Donald Trump hailed America’s first populist president Wednesday, laying a wreath at the tomb of Andrew Jackson and waxing lyrical about the similarities between himself and the seventh US president.
On the 250th anniversary of Jackson’s birth, Trump visited ‘Old Hickory’s’ Tennessee home, dubbed The Hermitage.
Praising ‘the very great’ Jackson’s willingness to take on ‘an arrogant elite,’ Trump broke away from prepared remarks to exclaim, ‘Does that sound familiar to you?’
‘I wonder why they keep talking about Trump and Jackson, Jackson and Trump. Ooh, I know the feeling Andrew.’
Since coming to office in January, Trump aides have sought to draw comparisons between the bareknuckle Democratic president and Trump.
A portrait of Jackson has been introduced to the Oval Office – ‘right boom! Over my left shoulder,’ Trump said – referring to portrait’s position behind the Resolute Desk.
‘Jackson’s (election) victory shook the establishment like an earthquake,’ he said, mocking Jackson’s critics who called his victory ‘mortifying’ and ‘sickening.’
‘Oh boy does this sound familiar,’ Trump said, describing him as ‘one of our great presidents.’
Trump even mentioned his admiration for a magnolia tree in the White House garden than was brought from The Hermitage.
‘I looked at it actually this morning,’ he noted.
Born in the backwoods in 1767, Jackson was orphaned in his early teens.
He gained a reputation as a fighter: As a young man he was cut with a saber for refusing to polish a British soldier’s boots and once killed a man in a duel.
‘From that day on Andrew Jackson rejected authority that looked down on the common people,’ Trump said, also lauding Jackson’s role in defeating the British in New Orleans.
‘He was a real general, that one.’
Andrew Jackson, America’s seventh president, was a controversial figure, who was known to have built his personal fortune with slave labor while his time in office led to the deaths of thousands of Native AmericansFormer president Andrew Jackson is a controversial figure, who was known to have built his personal fortune with slave labor while his time in office led to the deaths of thousands of Native Americans, tens of thousands of whom were stripped of their homeland. America’s seventh president, Jackson, who grew up on the frontier, was seen as an outsider and it is unlikely he would have ever become president if not for the Battle of New Orleans, in which he won a victory against the British at the close of the War of 1812.’The legacy of the battle is that Americans felt Jackson had saved them from the British. That launched the U.S. into an era of national pride,’ said Tony Guzzi, who organized the ‘Andrew Jackson, Born for a Storm’ exhibit at his historical Hermitage home.’The big, important thing is it really changed the way Americans felt about their country. They were more confident about the permanency of the U.S., which was only a few decades old.”Jackson was the next great war hero after George Washington. They put his image on everything from plates to pitchers to coins to you-name-it,’ Guzzi said, adding that many of the ceremonial swords, medallions and gold presentation boxes are on display.When he came to power he was popular, so popular in fact that his first inauguration was overrun by drunken well-wishers who tore up the White House furniture. Jackson had to escape from a window while his supporters were eventually persuaded to continue their celebrations on the lawn.But his presidency was plagued with controversy.The most famous was the 1830 The Indian Removal Act, also known as the Trail of Tears, which caused the death of thousands of Native Americans and robbed them of their lands.It forced multiple tribes to leave the cotton-rich land, where they had been for generations, to a designated zone on the other side of the Mississippi, which later became the state of Oklahoma.He was also a prolific slave owner and never freed a slave of his own will.His presidency also saw the closure of the national bank and an unprecedented use of the veto that many members of Congress criticized as exceeding his authority.His time in office was also known for the Petticoat Affair, a social catastrophe that began when members of his household and cabinet refused to socialize with the scandal-plagued wife of War Secretary John Eaton.The situation escalated and led to the dissolution of nearly Jackson’s entire cabinet.Today, statues of him remain, such as the famous equestrian piece at the center of Lafayette Park, while he has also been featured in Pulitzer Prize-winning biography ‘American Lion’ and Broadway rock musical ‘Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.’The portrait of former President Andrew Jackson has also stared out from the face of the $20 since 1928.But it may not be for much longer after a campaign to remove the controversial former president, who was responsible for deaths of so many Native Americans, as well as their loss of life.
Jackson first won fame as a military commander in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, when he led an American force that prevented a much larger British army from seizing the city and threatening the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.
He was elected in 1828 as the right to vote was expanded to all white men, not just property owners, and he brought new voter groups into the fold.
For the White House, comparisons with Jackson help place Trump inside the pantheon of US presidents and within the mainstream of American political history.
Trump’s critics have painted the polarizing mogul as an aberration and his views as antithetical to the American democratic tradition.
But historians say Jackson’s story is more subtle and comparisons with Trump may be misleading.
A top Jackson biographer says the comparison of Trump and Jackson is ‘not the cleanest analogy,’ but the seventh president offers the 45th a convenient example of ‘an unconventional presidency trying to accomplish big things.’
Although he attempted ‘cleansing the Augean stable’ – while Trump talks of ‘draining the swamp’ in Washington – Jackson was no political outsider.
Before entering the White House, Jackson rose through Tennessee politics, becoming a congressman and a senator before taking up a judgeship and becoming a general.
There are fundamental differences in the paths they took to the presidency. Trump is a New York real estate mogul who came from wealth. Jackson was born into poverty and rose to become a wealthy lawyer and a national hero after the War of 1812.
But Jackson’s reputation has been somewhat tarnished in recent years, with criticism focused on his temperament and the forced removal of Native Americans from their land.
The Treasury Department recently decided to replace Jackson’s image on the $20 bill with civil rights hero Harriet Tubman.
Trump acknowledged that his political kindred spirit was ‘a flawed and imperfect man’.
Until Trump won the White House, Jackson was also the last president to serve without bringing a family pet to the presidential mansion.
The president’s Nashville rally comes on the heels of a Congressional Budget Office report that says the GOP’s health care plan would leave 14million people without coverage next year and 24 million uninsured by 2026.
The plan is disliked by both far-right conservatives, who want a large-scale repeal as they believe they were promised, and by Democrats, who oppose the loss of coverage for so many.
President Andrew Jackson signed The Indian Removal Act on May 28, 1830, which forced tens of thousands of Native Americans to abandon the lands they had occupied for generations, to relocate to unsettled lands west of the Mississippi. Few tribes went peacefully and when many resisted, Jackson’s government responded in brutal fashion.Tribes were forcibly moved west by the United States government, often marching more than 1,000 miles, some in stockades.Between 1836 and 1839, more than ten thousand Native Americans were said to have died on the forced march, which became known as the ‘Trail of Tears.’Andrew Jackson had been a strong proponent of what he called ‘Indian removal’ since his time as an Army general. He spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida.They military actions resulted in thousands of acres of Native American land being handed to white farmers.When Jackson became president he continued his campaign and in 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act.The law stated the government had to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully.They were not allowed to force Native Americans to give up their land.President Jackson gave little heed to the law, and by the end of the decade, around 125,000 Native Americans had been relocated from their cotton-rich lands in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida, to west of the Mississippi – which later became the state of Oklahoma.The Choctaw became the first tribe to be forcibly moved from its land in the winter of 1831.Under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the tribe made the long journey on foot – some bound in chains – with no food, supplies or other help from the government.Around 4,000 people died on the way, earning it the long deadly march the name, the Trail of Tears.In 1836, another tribe, the Creeks, began a deadly march for Oaklahoma – 3,500 of the 15,000 who set out died.Representatives from the Cherokee tribe had negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which traded their land east of the Mississippi for $5 million, with relocation assistance and compensation for lost property.By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left Georgia so 7,000 soldiers were sent in who forced them into stockades at bayonet point and marched the tribe more than 1,200 miles to Indian territory.Disease, starvation and exhaustion killed more than 4,000.
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