Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump

Throughout history, the United States had a great deal of presidents that had served questionable and controversial terms. One of them is Andrew Johnson, perhaps one of the most-criticized presidents in American history. President that has a tremendous amount in common with Mr. Jackson is Donald Trump. The politics and leadership represented by Trump, inside and out, have deep roots in American tradition since two centuries ago. Its pioneer is the seventh United States President Andrew Jackson, whose term lasted from 1829 to 1837. Immediately after his inauguration, Trump introduced Jackson’s portrait into his cabinet, and spoke of it with great respect. In addition to praising him as a ‘heroic president,’ he said there would be no civil war if Jackson were later elected. (Gingrich)

Andrew Jackson is an American military leader, politician and statesman, best known for being the founder of today’s Democratic Party and his fight against the Second American Bank. He was a great enemy of banks, debts and loans. Like Trump, Jackson embarked on a presidential campaign as an outsider and was elected president in 1828, promising to clean Augi’s barns, which is identical to Trump’s call to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington. His entry into the presidential race marked a break with a past era in which presidents came from only one party and the beginning of a two-party era in America. Jackson was especially supported by settlers of Scottish-Irish descent. Jackson was accused in the newspaper of the harshest possible words: that he was a slave trader, a murderer of prisoners, but also a cannibal who ate the flesh of the slain Indians. His mother was said to be a famous prostitute and his father a mulatto. He did not remain in duty either, so he accused rival candidate Henry Adams of providing a young girl as a mistress to Emperor Alexander while serving in Russia.

For the ‘Jacksonians’ who make up Trump’s abhorrent electorate, the US is not a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual ideas originating in the Enlightenment and oriented toward fulfilling the universal mission, as Kant presented it, as a match between universal and individual norms and values. Instead, it is the nation-state of the American people, who find their fulfillment in internal issues and problems. The Jacksonians do not consider American exceptionalism to be the universal attraction of American ideas or that it is a unified American mission to transform the world, but that it is committed to the equality and dignity of American citizens individually. What Mr. Trump borrows from Jackson is not an issue, but a “way of thinking about the world.” (Inskeep)

Jackson was born into a family of poor Scott-Irish settlers in what is now South Carolina. As a thirteen-year-old, he joined the Continental Army during the American War of Independence and served as a courier. He and his brother were captured by the British Army and suffered severe abuse and were given scars to bear for the rest of their lives. His brother, like the rest of his family, died of starvation, illness and other consequences of the war. Because of all this, Jackson gained a lasting hatred of everything British, as well as contempt for the American aristocracy from the big cities on the Atlantic coast, which he held to be too ‘corrupt’ to British culture.(“Wikipedia”)

In 1787 Jackson moved to Tennessee, a border area that would soon become the new state of the United States. Although he could only boast from education by reading several law books, he became a successful and respected lawyer. Based on that, he became the first Tennessee lawmaker in Congress and later the first senator. He left that career to become a Tennessean Supreme Court judge, but also a colonel in the state militia. When the war between the United States and Great Britain broke out in 1812, American regular forces were too busy to successfully confront the Native American tribes on the western border. In one of them, the Creek tribe, a civil war broke out between the pro-British and pro-American factions, spilling over into conflict with American settlers. Jackson was named commander of the militia forces who had to solve the problem in a campaign later known as the Creek War. Jackson proved to be a skilled warlord, bringing solid discipline to the ranks of the militia and winning a great victory at Horseshoe Bend, which left the Creek tribe all over present-day Alabama in the United States.

Even greater glory was brought to Jackson by the dazzling victory over the British Expeditionary Corps near New Orleans in 1815, in which he had the great help of the Pirates Jean Lafitte. Although, given the previously negotiated agreement at Ghent, it is completely insignificant in military, political, and every other respect, it has done much to treat the Anglo-American war as a victory in future American history textbooks. Jackson himself made that victory one of the most popular Americans of his time. In 1817, Jackson, now a general, was ordered to secure the southern border of Georgia from the intrusion of the Seminole Indians, or to prevent Florida, then under Spanish sovereignty, from becoming a refuge for slaves. In pursuing the Seminoles, Jackson crossed the Spanish border, deposed the governor there, and ushered in American occupation power. A weakened Spain had no choice but to acknowledge the status quo and hand Florida over to the US by special treaty. Jackson became the first governor of Florida as a U.S. territory. In 1824 Jackson ran for President of the United States but was defeated by John Quincy Adams. That election marked the final breakup of the ruling Democratic-Republican Party. Jackson became the leader of the dissatisfaction faction that would become the Democratic Party.

In 1828, Jackson, as the first Democratic candidate in history, campaigned in a sharp campaign, skillfully utilizing the fact that most candidates are elected by voters rather than state assemblies, as well as the increasing share of Western border states among the population and the candidate’s college. As a populist, he used his humble origins and accused the representatives of the Eastern aristocracy that they could not care for the interests of the people. The result was a convincing victory. Immediately upon coming to power, Jackson dismissed all federal employees and replaced them with his supporters, thus establishing the so-called a system of loot that would be at the heart of American personnel policy in the 19th century. Jackson also stood out for his stiff resistance and successful abolition of the federal central bank – which he regarded as a tool of the Eastern financial aristocracy. In 1830, Jackson was one of the key proponents of the Native Relocation Act, which forced the Cherokee and other Native American tribes across the Mississippi to create as much land as possible for white settlers. In 1832, Jackson, though a southerner and supporter of a weak federal government, opposed South Carolina’s efforts to nullify federal customs in the so-called. nullification crisis. In the same year, he defeated Henry Clay, a Whig party representative in the presidential election. After his second term expired, Jackson retired to his Hermitage estate in Nashville, from where he remained active in politics as an advocate for the unity of the United States and an opponent of the secession of the southern states.

Andrew Jackson made decisions “based on loyalty.” (Cheathem) Mr. Cheathem article, which is a tertiary source, gives us information that is compiled and digested into facts that discuss how loyalty, more so than competence or capacity, guided Jackson’s selections. For a mind-blowing duration, Jackson held positions that demanded loyalty — from the officers he drove, the enslaved individuals he owned and the relatives and companions he tutored. Both Trump and Jackson grabbed for power, but while “Jackson did it to promote democracy, Trump has done it to promote autocracy.”(Fraser) Both of the presidents took office at a time of social and economic upheaval and lead the country in a powerful and compelling way, that will always be remembered throughout history.