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.”
