Donald Trump’s view of Andrew Jackson: “He had a big heart.”

Quote taken from Salena Zito’s interview with the President on Monday, May 1, 2017. The full transcript of that interview is an addendum at the end of this article.

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Our North American native peoples, however, had a different view of the seventh President of the United States of America. From the February, 20, 2017 issue of Indian Country Today:

A brief essay on why Andrew Jackson is one of the worst ten Presidents in United States history.

by Gale Courey Toensing • February 20, 2017

Andrew Jackson: A man nicknamed “Indian killer” and “Sharp Knife” surely deserves the top spot on a list of worst U.S. Presidents. Andrew Jackson “was a forceful proponent of Indian removal,” according to PBS. Others have a less genteel way of describing the seventh president of the United States.

“Andrew Jackson was a wealthy slave owner and infamous Indian killer, gaining the nickname ‘Sharp Knife’ from the Cherokee,” writes Amargi on the website Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory & Practice. “He was also the founder of the Democratic Party, demonstrating that genocide against indigenous people is a nonpartisan issue. His first effort at Indian fighting was waging a war against the Creeks. President Jefferson had appointed him to appropriate Creek and Cherokee lands. In his brutal military campaigns against Indians, Andrew Jackson recommended that troops systematically kill Indian women and children after massacres in order to complete the extermination. The Creeks lost 23 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama, paving the way for cotton plantation slavery. His frontier warfare and subsequent ‘negotiations’ opened up much of the southeast U.S. to settler colonialism.”

Andrew Jackson was not only a genocidal maniac against the Indigenous Peoples of the southwest, he was also racist against African peoples and a scofflaw who “violated nearly every standard of justice,” according to historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown. As a major general in 1818, Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish Florida chasing fugitive slaves who had escaped with the intent of returning them to their “owners,” and sparked the First Seminole War. During the conflict, Jackson captured two British men, Alexander George Arbuthnot and Robert C. Ambrister, who were living among the Seminoles. The Seminoles had resisted Jackson’s invasion of their land. One of the men had written about his support for the Seminoles’ land and treaty rights in letters found on a boat. Andrew Jackson used the “evidence” to accuse the men of “inciting” the Seminoles to “savage warfare” against the U.S. He convened a “special court martial” tribunal then had the men executed. “His actions were a study in flagrant disobedience, gross inequality and premeditated ruthlessness… he swept through Florida, crushed the Indians, executed Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and violated nearly every standard of justice,” Wyatt-Brown wrote.

In 1830, a year after he became president, Jackson signed a law that he had proposed – the Indian Removal Act – which legalized ethnic cleansing. Within seven years 46,000 indigenous people were removed from their homelands east of the Mississippi. Their removal gave 25 million acres of land “to white settlement and to slavery,” according to PBS. The area was home to the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations. In the Trail of Tears alone, 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.

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Addendum: Salena Zito’s interview with President Donald Trump was aired Monday, May 1, 2017 on Sirius XM radio:

TRUMP: They said my campaign is most like, my campaign and win was most like Andrew Jackson with his campaign. And I said, “When was Andrew Jackson?” It was 1828. That’s a long time ago. That’s Andrew Jackson. And he had a very, very mean and nasty campaign. Because they said this was the meanest and the nastiest. And unfortunately it continues.

ZITO: His wife died.

TRUMP: His wife died. They destroyed his wife and she died. And, you know, he was a swashbuckler. But when his wife died, you know, he visited her grave every day. I visited her grave actually, because I was in Tennessee.

ZITO: Oh, that’s right, you were in Tennessee.

TRUMP: And it was amazing. The people of Tennessee are amazing people. Well, they love Andrew Jackson. They love Andrew Jackson in Tennessee.

ZITO: Yeah, he’s a fascinating —

TRUMP: I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why?

ZITO: Yeah —

TRUMP: People don’t ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

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Hmmm … Why?

I wonder. As I also wonder about these revisionist historical observations from Mr. Trump at the outset of his remarks at a campaign stop in Buffalo on April 18, 2016:

“I wrote this out, and it’s very close to my heart because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 711, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down. And I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen in action.”

Hold the presses! He may have watched the police and firemen on 911, not to be confused with the 711 convenience store, but if so he watched it unfold on television. He was neither “down there” … he was ensconced in Trump Tower, nor did he bother to correct his 7ll gaff.

At a later Columbus, Ohio rally in November 2016, Trump said he watched the towers fall from his New York City apartment. “Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view — a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center,” Trump said. “And I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit … I saw the second plane hit the building and I said, ‘Wow that’s unbelievable.'”

If indeed Mr. Trump saw this event unfolding from his lofty perch in Trump Tower, he must truly have the eyes of the Eagle-in-Chief he imagines himself to be. Trump Tower is fully four miles away from the site of the former World Trade Centre.

He could, however, have watched it unfolding in real time from one of his black mirrors, confusing something he is watching on television with actually being present at the event. It could explain his continuing confusion with thinking that viewing something on his really big screen is the same as experiencing it in reality.

True, he did seem to understand that Jackson came from an earlier era, but couldn’t seem to reconcile the fact that Old Hickory. who was “really angry about what was happening in regard to the Civil War”, had in the ground for sixteen years before the Civil War began. Hard to be angry when you’re decomposing.

Hard to be President when you’re not all there.

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Skid Crease, Caledon