Donald Trump is utterly unable to admit a mistake. It doesn’t matter what the subject is or how egregious the original remark. It doesn’t matter if it’s something he said off the cuff without much, or any, advance thought. Once a statement has squirted from between from his puckered lips, it must be defended.
The process starts when Trump hears some couch banter on Fox and Friends, or puzzles through some headlines on Breitbart, mixes up a few “facts” in an already questionable story, then spews. Next—and this is critical—people laugh at Trump. Lots and lots of people. Laugh, laugh, laugh at Donald Trump.
At this point Trump squeezes his hands into ping pong ball-sized fists, and doubles down on his original statement. You want a triple-dog dare? Oh, he’ll go there. Plus he’ll order the NSC and Justice Department to get busy finding some way, any way, he can claim to be right.
On Monday, Donald Trump showcased a level of historical knowledge well below that of anyone able to hum the tunes to Schoolhouse Rock when he advised that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War, even though Trump’s new found idol and infamous racist died 16 years before the first shot in that war was fired.
... he said “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?
These deep historical thoughts brought to you by the man who just discovered the secret knowledge that Lincoln was a Republican. But then there was the laughing. And snickering. And the pointing. So you know what’s coming next.
See how that’s different? Trump knows that Jackson died a decade and a half before the war. He always knew that. Of course he did. It wasn’t that Trump didn’t know his history. How dare anyone suggest such a thing? It was that Trump knew his history better than anyone else.
Only Trump was familiar with Jackson’s prescience, with his deep concern over storm clouds he could see gathering from miles away. Only Trump could sense Jackson’s unique understanding of the coming war and the native populist genius that could have staved off that conflict with a few well-chosen Old Hickorish phrases.
So … how would that work? Well, to unfold this story, it’s first necessary to understand just how Trump mangled his history to begin with.
Andrew Jackson did participate in a Civil War preview. In the nullification crisis of the 1830s, South Carolina insisted that states had the right to ignore any federal law. To back off the would-be nullifiers took a two prong approach. Congress agreed to a compromise on tariffs that favored South Carolina. Meanwhile, Jackson’s contribution to the affair was to threaten war and actually dispatch a warship to remind the Palmetto State that he was willing to nullify their nullifying.
This story of state nullification of federal law is beloved of right-wing “historians,” except that in their version Jackson is the villain who halted the best idea any state ever had and choked real state-based freedom in the cradle. However, there’s no doubt that someone told this story to Donald Trump, who proceeded to mix it up with his misconception about the when of the Civil War and the idea that Jackson is somehow his role model and — poof. Jackson could have stopped the Civil War.
How would the real Andrew Jackson have responded to the real Civil War? Well, Jackson was not only a Southern slave-holding plantation owner, f#cking Andrew Jackson was a slave trader. He began buying and selling slaves when he was still a teenager. He bought. He sold. He went on hunts to track down runaway slaves.
Abraham Lincoln kept a portrait of Andrew Jackson around so he could point at it and say “See? Here’s a Southerner who believed in the power of the federal government over the state.” But not because he thought Jackson, had he not been dead, dead, and dead, would not have loaded up his outdated rifle to defend the Peculiar Institution.
Maybe Andrew Jackson could have staved off the Civil War. But if he had it would probably have been by force-marching anyone with abolitionist leanings to … maybe Mexico. Wherever they could be pushed to get them mostly dead and completely out of the way.
After all, in the real world, Jackson proposed, fought for, and signed the Indian Removal Act. That Act was also about pushing people where they would be mostly dead and completely out of the way. A little thing that modern types tend to refer to as “ethnic cleansing.” Nearly 50,000 Native Americans from “civilized tribes” were stripped of the land they’d farmed and tended peacefully for generations, and send on a death march to a place none of them had ever seen.
Why did Jackson do it? To support “white settlement and slavery.” That’s a far better preview of how Andrew Jackson would have addressed the issues behind the Civil War than anything to do with a tariff in South Carolina.
