President Trump won his election but fought the specter of illegitimacy and never trusted Congress, seeing everything as a plot against him. He developed a deep mistrust of Congress and what he thought of as the elite, ruling party as a result. Jackson lost the election of 1824 in the House of Representatives as no candidate had the requisite electoral votes. They are both elites in every sense of the term but did not think themselves as such. He and President Trump share this similarity. In the early 1800s, Tennessee was the frontier and while Jackson was a part of that gentry, he was an outsider and not a “coastal elite”. While Jackson was certainly born to a low station, orphaned as young boy and bounced around the houses of relatives, he did make a name for himself and was considered a part of upperclass Nashville society. Both rode populist movements to win the election and considered themselves to be men of people. I think that President Trump and President Jackson have a lot in common. I feel confident that the two are related.
I know that the president hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office and waxes poetically about Jackson but I’m not sure if it is actual admiration or outright contempt of his predecessor, who planned to remove Jackson from the $20 bill. I found it nearly impossible to avoid the connections between the current presidential administration and Andrew Jackson. Jackson is not admirable but was pivotal. This book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for what author Jon Meacham’s hometown newspaper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press call “an unflinching portrait of a not always admirable democrat but a pivotal president, written with an agile prose that brings the Jackson saga to life” which I think to be the best interpretation of Jackson and this book. His racism almost certainly fueled his desire to remove Native Americans from their homes and force them away from white settlements. Jackson owned slaves and believed unequivocally in the “supreme race”. I’ve read a lot about how awful Andrew Jackson was, especially the last four years.
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