Did Andrew Jackson Make America Great Again

By Erik J. Chaput

Erik Chaput teaches American history at the Lawrenceville School and in the Schoolhouse of Continuing Didactics at Providence Higher.

With the presidency of Donald Trump drawing to a close, I have been reflecting with my students on how historians will attempt to evaluate his time in office. The Trump presidency, as historian Sean Wilentz has noted, "represents a sharp break in our national political history — something different anything America, in all of its turbulence, has seen before."

Historians love to rank presidents and, equally the impeachment wagons were circumvoluted in Washington tardily last twelvemonth, Trump tweeted that he was the "greatest of all presidents." More than any other president in modern times, Trump has repeatedly compared himself to the most of import master executives in our nation's history.

President Trump's 2016 "Make America Corking Again" (MAGA) slogan is taken from President Ronald Reagan'southward 1980 entrada. In 2017, Trump visited the Hermitage, the Tennessee plantation habitation of President Andrew Jackson. A portrait of the controversial Jackson at present hangs in the Oval Office, a new addition to the celebrated room.

Over the concluding several years, Trump has repeatedly insisted, with some varying iterations, that he has done more for African Americans than any other president since Abraham Lincoln. In his explanation of his treatment of COVID-19 after the publication of Bob Woodward's latest book, "Rage," President Trump compared his downplaying of the virus to actions taken past Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression.

Historians have often used presidencies as a way to define critical moments in American history. There are books, for example, with titles such as "The Age of Jackson," "The Age of Lincoln" and "The Age of Reagan." In a tweet expressing his feeling of bias in the media, Trump said: "When the 'Age of Trump' is looked back on many years from at present, I simply hope that a big role of my legacy volition be the exposing of massive dishonesty in the Fake News!"

What has characterized the Trump presidency, especially in its final months, is a deliberate attack on the principles of democracy that so many of the men he has compared himself to in recent years have sought to protect. To bolster his powerful make and strengthen his hold on the Republican Party for another run four years from now, Trump has repeatedly sowed seeds of mistrust near the outcome of the presidential election, the press, and a deadly virus that continues to threaten our land.

Perhaps, in his last days in function, Trump volition find the time to read about some of the men he compares himself to so frequently. A transcript of an of import radio accost Roosevelt made in early on November 1938, a calendar week before important congressional elections and just days earlier Nazi mobs ignited a reign of terror confronting the Jewish populations of Austria and Germany, might be a skillful place to start.

From his home in Hyde Park, New York, Roosevelt reminded the American people how "in other lands across the water the flares of militarism and conquest, terrorism and intolerance, have vividly revealed … how precious and boggling it is to be allowed this free choice of free leaders."

At the end of the accost, evoking an argument fabricated by Benjamin Franklin during the American Revolution, Roosevelt maintained "that in these grave days nosotros need internal unity — national unity. For the sake of the Nation that is good advice and information technology never grows erstwhile." Roosevelt told the American people that these were words to live by.

Thirty years afterwards, in a piece in the New York Times, President Lyndon Johnson argued that sitting in the Oval Office "involves making decisions that draw out a man's key commitments."

Though his days in part are numbered, President Trump notwithstanding has time to align his commitments with the good of the nation.

Erik Chaput teaches American history at the Lawrenceville School and in the Schoolhouse of Continuing Educational activity at Providence College.

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Source: https://www.providencejournal.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/12/12/opinion-chaput-american-history-age-trump/3870943001/

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