HE DOESN’T KNOW JACK!
TAKING A STAB at revisionist history, President Trump said in an interview Monday that he thinks slave-owning former President Andrew Jackson would have been able to prevent the Civil War — and wondered why the catastrophic conflict occurred in the first place.
“Had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” Trump told SiriusXM about the seventh President, who left office 24 years before, and died 16 years before the onset of the Civil War.
“He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War,” Trump told the satellite radio station’s “Main Street Meets the Beltway” program, before questioning why the enormous war over slavery happened at all.
“He said, there’s no reason for this. People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why?” Trump said. “People don’t ask that question.”
“But why was there the Civil War? Why would that one not have been worked out?” he added.
Trump later took to Twitter to further spread his revisionist history.
“President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen!” he wrote.
Jackson was in office from 1829 to 1837, and died in 1845. The Civil War broke out April 12, 1861, when Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, was attacked.
Historians, however, have pointed out that as President, Jackson stopped an earlier attempt by South Carolina to secede by threatening to send troops to the Palmetto State. But Jackson, a native of the Carolinas who began his political career in Tennessee, was a Southerner at heart who owned slaves. On one occasion he took a local newspaper advertisement out to offer a $50 reward for a slave he had owned who had escaped. Jackson offered an additional $10 “for every hundred lashes any person will give him to the amount of three hundred.”
He was infamous for forcing Native Americans from their homes in what became known as the Trail of Tears, and for being a decorated veteran who served in the War of 1812. Trump has been frequently compared with the former President, due to their shared reputations as unpolished, populist outsiders wanting to defy the political establishment.
But despite the sinking reputation of Jackson in American history, Trump has nevertheless welcomed the comparison. He has hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office and last month paid homage to Jackson by marking Old Hickory’s 250th birthday with a visit to his Tennessee home and final resting place.
Trump continued to embrace that comparison during his interview with SiriusXM Politics.
“They said my campaign is most like . . . like Andrew Jackson with his campaign,” he told the satellite radio station, before launching into a story about the occasion when he learned of Jackson’s political career.
“And I said, ‘When was Andrew Jackson?’ It was 1828. That’s a long time ago,” Trump said.
“That’s Andrew Jackson. And he had a very, very mean and nasty campaign . . . . Because they said this was the meanest and the nastiest. And, unfortunately, it continues,” Trump said.