fight that John Roberts, I think, didn’t want to pick. By the way, when he talks about the independence of the judiciary, I wonder if he tapped Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the wrist when she was criticizing candidate Trump and saying, you know, that he was a fake and a phony. Because that’s not really above the fray.

Watch Bennett defend Trump’s attacks on an independent judiciary below, from the November 23, 2018 Fox & Friends.