President Andrew Jackson’s portrait is back on the Oval Office wall, in time to greet President Donald Trump as he enters for the first time as the 47th president.
It’s a choice Democrats are in no position to criticize, even though the seventh president owned slaves and ordered Indians in the Southeast to head west on the Road of Tears. Sadly, Jackson has long been a Democratic icon, appointed to his second term in 1832 through the first Democratic National Convention, and there’s a lot to be said for the guy who founded what is now the world’s oldest American 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 told Monticello years later that he was, in the words of his biographer Dumas Malone, “a damaging fellow. ” . type” “a type of violent passions that had shown little respect for legislation and institutions. “
As president, Jackson took things personally and overthrew all the cabinet members because their wives refused to socialize with his Secretary of War’s young second wife, who he accused, like Jackson’s ex-wife, of bad character. After the Senate of one Congress voted to censure her, the next Senate passed to overturn the admonition and draw lines about past censure in the Senate newspaper.
For all that, Jackson was a serious policymaker. He paid off the national debt. In vetoing the re-charter of the national bank, he established the precedent, though said he wasn’t doing so, that bills could be vetoed for policy and not just constitutional reasons. When South Carolina “nullified” a federal tariff, he sent troops to the border until it backed down.
Jackson’s first election was opposed through his four living predecessors, just as Trump’s was opposed through his five. But Jackson was the first and so far only president among his party’s presidential candidates. rest of his life. Trump, after the setbacks of his first term, at least momentarily established a similar dominance over the party he followed and began to make his own.
When House Republicans’ ebullient fractiousness threatened to delay the seating of Congress and tally of the electoral vote, he made sure that only one Republican member, a chronic dissenter whose wife recently died, was allowed to dissent. Attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, obviously unconfirmable, was allowed to withdraw, unmourned.
Fox News host and Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth won a Republican unanimous vote on the committee, and there was no Republican opposition in the Republican Senate (53-47) to challengers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
Similarly, there have been few Republican complaints about Kennedy’s or foreign policy maverick Gabbard’s abortion rights, or about Trump, following former President Joe Biden’s precedent of granting TikTok a 75-day pardon.
Few Republicans have criticized Trump for pardoning, contrary to his own words, violent Jan. 6 rioters, which has removed some of the sting for Biden’s pardons of his family members and of violent murderers.
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 his relatively brief second inaugural address, Jackson has avoided criticizing his predecessors. In his second inaugural address, Trump did not do so, denouncing “the cruel, violent and unjust militarization of the Department of Justice” 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 entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda,” he proclaimed. An overstatement, obviously. But the set of executive orders he described do, in fact, accord more closely with public opinion than the policies of his predecessors that they repudiate.
The repeal of the bureaucratic apparatus of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is consistent with the people’s maximum support (even, as recorded in the referendums, Californians’ maximum) for an equivalent remedy and their opposition to racial quotas and preferences.
Effective border and the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants have overwhelming majority support, as evidenced by the 264 House votes and 64 Senate votes in favor of the Laken Riley Act. Ending EV mandates and barriers to energy production is consistent with the public’s preference for customer choice.
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The dozens of executive orders Trump has signed since being sworn in have shown a similar point of preparedness and seriousness, as evidenced by his dozens of appointments to second- and third-line positions in executive agencies, a stark contrast to his chaotic eight-year tenure. transition of year. Jackson took until his second term in his leadership and his party in Congress, and historians have overestimated his political ascendancy by calling his era the “Jacksonian era. “Trump’s second term, like Jackson’s, will actually be fraught with setbacks and has already been marked by deviations from principle. But it doesn’t seem entirely out of place that the 47th president has the seventh president’s portrait on the wall.