To understate the obvious, last week’s election results have been heartbreaking for the losing side and bottom-of-the-ninth, walk-off, grand-slam-home-run-happy for the winners. If nothing else, the surprising results showed once again experts and their predictions are worth about as much as a sneaker full of puppy poo.
And now, they’re at it again. If I read one more story that seems straight out of The Astrologer’s Handbook with a headline beginning, “What a second Trump term will mean for (fill in the blank),” I will find something resembling a Black Hole, dive headfirst into it, and disappear with a *poof*.
It would be nice to think the soon-to-be 47th President and all Members of the 119th Congress will be thoughtful, decent and loyal to the oath they will all take in January. But I’m sure we all know that in Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill,” internecine, atavistic political warfare will reign supreme. Looking for all the world like a gussied-up version of the Hatfields and McCoys, Republicans and Democrats will once again assemble in a highly organized circular firing squad, seeming far more intent on annihilating each other than on devoting themselves to the moral imperative of governing.
Under Donald Trump’s benevolent guidance, Republicans will do their best to implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (or, at least, Agenda 47, which is the Republican National Committee’s Platform and a bullet-pointed version of Project 2025 — I know, it’s all so confusing), and Democrats will do their best to prevent that. Should make for interesting theatre.
But of all the possible questions we could now be pondering, the one I’m asking today is: Will Donald Trump restore the portrait of Andrew Jackson to the Oval Office?
When he first took office in 2017, Trump ordered the removal of the George Henry Story portrait of Abraham Lincoln, hung by President Obama, and replaced it with a portrait of Andrew Jackson, painted by Ralph E. W. Earl.
The portrait — depicting a leonine Jackson, dignified in a dramatic cloak — was originally a bit of 19th century political PR. Earl was a close friend of Jackson and churned out a stream of images aimed at convincing voters that the seventh president was a worthy member of America’s founding pantheon. That was a ridiculous stretch, but give Earl credit for trying.
Jackson was, in fact, unique. For example, he was the only president to serve in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He was also a military hero, a slave-owner, a lawyer, a judge and a planter.
Born in 1767 in the Carolina backwoods, he became a courier for the Revolutionary Army as a 13-year-old. The next year, he was orphaned when his mother died of cholera after nursing sick soldiers in South Carolina. Despite knowing great hardship when young, he grew to earn the nickname “Old Hickory” for his tenacity and became an American General in the War of 1812, routing the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814.
As a General and as President, he believed in the segregation of whites and Native Americans, according to NPR’s Steve Inskeep, author of Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab. Inskeep writes Jackson was ruthless, “opening Southern land for white real estate development, including his own personal real estate investments, whatever the human cost.” His 1830 Indian Removal Act resulted in the “Trail of Tears,” where roughly 17,000 Cherokees were forced out of their homeland east of the Mississippi river at gunpoint and moved to present-day Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokees died on the journey. Jackson didn’t care.
In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Inskeep said, “Trump gets in Twitter fights, but Jackson got in actual duels.” He added, “Gunfights with live fire.”
Of his many duels, 103 of them, actually — it’s amazing he had time for anything else — Jackson is only documented to have killed one person, Charles Dickinson, another southern planter and slave owner. Dickinson accused Jackson of reneging on a horse bet, calling Jackson a coward and an equivocator. Dickinson also made the mistake of calling Jackson’s wife Rachel a bigamist. He was right. The wealthy Rachel (her father had co-founded Nashville, Tennessee) had eloped with and married the uncultivated Jackson in 1791 not knowing her first husband had failed to finalize their divorce.
This was too much for Old Hickory, who challenged Dickinson. They met at Harrison’s Mills on the Red River in Logan County, Kentucky, on 30 May 1806. Jackson sustained a serious wound from Dickinson, who shot first. The bullet hit Jackson in the chest, was never removed, and caused him chronic pain for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, after being wounded, Jackson remained standing, fired, missed, re-cocked his weapon, fired again, and killed Dickinson. We should note that firing twice was against the rules. Once again, Jackson didn’t care.
In addition to injuries sustained in duels, especially Dickinson’s bullet that lodged in one of his lungs, by the time Jackson became president he had already survived smallpox, osteomyelitis, malaria, dysentery, rheumatism, dropsy, “cholera morbus” (widespread intestinal inflammation), amyloidosis (a waxy degeneration of body tissues) and bronchiectasis (inflamed and dilated bronchial tubes).
The man seemed invincible.
After losing to John Quincy Adams in 1824, when the election was decided in the House of Representatives, Jackson ran again in 1828, defeating the incumbent Mr. Adams decisively.
As the first President not part of the founding elite, he was also the first to ride a populist insurgency to victory. The populism he espoused held that westward expansion meant more chances for “the common man” to participate in national affairs. He considered himself one. His populism also meant that anything in the way of American expansion (perhaps the initial version of Trump’s America First dogma), had to go. That included Native Americans.
Jon Meacham, the author of American Lion, his 2008 biography of Jackson, said, “Jackson was the first president who was not a Virginia planter or an Adams from Massachusetts. The establishment at the time saw his election as a potentially destabilizing democratic moment in what was largely a republican culture.”
In brief, the establishment elites were afraid of him, and for good reason.
In addition to what he did to Native Americans, and in keeping with his populist persona, Jackson:
- Vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson viewed the bank as a powerful, elitist institution that favored the wealthy, and his veto effectively dismantled and ended it;
- Created the Spoils System by appointing political supporters to government positions, which he saw as a way to empower the common people and give them access to political power. His innovation also let him surround himself with true loyalists.
- Opposed and ended the Nullification Crisis, championed by Jackson’s Vice President, John C. Calhoun. The crisis centered around the idea that states could nullify federal laws. Jackson saw this as a threat to national unity, a power grab by wealthy elites, and an attack on federal authority, meaning his authority.
The seventh President, who was fond of saying, “I was born in a storm, and calm does not suit me,” centralized federal power as no one had before him. He was authoritarian in nature and regimental in policy. A hard, quick tempered man not known for losing gracefully, it’s no wonder Donald Trump during his first term could look up to his left from the Resolute Desk and see one of the few men he could bring himself to admire looking back at him.
By the way, in case you’re wondering which portrait Joe Biden put in place of Andrew Jackson’s after assuming office in 2021, it is Benjamin Franklin’s, painted by Joseph Siffred Duplessis in 1785.
I don’t think Dr. Franklin will be hanging in the Oval Office much longer.
