Trump’s playbook
“Ferocious in his resentments, driven to wreak revenge against his enemies, he often acted without deliberation and justified his behavior as a law unto itself.
“He was not admired for his diplomatic qualities, which he lacked in abundance in comparison to his highly educated rivals…”
“His supporters adored his rough edges…”
Sound familiar?
It’s not Donald Trump but, if you believe in such things, you might think Trump is channeling the ghost of a former president.
The subject of this unflattering portrait is Andrew Jackson, the nineteenth century soldier, politician, president. It comes from an excellent 2016 book, ‘White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America,’ written by Nancy Eisenberg. Eisenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University.
The mainstream media, pundits, psychologists and psychoanalysts, philosophers and social scientists all have tried to solve the Trump enigma. Their observations for the most part have been spot-on—as far as they go. Like blind men exploring an elephant, they have rendered an accurate description of each part of the pachyderm’s body. Alas, the whole evades them. The missing element needed to connect the dots is history. Decoding Trump requires the kind of deep and iconoclastic rereading of the American story that Eisenberg provides.
The similarities between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump are almost eerie but they are not the result of a mystical connection or reincarnation. They reflect common threads in American history, a rot at the core, a foundational flaw, something that is impossible for most Americans to consider much less concede. The United States of Jackson and Trump was founded on the belief that whites of northern European descent are a race superior to any other in the world. That belief is still around and stronger than we thought, and it is coupled with the notion that the success of the United States proves the truth of white superiority and entitles this country to act in the world as a law unto itself.
The death of Jackson’s America has been pronounced many times but it keeps coming back like some history version of Frankenstein. Jackson concocted a pretext to launch an illegal war of aggression against Spain in Florida. In the next hundred plus years, the same script was repeated many times by the United States and other countries. After World War II, the United Nations was created mainly, by the United States, to prevent a recurrence. It didn’t deter even the United States from waging war for dubious reasons without UN sanction. Witness Vietnam. More recently, George W. Bush thumbed his nose at the UN and used non-existent weapons of mass destruction to justify his illegal invasion of Iraq.
The election of Barack Obama seemed to signal we were through all that, white supremacy and illegal wars. But Obama was unwilling or unable to drive a stake through the heart of the two-sided monster by failing to deliver even a tap on the wrist to those who under Bush committed torture and other war crimes.
At least Obama’s two electoral victories proved Americans had moved past the myth and practice of white supremacy. Or so we thought.
Enter Donald Trump. Dishonest and disastrous as a businessman, he is nevertheless clever at spotting and taking advantage of unsavory opportunities predicated on deception and manipulation. Trump realized that Obama’s presidency had opened a fault line under the surface of which Jackson’s America lay boiling. His campaign, by fiercely attacking Mexicans and immigrants from all those other “shithole” countries, set off just the kind of tremors needed for all the suppressed white supremacy and “America First” sentiments to burst forth. Trump’s genius was to discover that there was still in this country in the twenty-first century, as in Jackson’s age, a market for undisguised bigotry and thuggish politics at home and abroad.
Trump is no Mussolini or Hitler, but instead is a quintessentially American phenomenon. Jackson expelled tens of thousands of “savages”—Native Americans—from their homes and drove them toward was then thought a worthless west. Trump is trying hard to send the brown hordes already here south from where they came from. He wants to build The Wall to prevent more murderous savages from coming in. In doing these things, neither man cared about law or common decency. Nothing shows Trump’s political and moral kinship with Andrew Jackson, their common vileness, than the time he held a ceremony to honor a group of elderly Native American World War II veterans and chose a portrait of Andrew Jackson, their tormentor, as the background. The politics of Jackson and Trump are utterly devoid of the milk of human kindness. Each left a Trail of Tears as a legacy. Together they created a river of tears, to their and America’s discredit.
As big a deal as it is, ethnic cleansing is not the only thing Donald Trump inherited from Andrew Jackson. Consider the parallels.
Jackson was a bully unschooled in political argument who made up for it through profanity, personal insults and intimidation.
Trump fantasized about shooting someone on New York’s 5th Avenue and not losing a single vote because of it. Jackson actually killed many people: Innumerable Indians, a handful of political opponents with whom he fought duels, and a dozen of his own soldiers that he had executed. Because of the carnage, not in spite of it, he became wildly popular.
Jackson’s supporters portrayed him as a man of the people in contrast to the educated elites, like Jefferson, Madison, and Adams, who founded the republic. In fact, Jackson did nothing for the “white trash” whose champion he was supposed to be. Instead, he had the army remove white squatters in the defeated and devastated South from the marginal land on which they tried to eke out a subsistence,
Like Trump, egalitarian and democratic ideals were not Jackson’s thing. His thing was, as Eisenberg shows, an aggressive expansionism contemptuous of the Constitution, of U.S. and international law, and even of the chain of command.
Thus he took it upon himself to concoct a pretext to invade the Spanish colony of Florida, undertaking an act of war and a breach of international law with no authorization from the president or Congress.
He was an America Firster, a practitioner of Manifest Destiny before the term was coined, who set the blueprint for what would follow, from the Mexican War to Trump’s latest confrontational moves against Iran.
Psychoanalysts use the term the return of the repressed. That’s when repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior. At the deepest level, the Trump phenomenon represents a collective return of the repressed America of Andrew Jackson.
