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Opinion

No, there has never been an American president like Trump

Trying to make Trump look less than a menace threatening world peace by comparing him to  the seventh US President Andrew Jackson just doesn’t hold up.

Let’s begin by saying the obvious: America is in the grip of a political and constitutional crisis. But instead of enumerating all the horrible things that the country’s new irrational president has launched on his first 10 days in office, it’s important to pause and ask: has America ever gone through a moment like this? Has the country ever had a president like this one? Scanning presidential history gives us a few offbeats, but one in particular is known among historians: Andrew Jackson; he was a U.S. president from 1829 to 1837. But while Jackson was a populist, he wasn’t extremely dangerous for the world and that’s because America wasn’t powerful enough for its leadership to cause damage beyond its borders. And fascism wasn’t an ideology that deranged politicians aspired to. But’s intriguing how some conservatives, like Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, are trying to rehabilitate Donald Trump’s presidency by comparing him directly with Andrew Jackson. The question is: does the analogy hold and why is this important at all?

The question may not seem too obvious at first, but once you learn a few facts about the so-called Jacksonian democracy, you notice that the effort is to make Donald Trump look not as a menace who is threatening the world peace, but merely as a populist, a man of the people, a president of the average American. At worst a nationalist. It’s true that Trump and Jackson share certain characteristics such as an impertinent temperament, ignorance and cluelessness about policy. In fact, not unlike Trump, Jackson had no real policy ideas to offer. “Up to the time of his inauguration Jackson had contributed neither a thought nor a deed to the democratic movement, and he was elected without a platform,” wrote the eminent American historian Richard Hofstadter in his seminal book “The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It.”

An aristocrat, lawyer, and land speculator, Andrew Jackson grew up in Tennessee and North Carolina. In his youth, he developed a passion for gambling and horses, and before he became president—unlike Trump—he sampled political power and military glory by becoming a congressman, senator, and a general in his twenties. Jackson defeated John Quincy Adams, the incumbent president in the 1828 election, which was marred by demagoguery and mudslinging that only 2016 campaign could perhaps surpass. His message resonated with a large swath of the American people. Jackson did not read and could not spell and spoke in a coarse language, much like the current president. In an evocative description of him that can easily describe the current  president, Hofstadter wrote: “[Jackson] was a simple, emotional, and unreflective man with a strong sense of loyalty to personal friends and political supporters.” When he made policy decisions, it was hard to know if they were personal whims or policy problems. “Historians have never been certain how much his policies were motivated by public considerations and how much by private animosities,” Hofstadter wrote.

But beyond these factors, the Jackson-Trump analogy begins to breaks down.

That is so because America of the 1820s and 30s was a small emerging nation still trying to find its footing in the congress of nations and it hardly mattered to the world whether the country had a stable executive or not. Although Andrew Jackson was the first populist president sweeping to power largely by running as an anti-establishment candidate, the Jacksonian movement coincided with unique circumstances of the times: growing settlements in the west (six western states were admitted to the Union) vastly expanding the voter base for the poor. It was a new dawn for the frontier and yeomen farmers who finally found their voice in Jackson’s populism – which promised to save them from the established powerful merchants and capitalists that had run the economy since the country’s founding. It was the time of land speculation in which farmers were more interested in the value of their land than what grew on it. Breaking the cycle of subsistence and impoverished living was a dream of the farmer and Jackson knew that well because he had been a land speculator himself.

By contrast and to the extent that Trump’s rise today can be attributed to any economic struggle, his message was more about turning inward, closing down avenues of economic expansion, and protecting the worker from trade and forces of globalization. Nevermind that much of the nationalistic rhetoric and economic demagoguery made little or no sense to those caught in the winds of the modern economy. His main ideas to launch trade wars with neighbors, impose tariffs, and bully free enterprise into submission are self-defeating and have little to do with Jackson’s effort to open avenues to business for the ambitious small capitalist and merchant of the 1830s. Trump’s populism is a complex mix of belligerence, vindication, cultural prejudice, bigotry, personal narcissism, and a flagrant abdication of responsibility that comes with the office. In every speech and action, big and small, he has demonstrated that he, himself, is the center of his movement, not the people, their rights and liberties.

These characteristics make him all the more dangerous because today’s America is a global hegemony with the world’s most lethal military. The country has stockpiles of nuclear weapons that can threaten the destruction of the planet. No country in history has had a deeper and wider economic, military and technological reach than America has now. The world’s most pressing global issues from the environmental degradation and climate change to human rights, terrorism, and globalization depend heavily on America’s leadership and commitment. That leadership and commitment are now in the hands of a menace of a president who, just a week in office, has sparked outrage and chaos around the globe and a constitutional crisis right at home, which seems to have no end in sight.

So, there is almost no comfort in comparing Donald Trump with another president of almost two hundred years ago. Plus, Andrew Jackson became a real hero of the people and worked hard to clean up government and remove the money men and break well-entrenched monopolies. Donald Trump has already flooded the government with billionaires. If Andrew Jackson could cause chaos with his own hand, the most he could do was to kill someone with his pistol, which he did once in a duel. Donald Trump has his fingers on nuclear weapons that can kill millions of people. The comparison is ludicrous. America has never gambled with itself and the world more than it did on November 8, 2016.  

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01 February 2017 - 13:47

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