Abstract
This article begins with a consideration of the putative parallels between the presidencies of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s 7th president, and Donald Trump, the 45th. Underlying Trump’s and his supporters’ partisan case for his Jacksonian populism and similarly volatile temperament is another argument explored in this article: that such a Jacksonian framing implicitly situates Trump in the pantheon of the nation’s greatest, most consequential presidents who have expanded the powers of the office itself. Several standards of judgment are adduced for the critical consideration of the Trump presidency as it nears the completion of its first term. The consequentialism of the Trump presidency is weighed against standards of ethics and the personality trait known as Machiavellianism.
A month after the inauguration of America’s 45th president, Donald J. Trump, the Associated Press wire service carried a piece by a New York Times journalist which advanced a bold—if not entirely novel—claim: that President Trump’s campaign was in the American presidential tradition of the nation’s 7th president, Andrew Jackson (Lemire, 2017).
It has been a familiar trope about Mr. Trump is the 21st century Andrew Jacksonian. And it is far from the only one. Where can history even begin to situate this president, much less explain the stunning social movement propelling his presidency domestically and foreign? Trump is, in a word, a phenomenon.
Exhibit A: Call it the Jacksonian hypothesis. There are others.
What, after all, can we make of President Trump? And according to what criteria or standards—and whose? This article offers an exploration of a still-developing story. Explorations like this essay are intended to test the waters, try out comparisons, look for matches between one phenomenon and another, and in offering a judgment, present the evidence.
This president and his presidency have unearthed such powerful reactions on all sides of the American political spectrum, as well as abroad, that we have been privy to more than a few hypotheses, theories, and speculations attempting to explain and account for the phenomenon.
Questions abound. Is the man insane or brilliant? Is his bluster a matter of uncontrolled rage as a journalist proposes (Woodward, 2020)? Is the phenomenon best understood sociologically as political theater (Goffman, 1959)? Can political science explain Trump as a populist? And if Trump is the avatar of America’s seventh president, the impactful Andrew Jackson, does that make Trump’s presidency consequential? Even great, as in worthy of a fifth face carved on Mt. Rushmore, along with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt?
To frame Trump as Jacksonian is, of course, to situate him not outside of history, but inside a specific tradition: that of the nonconforming visionary modeled on the nation’s seventh president. Framing Trump as Jacksonian amounts to framing (or reframing) his volatile temperament, his incendiary communication style (including his intensive use of Twitter), and his political agenda not as his critics on the left and right have framed him—as crude, vulgar, unstable, incoherent, reactionary, authoritarian, narcissistic, dictatorial, and even lacking in sanity. Instead, the Jacksonian framing of Trump marks him as no more or less eccentric than President Jackson, that is, as the rough, tough, tell-it-like-it-is common man who is shrewd, controlled, strategic, and even visionary. A populist. Praiseworthy. Of Jackson’s temperament and his bid for the White House, Lepore (2018) quotes Daniel Webster’s quote of Thomas Jefferson who opined, “He is one of the most unfit men I know for such a place” (p. 181).
From the outset of Trump’s candidacy, his then-chief strategist, Steve Bannon, envisioned this persona for Trump. Dramaturgically speaking, Trump could play himself. His “character” was as he was and is seen to be. Had not Jackson opened the doors of the White House to the muddy shoes of the common White man of the 1820s, that newly enfranchised voter no longer disenfranchised by any property-holding requirements in the slew of states newly folded into the United States? And while the historiographic mythologizing of Trump-as- Jackson has not been the most hotly debated issue of the president’s controversial presidency, Trump’s temperament itself has been a continual source of controversy. Thus, if the Jacksonian label could be affixed to Trump, it could serve as a rebuttal to his critics’ argument that he’s unlike—worse than—any president in American history.
And was not the same condescending classist slurs leveled at Jackson by the Ivy League-educated elites of his day? The Adamses and Jeffersons. The founding fathers. The hoity-toity’s of the original revolutionary 13 states.
Trump’s team seized on the parallels between his outsider status and the long-dead Tennessee war hero, although the parallelism is more than a little misleading. Unlike Jackson, war hero of the Battle of New Orleans against the British, Trump had never served in the military, procuring a deferment from the draft on account of bone spurs—an excuse that was morphed into mockery by his critics. Trump even hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office. This was what Trump’s campaign strategist Steve Bannon called a “Jacksonian moment” (Glasser, 2018). At Trump’s inauguration, Bannon continued framing Trump as the second coming of Jackson, telling reporters after Trump’s inaugural address, “I don’t think we’ve had a speech like that since Andrew Jackson came to the White House” (Johnson & Tumulty, 2017).
Other historians agreed. “Both were elected presidents as a national celebrity; Jackson due to prowess on the battlefield and Trump from making billions in his business empire,” said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University. “And it’s a conscious move for Trump to embrace Jackson. In American political lore, Jackson represents the forgotten rural America while Trump won by bringing out that rural vote and the blue collar vote” (Lemire, 2017).
The List
Born in the winter of 1945, during the final dying months of the fourth term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I grew up in the New York City of the post-World War II Fifties. With a precocity, the result of my older brother, Richard’s passion for history and politics (he was all of 6 years older), I absorbed the history lessons of that era. It must have been from him that I learned the list: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt
For a grade-school son of the upper middle classes—innocent of the simmering, chronic inequalities of American society—Fifties America seemed a fine place, indeed. The hard-won triumphalism of the nation and its allies over fascism; the moral pride of the Marshall Plan which rebuilt decimated Europe—these were the historical facts and the frame. The mature drama of the dissenting social movements—Civil Rights, feminism, environmentalism, gay rights, disability rights—these had not yet moved from the wings to center stage. Sitting in my sixth-grade classroom in 1956, America seemed like a very good nation. The Eisenhower presidency seemed to fit into the tradition of the American presidency from Washington to the Ike. One had a sense of continuity. The fabric of American history may have been torn by a Civil and World Wars and a Great Depression, but the fabric had been repaired. America was resilient. Even its gender pronouns—she, her, hers—suggested an innocent femininity to be righteously protected.
I learned what may have been a widely accepted shortlist America’s greatest presidents. Seven in all. By the close of the fifties, after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second term, there had been 35 presidents. But only seven made the shortlist. Jackson was the third.
The list began with the nation’s first president, George Washington, skipped John Adams, the second, and resumed with Thomas Jefferson, the third, largely for his expansionist Louisiana Purchase, skipped James Madison, the fourth—possibly because his greatest contribution had long preceded his presidency with his authorship of numerous Federalist essays which created the political rationale for the American Experiment. James Monroe, the fifth, was also skipped, notwithstanding his famous Doctrine which articulated the policy on identifying “spheres of influence.” The sixth, John Quincy Adams, who as Monroe’s secretary of state had drafted the famous Doctine, did not make the list. But the seventh in the succession did. Andrew Jackson lost to Quincy Adams in the hotly contested election of 1824, only to arise to deny Adams a second term in 1828, the first of his two terms.
The list continued with the most uncontroversially consequential of all of our presidents, the 16th, Abraham Lincoln—the last of the “great” presidents of the 19th century.
The 20th century list began with a bang—literally, after the assassination of William McKinley, the 25th, in 1901—with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th, who famously and mythically charged up San Juan Hill in America’s expansionist (contemporary history says imperialist and colonialist) war with Spain. It could fairly be said of Teddy Roosevelt what America’s great poet said of his self in the Leaves of Grass: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes”
In the seven decades which followed the second and final term of President Eisenhower at the end of the fifties, there have been nine presidents, beginning with Kennedy and ending with Trump. Amid the notorious hyperpartisanship so often observed of America from the dissenting activisms of the sixties to the era of President Trump, there have been hagiographical claims made to place one or more of those nine on a greatness list.
Two names stand out among the nine: Lyndon Johnson, the 36th, and Ronald Reagan, the 40th. Johnson’s claim focused on his liberal expansion of the FDR social safety net and for his signing voting rights legislation which extended enfranchisement protections to all Americans, notably Black Americans who, in the Jim Crow South, had been long denied the vote afforded to White Americans.
The “Greatness” Standard
The mid-century legendary list of seven has come famously under critical scrutiny in recent years. Presidents Wilson and Jackson fail to shine with their mid-century brightness under the hot lights of their views on race. Teddy Roosevelt has come under fire. The Roosevelt statue that fronts the Museum of Natural History in New York City has been criticized as a noxious symbol of White supremacy, and the full credit for emancipating slaves has been withdrawn in some measure by President Lincoln’s critics as a narrative of White folks as the savior of Black folks.
And what, after all, is greatness in a president? The term is almost impossibly vague as we shall see about another dubious and sententious term, populist. Space does not permit a full discussion of “greatness,” although it is the garland with which presidents and their adherents have ever sought to adorn a legacy. Gergen (2000), who advised presidents from the Republican Nixon to the Democrat Bill Clinton, concludes his assessment of presidents (Eyewitness to Power) with a list of seven attributes of leadership. Granted that neither leadership nor power is the equivalent of greatness, the attributes on Gergen’s list point would be, at least, consistent with presidential greatness. They are character, “a central, compelling purpose,” persuasiveness, “the ability to work within the system,” “strong prudent advisers,” and “the inspiration of others to carry on the mission” (pp. 345-352). Gergen wisely leaves it open as to whether he intended his list to be comprehensive, or that presidential greatness requires all seven.
In a polarized America, greatness appears to be, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder (Pogrebin, 2020). Wilson, too—the architect of the humanistic and failed League of Nations—has been hoisted on the petard of his record of racism before his presidential term when he was president of Princeton University (Snyder, 2020). Johnson’s place on a greatness list was sullied by his unpopular prosecution of the Vietnam War. And if Lincoln’s greatness appears solidly rooted in his leadership in saving the Union from the Confederacy in the Civil War, he is no longer universally regarded as “the great emancipator” by a growing contemporary rejection by a chorus of Black and other Americans, of the dubious and mocked narrative which has White folks saving Black folks (Cole, 2020).
The case for placing President Ronald Reagan’s and his conservative “Reagan revolution” of the eighties on the list of consequential presidencies has been driven, unsurprisingly, by Republic partisanship. However, the furor surrounding the putatively Jacksonian Trump presidency has all-but-eclipsed the hagiographical zeal of the Reaganites. The bulldozing rhetoric of the Reality TV president has been blacking out the graceful oratory of the former Hollywood leading man.
Judging Jackson
In American Lion, Meachem’s (2008) biography of Andrew Jackson, the historian judged him to be “one of America’s most important and most controversial presidents (p. xvii), adding that he is “also one of the least understood” (p. 4). Meachem’s judgment itself is not controversial. Nevertheless, Jackson’s luster has diminished in recent decades. The historiography of the presidency of Andrew Jackson has changed, which is not surprising. Every generation gets to rewrite history. Identifying the reasons for Jackson’s fall from his long-held iconic status would require more space than is available in this article. Perhaps there is a clue in relative differential ranking in the Quinnipiac poll between Jackson’s 4th place in leadership and 38th in equal justice for all, for like Trump, Jackson was famously, notoriously stubbornly, intransigently, and stridently partisan. If FDR was a radio president, Jackson and Trump are bullhorn presidents, swift to anger, famous for their hot tempers and thirst for retaliation, revenge, and celebratory boasting (Quinnipiac, 2018).
The same poll ranked presidents since World War II. The overall best three were Presidents Reagan (1st), Obama (2nd), and JFK and Clinton (tied for 3rd and 4th). Another casualty of the recency effect emerges in the ranking of the worst since World War II, in which Trump tops the list, followed by Obama and Nixon. It is interesting to see the pairing of the odd couple of our own Era of Bad Feelings, Trump and Obama. In still other polls, partisanship appears to account for the apparent asymmetrical rankings of the same president as one of the six worst, or one of the six best, since World War II, according to the assessment of George W. Bush, the nation’s 43rd president in The Wall Street Journal poll.
Politics has come be widely regarded as virtually inseparable from polling. Yet as the world has discovered on many occasions, even election eve polls are often notoriously and dramatically wrong. The photo of a broadly smiling and victorious Harry Truman holding up the headline: DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN, is famous in U.S. political history. Until the tallies were counted on election day 2016, almost no one expected Donald Trump to be president-elect. The weaknesses of lists and polls alike are apparent: each is a snapshot of public opinion frozen in time, and subject to a host of biases, political, cultural, and otherwise. What compels our interest are the hierarchical points at the furthest ends of the spectrum, as well as the longitudinal progression of opinion over time.
Scholarship enables a deeper dive below the surface of lists and polls, looking backward over historical time, comparing and contrasting, weighing and balancing. So it is that Meachem (2008), looking backward to Jackson and forward from him, ponders his significance: A source of inspiration to Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, revered by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and hailed by Harry Truman as one of the four greatest presidents—along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—Jackson expanded the powers of the presidency in ways none of his six predecessors had. (p. xviii)
Jackson’s Radical Departure
Lepore (2018) observes that the first five presidents—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe “were diplomats, soldiers, philosophers and statesmen, founders of the nation” (p. 180). The sixth, John Quincy Adams, if not a founder, was made of similar stuff, having drafted the Monroe Doctrine as secretary of state in the Monroe administration. And it is here that Lepore makes a case—characteristic of historians—if not for periodicity, then, at least, for a disjunction in the narrative of U.S. presidential history. One of these things is not like the others—the “thing” in question being the president and the presidency of Andrew Jackson, in Lepore’s storytelling.
Jackson Was Strikingly Different
Unlike the founders, statesmen, and men of letters who preceded his presidency, Jackson was a nonpareil. An outlier. In the controversial campaign of 1824—no caucus chose Jackson to be a party candidate, so he chose to be nominated by the Tennessee legislature (Lepore, 2018, p. 182). In Lepore’s narrative, Jackson’s ascendancy was on the updrafts of what could be called populism. A passel of new states were ratified and promptly eliminated the traditional property-owning requirement for enfranchisement. “By 1821, property qualifications for voting no longer existed in twenty one of twenty-four states” (Lepore, 2018, p. 183). America was rapidly changing from a landed, agrarian nation to a business and capitalistic one.
The change was becoming impossible to ignore. The political, social, cultural, and economic environment from which a person (read: a White man) rose to presidential credibility had undergone a stunning shift, and the celebrated General Andrew Jackson—military hero in the Battle of New Orleans against the British—was a beneficiary. Dismayed at the nepotism and landed aristocratic snobbery he saw in the anointing of John Quincy Adams by his presidential dad, Jackson quit the U.S. Senate and set about defeating Quincy in the election of 1824, which he famously lost after winning the popular vote but not the electoral tally, throwing the decision to the House of Representatives which chose Quincy Adams after powerful Kentucky Senator Henry Clay threw his own support to Adams—which Jackson, famous for his volcanic temper, regarded as a “corrupt bargain” (Lepore, 2018, p. 185).
But time was on the loser’s side. “In the years from 1824-1828, qualified voters grew from 400,000 to 1.1 million” (Lepore, 2018, p. 183). The rising tide of new, western-states voters helped put Jackson over the top against Quincy Adams in the election of 1828, which also marked the birth of the Democratic Party—Jackson’s party.
Here, then, was a new sort of American president. Not a little new; very new. Radically new. (The comparisons with Trump are hard to miss, although, in what follows in this essay, they will be found to be tendentious, politically spun, and deeply misleading.) Jackson was roughhewn in what seemed like a backwoods, ill-educated way. We shall see that the Trump campaign and Trump’s own self-portrait as an avatar of Jackson—even to the extent of posing in front of a portrait of Jackson in the White House—while tempting are, in fact, ultimately, if not entirely superficial, nevertheless ultimately meretricious and self-aggrandizing, which is consistent with the rhetorical and dramaturgic style of Mr. Trump and the Trump presidency.
If luck can be among a pollster’s criteria (and it was for the Sienna College pollsters), Jackson was one lucky fellow (Sienna College Poll, 2018). Sienna surveyed 157 presidential scholars in February 2019 and arrived at Jackson’s ranking of 4th luckiest of the 45 presidents (Sienna College Poll, 2019). It was the very successful and famously eccentric New York Yankees pitcher Lefty Gomez who entered the lexicon with his retort to his critics who said he was not that great, just lucky. He famously replied, “I’d rather be lucky than good” (Rogers, n.d.). Jackson’s highest other rankings were for risk-taking (4th) and leadership ability (9th). It is worth noting that luck was President Trump’s sole high ranking in the Sienna poll; none of his other rankings were higher than 40th. Even if we discount the likely anti-Trump bias among academic historians, it would be difficult to account for Trump’s lowest 5% rankings in 20 of 21 criteria. Jackson’s two lowest rankings were for his handling of the economy (38th) and his rough-and-tumble, backwoods background (30th). That other backwoodsman, Abe Lincoln, ranked 28th for his log-splitter country lawyer background. Mythicizing U.S. presidents can be understood to play a role in judging them; nor are academic historians free from that tendency, conscious or otherwise.
Personality Cult
Among other factors affecting the present and historical assessment of presidents—and one particularly relevant to the assessment of Jackson and Trump—is what Isenberg and Burstein (2019) call the “cult of personality” (p. xvi). It is a fair assumption that some portion of Trump’s aspirational linkage with Jackson has been based on the volatile and cantankerous personalities of the leaders and the uproarious excitement their personalities stirred in their followers.
More is at stake, however, in the assessment of presidents than the power of their personalities. Much more. If Lincoln found inspiration in such a mythicized leader as Jackson, it should surprise no one, given the similar mythicizing of the autodidactic, backwoods Illinois country lawyer. Like Jackson, Lincoln was no illiterate, although it’s true that his grammar and spelling were free of Jackson’s error-ridden drafts, which his enemies delighted in pointing out. The choice between Adams “who could write” and “Jackson “who could fight” would prove decisive in Jackson’s rematch with Quincy Adams in 1928 (Lepore, 2018, p. 182); citing The National Journal [Washington, D.C.] April 28, 1824). While we will not know whether future presidents will be inspired by Trump, as Lincoln was by Jackson, it appears that Trump has failed to inspire his living predecessors, Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. What Trump has inspired in these presidents has been opposition and even enmity.
Jackson’s Bank Reform
As the new nation’s first secretary of the Treasury in the administration of George Washington, one of Alexander Hamilton’s most ambitious initiatives was his creation of a for-profit United States Bank. It was chartered with enormous powers. It acted as the federal government’s fiscal agent, collecting tax revenues, securing the government’s funds, making loans to the government, transferring government deposits through the bank’s branch network, and paying the government’s bills. The bank also managed the US Treasury’s interest payments to European investors in US government securities. (Hill, 2015)
Hamilton’s financial and economic vision was not to last. The bank’s charter expired in 1811 but a second bank was chartered soon after. As Schlessinger (1949) explains, the bank’s sequel—the charter of the Second Bank of the United States—ended in 1836, and public opinion in the newly incorporated western states had reviled it, waging what Schlessinger called a “bank war” (p. 35).
Jackson, whose political sensibility has so often been called populist, despised the Hamiltonian creation of a U.S. bank, which he believed favored the wealthy speculator class, and he effectively killed it by ordering his treasury secretary to withdraw its funds and redistribute them to selected state banks. Jackson’s enmity to the bank is one of innumerable indications that “polarization” is a far more salient attribute of American political history than unity. Polarization is not an historical aberration but a definitive one.
The Populism Criterion
Can every president’s supporter claim their hero as a populist? It could seem so.
The vagueness, tendentiousness and agenda-setting tone of the term makes it seem an almost automatic branding. The Trump juggernaut could well embrace an Oxford definition of the term: Populism is an anti-establishment, anti-elite ideology and political strategy. Populism as an ideology adopts a discursive approach and focuses on the tensions between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” (Oxford Bibliographies, 2020)
Yet the term is (overlapping with “popular’) honorific and can be and has been, applied to politicians from Jefferson to Trump (Larson, 1981). A Google search for “populism AND trump” collected 9.2 million hits; populism AND Andrew Jackson, 2.7 million. Both searches would have included thousands of scholarly articles, books and monographs. Similar searches turned up 6.5 million for Bill Clinton, 4.5 million for George W. Bush, 1.3 million for Abraham Lincoln, 4.3 million for Alexander Hamilton, and 2.1 million for Thomas Jefferson. That the meaning of the term—or even a consensus definition—is so bedeviled by overuse as to be rendered largely useless except in a rhetorical or tendentious sense, making the label a mighty impediment for our purposes in its application to Jackson and Trump. Nor are terms like stubborn, childish, irascible, volcanic, unpredictable any more useful.
Nevertheless, historians as well as the rest of us, have not feared to tread. Lepore (2018) offers her opinion on Jackson quite unambiguously, that his “rise to power marked the birth of American populism” (p. 181), thereby glossing over Jefferson’s multimillion populist references, if not all of them opining that the third president who opposed the elite and aristocratic Hamilton made him a populist in the binary sense that if one were the adversary of aristocracy, then one must be a populist. To be precise, the meaning of Jackson’s populism for Lepore was grounded in another political dichotomy—the republicanism of John Quincy Adams and the democratic philosophy of Jefferson. Historians are, after all, storytellers, and nothing so compels us to engage with a story than conflict, which works the same for drama, as Aristotle famously observed. Lepore’s project in These Truths pivots around these very binary terms—these dichotomies. She goes on to weave together around populism the disparate strands of Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism, Jacksonian anti-Hamiltonian democratic sensibility, and the late-19th century origin of the Populist Party and the Progressive movement which spread across both political parties through and beyond the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, winding through the 20th-century social and political movements, encompassing dissenters and reformers of every stripe, from the kingly New York power broker, Robert Moses, to the dissenters and radicals of the Civil Rights and similarly driven movements threaded through the 20th and 21st centuries.
Much more can be said of populism’s species, as it were—authoritarian populism, progressive populism. When self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination in the run-up to the 2016 election, his populism was called progressive, as contrasted with the populism of Trump which was labeled authoritarian.
Putting it in daily-newspaper terms, the Washington Post political correspondents Karen Tumulty and Jenna Johnson frame the Jacksonian hypothesis of Trump this way: “Jackson, like Trump, was a wealthy man who gave voice to the frustrations and anger of working-class whites against moneyed interests.” Later, “a departure from the mannered elite” was offered to substantiate Nixon’s populist props, which looks back on Nixon’s well-known malicious envy of the Kennedys. A somewhat similar animus infuriates Trump and his base about the “coastal elites”, mainstream media, Ivy League academia, and the Democratic Party backing Secretary Clinton’s notorious characterization of placing “half of Trump’s supporters in the basket of deplorables.” She elaborated, “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it” (Riley, 2016).
Clinton’s references to familiar and frequent criticisms of Trump, notably but not limited to Democratic Party and liberal adversaries, bring to mind the thesis of historian Richard Hofstadter (1964) that embedded in American cultural and political history is a “paranoid style,” often associated with the rise of the Populist Party and the populist agrarian protest movements of the late 19th century.
Who is, and who is not a populist, is a criterion whose usefulness is dampened by its vagueness. When historians can refer to “progressive” populists and “authoritarian” populists, the term itself tends to trade off salience for tendentiousness.
The “Governing Moment” Standard
Writing in the Maryland Law Review, Lomazoff (2017) rejects the Trump–Jackson pairing: “Why Donald Trump is Not Andrew Jackson: To liken Trump to a latter-day Jackson is simply not the same thing (at least to my mind) as suggesting that Trump is governing in a Jacksonian moment; while the former focuses on individual traits, the latter describes environmental qualities. Otherwise put (to borrow from Stephen Skowronek), Meacham was describing Trump’s “governing environment. (p. 281)
Lomazoff (2017) uses Skowronek’s concept of a “leadership moment,” (p. 14)—the historian’s zeitgeist-like standard of presidential assessment—to disagree with Meachem’s thesis that Trump is governing in a Jacksonian moment. That said, Lomazoff’s position, despite the title of his article, is less a rejection of Meachem’s thesis than a pause to allow for his skepticism that a man with Trump’s problematic volatility and mendanciousness could be bracketed with Jackson. Lomazoff’s reasons are unclear, but one suspects his skepticism may have more to do with his unstated opinion of Trump as a bad-faith actor, compared with Jackson as a good-faith one.
Once again, we arrive at a series of questions and concerns about assessing the history and historiography of any president and any presidency We’re dealing with an evolving poetics of history, echoing T. S. Eliot’s (1969) lines spoken by the iconic ambivalence of one Mr. Prufrock who despairs of “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
As I write these words, the election of 2020 is but days away. Among the innumerable questions about Mr. Trump has been from the moment he announced his candidacy, Is this thing unlike all the other things?—where thing is Trump. The anti-Trump partisan response has been a resounding No! (He’s the worst ever. Unfit for the office.) Trump’s supporters have conceded that he is “different,” but that his differences—irascibility and the rest—are precisely the source of his dramaturgic power and electability. Not content to brand Trump as a complete and utter outsider president, figures as different from each other as the nihilistic Bannon and liberal historian Meachem, each see Trump situated solidly in the Jacksonian tradition, as a breaker of the furniture of the educated elites.
Almost tangentially, if not in an end note, an even more fundamental question needs to be asked and answered about the meaning of history itself. As to what can be said of the epistemic question asking whether Trump and Trumpism, whether cursed as a mad king or hailed as the savior of America, can somehow be placed outside of American history itself. But the notion that Trump is such a nonpareil that his oddness removes him from history violates the idea of history itself, that is, if we can at least agree that history samples its narratives from the entirety of time past and time present. Trump can no more be removed from history than Washington, Lincoln, or Martin Luther King.
Returning to Lomazoff’s argument disjoining the putative case that Trump’s place in history is something like the second coming of Jackson, or, at the very minimum, that Trump is Jacksonian, Lomazoff demurs by asking us to pivot away from the comparison of the presidents and their presidencies, and instead reframe the matter in terms of what he calls their “governing environments,” (Skowronek, a reframing of the questions which he credits the historian Stephen Skowronek (2017) in The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership From John Adams To Bill Clinton. For Lomazoff (2017), “Explaining how presidential incumbents behave—or what ‘leadership posture[s]’ they adopt—in different governing environments is the central task of Skowronek’s [book]” (p. 281). “I am not at all convinced that Donald Trump is governing in a Jacksonian moment.”
Lomazoff goes on to reference Meachem’s biography of Jackson in which he, too, makes the case to disjoin Trump from Jackson and Trumpism from Jacksonianism. Writes Meachem (2008) of the Trump years: “The moment is Jacksonian, but do we have a Jackson in the oval office?” Meachem is emphatic that we do not.
Circling back to the Quinipiac Poll (2017) which ranked presidents on multiple criteria, the findings included findings of how president’s ranked on “crisis leadership.” (Jackson ranked 10th; Trump’s presidency was too new in 2017 to be ranked). At the risk of stretching an inference, we can say with considerable confidence that the Jacksonian moment, as it were—while fraught—was significantly less so than Lincoln’s moment, Washington’s or FDR’s. Jackson’s redistribution of the U.S. bank’s funds to state banks hardly compares to the crises of the Civil or the Revolutionary War, or the Great Depression and World War II, the “governing moments” of those great presidents.
All the while, Trump—who has compared himself on many occasions with Lincoln in terms of his argument that he has increased the economic and financial health of African Americans—is undoubtedly inhabiting a highly stressful moment, what with the multiple crises of the pandemic, the sporadically violent racial reckoning, and the loss of tens of millions of jobs—on top of which has been the drumbeat of Trump’s shocking policy executions (notably, the administration’s family separation featuring “children in cages,” that stunningly cruel approach to immigration).
The Consequentialism Standard
What we can take away from rethinking the Trump/Jackson pairing may be obvious: that judgment will be made, as all such judgments are, by histories yet to be written by historians yet to be born. The recency effect appears to work both ways at present. Trump’s adherents tend to see him as Jacksonian; his critics do not.
As for me, the Trump/Jackson hypothesis is not at all irrational; the men and their times have too many similar tendencies to dismiss their pairing, at least, to a certain extent, and as the saying goes, perception is reality, which holds true for true believers and partisans on both sides of the aisle.
No less interesting a debate rages around another term hardly less difficult to pin down than populism. That criterion is presidential greatness.
Shall we lump the adjudication of “greatness” together with the famous assessment Justice Potter Stewart offered in 1964 to define pornography: that he knew it when he saw it? With all due respect to the justice, the naïve realism of such a judgment passes neither the epistemological test of justifying how one knows anything nor the legal, evidentiary test in the justice’s own Supreme Courtroom.
But if the Potter Stewart standard for judging pornography fails the test of reasoning, then that standard will be of no use in assessing the greatness of this or that president. The standard most often applied to the question of presidential greatness is one of consequentialism—that is, the level of impact that a president can be found to have on the presidency itself, based on the evidence of the president’s accomplishments.
Of Jackson, Schlessinger (1949) wrote that “he grew visibly from the day of his inauguration.” (p. 24). As for Trump, we can reasonably expect that his detractors would say—and have said—that he was never up to the job in the first place, while his partisan supporters would disagree, based on Trump’s fulfilment of his campaign promises to seek to gut Obamacare, slap tariffs on China, seek to exit the Iran nuclear deal, and load up the courts with reliably conservative judges. As for Jackson, based on the evidence of his accomplishments during his two terms, he did significantly expand the powers of the presidency. His undoing of the Hamiltonian U.S. bank could, itself, constitute a persuasive case for Jackson as a consequential president. The obvious weakness of the consequentialism standard is partisanship which has intensified during the presidencies of presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump.
The Ethics Standard
Nor does the greatness criterion escape the sticky matter of presidential ethics. President Nixon is widely credited with the unquestionably consequential opening of America’s relationship with China, an accomplishment which can be argued is parallel to Jackson’s. The huge “however,” of course, is Watergate, which precipitated Nixon’s resignation in disgrace.
Not that any ethics criterion is not subject to the same crosswinds of partisanship and public opinion that undermine one’s confidence in other criteria. A recent example is the impeachment of President Trump on the evidence of his abuse of powers, which led to a Democratic-led House impeaching him followed by a Republican senate acquitting him. Whether the president acted unethically became as contested as any other partisan-roiled issue, and the assessment of the president’s ethics was ultimately transcended by the political and judicial power of a Republican senate majority acting as judge and jury.
Judging Trump
By What Criterion (or Criteria) Should the Trump Presidency Be Judged?
Trump’s presidency does accord with presidential adviser Dacid Gergen’s criterion of a “central, compelling purpose.” Trump’s purpose has been identified variously by his critics as hypernationalism, and more darkly as “othering,” White supremacy, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and an ambition to create a fascist dictatorship. Trump has characterized his central purpose variously as patriotism, nationalism, America First, and, of course, Make America Great Again, his signature theme.
Gergen’s criterion of “the capacity to persuade” is evidently among Trump’s strengths, attested by his election and the stability of his political support over his first term. That his persuasion is unethical—that is, propaganda—is really more a quarrel over definitions than a denial of a communicative and political result, albeit with less than a majority of Americans according to most polls (Gallup Poll, 2020; Silver, 2020).
Gergen’s criterion of “prudent” appears inaccurate on its face for judging Trump’s consequentialism. It has been his imprudence (his often cited volatile temperament), which he has leveraged into his extraordinary popularity with his base, over and above the objections of his critics.
Machiavellianism
A psychological trait, not one of Gergen’s leadership criteria but common in the literature of psychology and communication, is Machiavellianism, a term defined in psychology as “a personality trait centered on manipulativeness, callousness, and indifference to morality” (Jones & Paulhus, 2009, p. 28). Gergen’s first criterion on his list of leadership traits is character, which accords with ethos, the first of the rhetorical triad, followed by pathos (appeal to emotion) and logos appeal to reason). Trump’s ardent base would be hard-pressed to make a case that their leader is a man of good character, arguing instead that at least their leader has made good on his campaign promises.
Yet Trump’s appeal—like that of similarly constituted authoritarian strongmen and dictators—resides not in the asset of good character or a willingness to compromise, but in his capacity (eagerness? instinct?) for cruelty and, at times, revenge. Putting aside the many oversimplified misreadings of Machiavelli’s advice to his Prince, Trump can be situated, nevertheless, in the Machiavellian tradition for being a leader who, when having to choose between being loved or feared, more often than not selects the latter. Trump’s notorious “children in cages” family separation immigration policy did nothing if not inspired fear. As a Machiavelli’s biographer noted, “Fear and the impression of power are effects Nicolo ascribes to the pomp and majesty of the state” (De Grazia, 1990, p. 367). Machiavelli (1998) wrote that “Cesare Borgia was held to be cruel; nevertheless, his cruelty restored the Romagna [a region in ancient Italy], united it, and reduced it to peace and faith” (p. 65). Trump’s supporters can judge their leader as compelling and persuasive (to borrow Gergen’s terms) not because, like Borgia, his cruelty brought about unity and peace, but because the ends of fulfilling his campaign promises justified the cruelty of his means.
According to the consequentialism criterion, in Trumps’ first term of a possible two, he has had a significant impact on the presidency. It is worth noting that consequence—the question or whether something that happens is of great import in the judgment of gatekeeper editors—does not distinguish between the heartwarming and the tragic or the peaceful and the violent. If anything, bad news is more engaging than good news. If it bleeds, it leads. More than any president in the last half dozen, President Trump has made more news more often with his announcements—frequently on Twitter—of new executive orders and a slew of policy pivots and reversals of the previous administration’s policies.
Domestically, Trump has led an aggressive deregulatory agenda which has included the expansion of drilling rights for fossil–fuel exploration, as well as removing the United States from global agreements to slow the effects of climate change.
President Trump has instituted a policy of an America First nationalism with a rhetoric so strident that it has energized and mainstreamed White supremacist militia movements. In communications, he has used Twitter to set policy agendas and effectively bypass the mainstream media in a way that makes candidate Bill Clinton’s saxophone-playing appearance on a cable television show and candidate Nixon’s piano playing on television seem almost primitive.
In his first term alone, Trump has managed to nominate and watch seated on the Supreme Court, three of the nine justices—staunch conservatives all—resulting in shifting the already conservative Court far to the right (Fandos, 2020). The conservative reformation of the Court could rank as the most consequential domestic accomplishment of the Trump presidency. The implications for crystallizing public policy on the highest profile public issues—abortion, health care insurance and gun rights—can hardly be overstated.
On the matter of their impact on the nation’s economy, the legacy of both presidents Trump and Jackson is undisputed. It ranks at or near the top of the consequentialism of their presidencies—Jackson’s for his gutting of the Bank of the United States and Trump not only for his tariffs imposed on rival China, but, as Cohen (2020) explains how Trump: married seemingly contradictory or inconsistent positions to win over both hard-core capitalists and the working class. There would be large tax breaks and deregulation for business owners and investors, and trade protection and aid for manufacturers, miners and farmers. (p. 1)
On the foreign policy front Trump has chilled relations with America’s traditional allies in the NATO alliance, while appearing to embrace dictators and authoritarian strongmen from Russia’s Putin to Turkey’s Erdogan to Brazil’s Bolsinaro. He has moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem, further alienating the Palestinian movement and seeming to lessen even further the possibility of a Middle East peace accord. He has been severely critical of globalist institutions including the United Nations and the World Health Organization. His tariff policies and continual hectoring of China—before and during the pandemic—have moved America into, or on the verge of, a Cold War with China. Where his predecessor, Obama, pivoted American trade far eastward to a “trans-Pacific partnership, Trump has done a 180 back to the truculent nationalism of America First.
Strenuous objections to Trump’s “greatness” are already plentiful. But can the same objections be made to the question of his impact? His significance outrages his critics. The case can be made that Trump has not expanded the presidency but shrunk it. But the tendentiousness of that argument is clear.
That Trump was a traitor in the tradition of Benedict Arnold is among the darkest judgments of this president. This thesis was advanced by a scholar of American history and international relations (Rothkopf, 2020). Rothkopf argues that Trump should be situated in the tradition of traitors from Benedict Arnold to the Rosenbergs, the married couple who were convicted and executed for selling nuclear secrets to the Soviets during the Cold War (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2020). While there is not sufficient space in this article to explore Rothkopf’s argument fully, I will push back on it and offer another version of Rothkopf’s thesis—that Trump and his presidency can be understood not as are Benedict Arnold and the Rosenbergs selling secrets to the enemy; but rather as in the seditious tradition of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, a secessionist who regarded himself not as president of the United States but of the Confederate States, much as Trump has styled himself as president of the “red” states.
In any judgment of the presidencies of Trump and Jackson, there is a preponderance of evidence supporting the presidential consequentialism of each, although the question of the greatness of either is far more problematic, if not entirely muddled and perhaps best left moot. While Jackson was an inspiration to Lincoln and future presidents in the twentieth century, the Trump presidency is still in its first of two possible terms, too new to inspire presidents yet to come, although disappointing and even outraging living president predecessors Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
On the matter of Trump’s putative Jacksonianism, it can be fairly said that both presidents gave the nation a long and raucous shaking and took it in a new direction from hallowed traditions and norms. It is just that the names we have given that shaking—populism, radicalism, demagoguery—are ultimately unhelpfully vague and contested from all sides and for many reasons.
Conclusion
There are at least six takeaways that emerge after reviewing the criteria and the evidence.
One, that both presidents Trump and Jackson are consequential. Each has had a major impact on the nation and the institution of the presidency itself.
Two, that both presidents regarded their presidencies as a reformation of their predecessors’ presidencies. Jackson sought a radical departure from the aristocratic Hamiltonian and Republican presidencies of the preceding founding fathers, from Washington to Quincy Adams. Trump has attempted not only to reverse the liberalism of his predecessors Obama and Clinton, but to complete the conservative reversal of FDR’s social programs, notably begun with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Three, that there are distinct similarities of temperament that link these presidents, as well as a perceptual, if notoriously difficult to define, populism.
Four (a corollary to Two), that the temperament of both became almost indistinguishable—for better or worse—from the content and accomplishments of their presidencies.
Five, that neither of these men lie outside American history. There is a presidential tradition of cantankerousness and volatility, not only within the American presidency, but in American political history, itself.
Six, (a disclaimer), that the multiple standards and criteria for assessing presidents and presidencies, along with the impact of partisanship and the recency effect, are both an aid and a challenge to present and future historians to engage in comparisons of contemporary and past presidents.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Dedicated to the memory of my brother. Richard A. Brown (1939-2020), my first teacher, for his passion for history, politics, and the American presidency.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.