The portrait of President Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president.
It’s a choice that Democrats are in no position to criticize, even though the seventh president owned slaves and ordered the Southeast Indians to pass west on the Trail of Tears. Unfortunately, Jackson has long been a Democratic icon, nominated for his second term in 1832 through the first Democratic National Convention, and that’s all to be said for the guy who founded what is now the world’s oldest political party.
There are some similarities. Jackson’s attitude, like Trump’s, dismayed his predecessors. He was from the Tennessee frontier, killed a guy in a duel, and left Congress to join an elected general of the state militia. Seeking national peace, he became famous for the massacre of the British in New Orleans in 1815.
Thomas Jefferson, who as vice president had presided over the 30-year-old Senator Jackson, exploding with fury, called him a “harmful fellow” and years later told visitors to Monticello that, in the words of his biographer Dumas Malone, “a damaging fellow “”a type of violent passions that had shown little respect for legislation and institutions. “
As president, Jackson took things personally, ousting all Cabinet members because their wives refused to socialize with his secretary of war’s young second wife, who was accused, as Jackson’s late wife had been, of loose morals. After the Senate in one Congress voted to censure him, he got the next Senate to vote to rescind the rebuke and draw lines across the earlier censure in the Senate journal.
However, Jackson was a serious political decision-maker. He paid off the national debt. By vetoing the reform of the statutes of the National Bank, he set a precedent, he said no, that expenses can be vetoed simply for political reasons and not only for constitutional reasons. When South Carolina “rescinded” a federal tariff, it sent troops to the border until the subsidy was reduced.
Jackson’s first election was opposed through his four living predecessors, as was Trump’s through his five. But Jackson was the first and so far only president among his party’s presidential candidates for the rest of his life. Trump, after the upheavals of his first term, at least momentarily established a similar stranglehold on the party he followed and began to make his own.
When exuberant agitation through House Republicans threatened to hold up the holding of Congress and the counting of electoral votes, he ensured that only one Republican member, a chronic dissident whose wife had recently died, allowed to explicit dissent. Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz, glaringly unconfirmable, allowed to withdraw, without tears.
Fox News host and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth won with a Republican unanimous vote in the committee, and there was no Republican opposition in the Republican Senate (53-47) against debatable candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard .
Similarly, little Republican criticism has appeared of the pro-abortion rights Kennedy or the foreign policy maverick Gabbard, nor of Trump following former President Joe Biden’s precedent of granting a 75-day reprieve to TikTok.
Few Republicans criticized Trump for pardoning, contrary to his own words, the violent January 6 rioters, taking some of the sting out of Biden’s pardon of members of his family circle and violent killers.
And Trump’s declaration that, contrary to court decisions, the 14th Amendment does not grant birthright citizenship tends to undercut the entirely justified criticism of Biden’s declaration, contrary to statutory and constitutional provisions, recognizing ratification of a 28th amendment.
In Jackson’s relatively brief second inaugural address, he avoided criticism of his predecessors. In Trump’s second inaugural address, he didn’t, denouncing the “vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department” and “the radical and corrupt establishment.”
But overall it presented a more positive outlook. ” America’s golden age begins now,” he boasted. “Sunlight spreads all over the world. He spoke of his own “historic political comeback” in 23 words, but preceded and followed it up with 334 words of praise for Americans’ achievements since the 20th-century colonial era, a great addition to previous presidents’ narrative of the nation’s history. .
“The whole country joins our program,” he proclaimed. An exaggeration, obviously. But the set of decrees he described is actually more in line with public opinion than the policies of his predecessors, which they repudiate.
Repealing the bureaucratic apparatus of “diversity, equity and inclusion” is consistent with the maximum demand of people (even, as recorded in the referendums, of Californians) for equivalent treatment. and his opposition to racial quotas and preferences.
Effective border enforcement and deportation of criminal illegal immigrants enjoy supermajority support, as shown by the 264 House and 64 Senate votes for the Laken Riley Act. An end to electric vehicle mandates and barriers to energy production is in line with the public’s desire for consumer choice.
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The dozens of executive orders Trump has signed since taking the oath of office have shown a similar level of preparation and seriousness apparent in his dozens of appointments to second- and third-line positions in executive agencies — a vivid contrast to his chaotic transition eight years ago.It took Jackson until his second term to control his administration and his party in Congress, and historians have overstated his political ascendancy in labeling his times “the Jacksonian era.” Trump’s second term, like Jackson’s, will surely have its setbacks and already has been spotted by departures from principle. But it doesn’t seem completely inappropriate for the 47th president to have the seventh president’s portrait on the wall.