Trump’s fixation on Jackson was revealed in an interview this week. As is his usual wont, his knowledge of Jackson seemed to have derived from listening to a five minute condensation of Cliff Notes on Jackson and with that soupcon of information, he proceeded to stamp his garbled narrative and opinion onto Jackson.
One big difference between Trump and many other politicians is that his ignorant buffoonery is always on display. Not couched, coached, and hidden by minders employed to make a buffoon look smart and informed.
This still left me with a question: when did Trump first fixate on Jackson as a president to admire? Can this be condensed to his political MO: cable news and obsessive loathing of all things about Barack Obama? Mostly yes as Politifact writers detail. But we can’t ignore an earlier notation from Trump on July 10, 2013:
Interesting…the last time a Democrat succeeded a two-term Democratic pres. was in 1836 when Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson.
Still that can be written off as a factoid* someone (one of his kids?) mentioned to him as he was assessing his odds for a presidential run in 2016. (Not to be overlooked — and which I and most people paid no attention to in 2011 — the guy was making enough motions to run against Obama that he was roasted by both Obama and the keynote speaker at the WHCD that year. But he is too much of whiny ass titty baby to have gone mano-a-mano against Obama.) Plus, there wasn’t much more that he could do with the factoid because Jackson was a Democrat.
Did he mention Jackson anytime after that and before the Treasury Department announced in 2016 that Jackson was being demoted to the back of the bill? Recall that by then Trump had been on the campaign trail for ten months. When, where and how did he praise that guy in those months? If he didn’t, his Jackson bromance began with cable news and his faulty idea of the federal government and how decislons about US currency and coins are made.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump says that “Harriet Tubman is fantastic” but that Andrew Jackson should be left on the $20 bill; decrying the move as “political correctness.” He calls for another denomination of bill for Tubman to be put on.
Steve Inskeep at the The Atlantic was onto the team Trump-Jackson connection before others in the media. Building on a factoid of no significance and whitewashing Jackson to raise the stature of the buffoon into “Presidential.”
Steve Bannon, the media executive and soon-to-be White House strategist, has been describing Donald Trump’s victory as just the beginning. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism,” he told the Hollywood Reporter, “we’re going to build an entirely new political movement.”
Newt Gingrich [noted fifth rate historian] has compared Trump to Jackson for some time. [220 year old] Rudolph Giuliani declared on election night that it was “like Andrew Jackson’s victory. This is the people beating the establishment.” That may seem a comforting comparison, since it locates Donald Trump in the American experience and makes his election seem less of a departure.
Just goes to show that history can be twisted into whatever a charlatan wants it to be.
*Technically true (an exception for Trump) but meaningless for many reasons not worth the bother recite.
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“What we know, first and foremost, is that it hardly matters what Trump says because what he says is as likely as not to have no relationship to the truth, no relationship to what he said last year during the campaign or even what he said last week. What he says bears no relationship to any consistent political or policy ideology or world-view. What he says is also likely to bear no relationship to what his top advisers or appointees have said or believe, making them unreliable interlocutors even if they agreed among themselves, which they don’t.
“This lack of clear policy is compounded by the fact that the president, despite his boasts to the contrary, knows very little about the topics at hand and isn’t particularly interested in learning. In other words, he’s still making it up as he goes along.”
Jackson also had faulty view of economics. Destroying the Second Bank was an economic blunder.
Perhaps it would be faster and easier to list what he didn’t have a faulty view of.
#1 — He apparently loved his wife.
#2 — ???
Jackson began his ownership and trading of slaves in the 19th century. Shortly after George Washington had died and in his will provided for emancipation of his inherited slaves. That alone puts him on a lower level of slave owners. (Although Martha Washington wasn’t enlightened. She only owned one slave and didn’t free her. It was left to her grandson to free her Custis dower slaves which was only done shortly before the Civil War.)
What was populism? The illusion that with free land, slave labor, and generous bankruptcy laws, a small farmer with land but little means could become a planter who built a pile like the Hermitage.
Just had to look ’em in the eye and talk plain. And make sure that the peach brandy showed up at the court houses.
Yes, the illusion. Jackson lied, cheated, and stole to get that land, buy those slaves, and build his pile.
Jefferson’s wife held her own half-sister (Sally Hemmimgs) as a slave. What they told us at Monticello was that they were near-twins. I suppose sally was a little darker but both her father and her maternal grandfather were white masters, so she was probably lighter than Obama. I’m not sure but I think those two men were father and son so it was incestuous as well. Such was the morality of old Virgina society. Like dogs. Maybe that’s why Virginians like dogs so well.
It probably isn’t a popular view, but I see Jefferson as a basically good man who couldn’t control his lusts. He knew he should free his slaves, but he couldn’t stand being poor. He knew he shouldn’t be sleeping with Sally but he wanted her so damn bad (many men, all through history). He did free them in his will, IIRC, but they weren’t freed because a bank held mortgages on them all, so they were re-sold to pay the bank(s).
Sally Hemings father and grandfather were unrelated.
Betty Hemings was the daughter of Susanna (slave of Francis Eppes) and John Hemings (English sea captain) (He tried to buy Susanna but Eppes refused to sell.)
Martha Eppes (daughter of Francis) married John Wayles and she received Susanna and Betty as a wedding gift. Her daughter, also Martha, was a widow when she married T. Jefferson. Martha’s Hemings-Wayles half-siblings were a dozen and more years younger than she was — Sally would have been at least eighteen years younger than her half-sister Martha.
We know that Sally’s children could “pass;” three chose to do so and one didn’t.
Being good isn’t a question of intent. It’s living by principles that are contemporaneously integral to being good. We know that the laws of that time precluded the widowers Wayles and Jefferson from marrying mixed race women, but there’s no evidence that those relationships were other than slave and master. Also Martha Wayles Jefferson did ask her husband not to remarry. (It’s not clear to me that Wayles and Jefferson had the legal authority to free or sell the Epps/Hemings descendants, but TJ did free three of them in his will; so, who knows?)
Thanks for the clarification. I was going by memory of a tour of Monticello, a very long time ago.
I’ll concede that a male, I may be more forgiving of male shortcomings. As for the conflict on slavery, I can see that a man would be torn between conscience and poverty.
What I pulled away from that tour (actually I’ve been there twice) was that Jefferson was a very intelligent man but a bad money manager. Like Steinmetz.
Has anybody considered whether Trump was confusing Andrew Jackson with Andrew Johnson in his remarks? Clearly, the part about “Had Andrew Jackson been a little later…” is about Jackson, but maybe he was conflating something he learned in school about Andrew Johnson (anti-secession southerner) with Jackson? His quote doesn’t really make sense with Johnson either, but this is Trump we are talking about.
Probably not good for one’s mental health to attempt to delve into the mind of Trump. Better to ponder a first rate mind than a mind as pedestrian and flabby as Trump’s.
Trump is the lawyer, late at night, with a bad case, looking for any precedent to support his argument.
I worked with a law professor for a while who essentially did the same thing. He cherry picked data to support his main theme.
Trump doesn’t care where the statement came from, and he doesn’t how reliable it is, if he hears it and it supports something he wants to sell he uses it.
I have been the lawyer up late at night with a bad case. I know exactly where he is coming from.