King Andrew & Prince Donald
The time another outsider rode populism to power
The new president’s critics blasted him as a vulgarian, a brash, impulsive egotist with thin skin and a hot temper. Gentler souls were shocked by his swashbuckling behavior and simplistic rhetoric, not to mention his personal life. Charges of adultery and other indiscretions shadowed his campaign and persisted after his election. The president also had a distinctive hairdo.
Donald Trump? No, the description applies to Andrew Jackson, who occupied the White House from 1829 to 1837. Although their presidencies are separated by nearly two centuries, Jackson seems in some ways to have anticipated Trump, at least in tone.
Capitol insiders doubted him; no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson declared Jackson “a dangerous man” who was temperamentally unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. When the outsider won, his supporters, a basket of backwoods deplorables, literally trashed the White House in a post-inaugural frenzy. His antipathy to minorities went far beyond attitude; the president was both an Indian fighter and a slave owner. Jackson’s leadership style was so imperious, even imperial, that critics dubbed him King Andrew I. Donald Trump seems to have scant knowledge of presidential history and even less interest in the subject, but my guess is that he’d find Andrew Jackson a worthy ancestor.
The comparisons eventually run out of steam. Jackson was a military hero; Trump never served. “Old Hickory” spent years in Congress before reaching the White House; again, Trump never served. Jackson was a founder of the modern Democratic Party; Trump ran essentially as an independent in Republican’s clothing. Jackson’s portrait is, for the time being, on the $20 bill; it’s hard to imagine Trump’s visage on anything but casino currency.
An American icon
Our seventh president’s actual record was decidedly mixed. He faced down South Carolina when it tried to nullify a federal law and worked to bring democracy closer to the people. On the other hand, his insistence on hard money in soft times sparked a deep recession in 1837, and he implemented a genocidal policy of Indian removal. The Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears was a Jackson project.
His record aside, Jackson’s power as an American icon is indisputable. He was the first president born in a log cabin, the first from the trans-Appalachian West, the first who rose from a difficult childhood to the heights of affluence and influence. Jackson was the most self-made of men — a fact his campaign managers let no one forget.
Trump is a billionaire whose first for-
tune was inherited. Like Jackson, however, he is a largerthan-life figure who connects with ordinary Americans on a visceral level; voters on Nov. 8 embraced a mood rather than a man, an image rather than an intellect.
How could someone as rich as Trump play the same populist card in 2016 that Jackson rode into office in 1828? One answer is that there always has been a Beverly Hillbillies quality to Trump; his very crassness gives him a common touch. All those fabulous towers are basically just big pickup trucks, and he can brag about them with as much bravado as the guy on the next barstool talking about his Ford F-150.
However shaky or shallow its roots, Trump’s populism is virtually all he shares with Jackson on a fundamental level. Every president holds up a mirror to the electorate. Jackson was democracy personified, a living reflection of all the restless yearnings of the American people. Trump offers a different, darker reflection, and there can be no more powerful illustration of how much our nation has changed in the last 200 years.
Aspirational
Jackson channeled aspiration while Trump channels resentment. Old Hickory was a forward-looking expansionist who wanted to enlarge the Union and its economic sphere. Trump campaigned as a nostalgic reactionary who wanted fewer newcomers, fewer foreign entanglements, fewer complications of any kind. “Make America Great Again” rhymes too easily with “Make It 1958 Again.”
Jackson was a fervent believer in the importance of government, while Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” Jackson never doubted the public sector’s power, even its obligation, to curb what he called “the advancement of the few at the expense of the many.” He stood for “the humble members of society” against “the rich and powerful.” Donald Trump embodies wealth and power, and yet, in perhaps the oddest inversion of all, he has been the most savage of critics. Despite the fact that the prevailing system — taxes, regulations and all — helped to make him a New World Croesus , Trump’s campaign message was a drumbeat of negativity: about government, the economy, the military and, most troubling of all, about the future.
Despite the uneasy fit between message and messenger, nearly half the voting public chose Trump, including a preponderance of blue-collar Americans. Whatever happened to the common man and woman? As they have since Jackson’s time and long before, farmers can say loudly and proudly that their work is essential, but what about the millions whose jobs have gone to China or Mexico or simply into thin air? Stripped of pride in the work of their hands, facing a future that seems to have little place in it for them, they flocked to an amoral, vainglorious demagogue who echoed their fears and promised to make things better.
What happens when the border wall doesn’t get built, when the jobs don’t come back from China, when the Latino tide continues to rise, when Americans by the millions lose their health care coverage? What then? Trump appears never to have known an ounce of shame or shown a trace of humility in his adult life. What if his presidential quest turns out to have been nothing more than an epic exercise in ego?
In 1829, as Andrew Jackson was on his way from Nashville to the White House, Daniel Webster, already a lion in the U.S. Senate, expressed high anxiety. “When he comes,” Webster wrote, “he will bring a breeze with him. Which way it will blow I cannot tell.” Millions of Americans are feeling similar anxiety today. What will a Trump presidency bring? For many of us — right, left and center — Daniel Webster put it perfectly: “My fear is stronger than my hope.”