By CIAN McKEOWN
One of the most prominent adjectives used in politics to describe the magnitude of our current president’s disregard for the checks and balances of the federal government and extremist policies is perhaps not the right one. Unprecedented should mean that there’s nothing close to the threat that the current administration poses to public health, foreign policy, the economy, working people, and minority groups than this one. While this may be true, we see some strikingly similar administrations in the long, checkered history of the American presidency.
During the first Trump presidency, a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States hung watchfully in the White House Cabinet Room. Which presidential portraits an administration chooses to hang there are often telling about the values a president may have. Trump’s predecessor hung portraits of George Washington and Harry Truman. This subtle gesture is not the only public ode Trump has made to Jackson however, delivering an address at Jackson’s Hermitage in 2017. In 2020, when protesters tried to tear down a statue of Jackson in Washington D.C’s Lafayette Square, Trump protested, saying the protestors “don’t love our country” and calling the statue a “great monument.”
Jackson, like Trump, entered the political arena as an outsider and positioned himself as a man of the people. At the time, Jackson lived at his famous Hermitage, a plantation in Tenessee where he owned nearly one hundred slaves. Jackson suffered a humiliating defeat in 1824 despite gaining a groundswell of support. It was a close election, so close in fact that no candidate won a majority of the Electoral College vote. As a result, the 12th Amendment dictated that the House of Representatives decide the election. Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House at the time, threw his support behind John Quincy Adams, even though Jackson outpaced Adams in both the popular vote and Electoral College.
Adams was then handed the presidency by Congress, appointing Henry Clay as his Secretary of State. Unlike another presidential candidate 196 years later, Jackson conceded the election to Adams. But Jackson was still furious, calling the perceived deal between Adams and Clay a “Corrupt bargain.” From then on Jackson vowed to clean up what he viewed as rampant corruption in Washington, to drain the swamp if you will.
Jackson supporters were an almost cultlike mob, the first in a long line of tribalist partisans to enter American politics. In the election of 1824, Jackson was painted as a victim, and “Jacksonians,” as they came to be known, founded the Democratic Party. Although the mud-slinging presidential campaign of 1828 dredged up many unsavory details about Jackson’s past, such as his many duels, he easily won. If you would believe it, there is another president who convinced voters to ignore his many scandals based on the populist image he had cultivated. His easy victory was overshadowed by the death of his wife Rachel in 1828. In a very Trumpian move, Jackson offered a vengeful jab at Adams supporters in eulogizing his wife, saying “May God Almighty forgive her murderers, as I know she forgave them. I never can.”
Before John Quincy Adams and his family could even move out, a disorderly mob of Jacksonians descended on the White House and damaged thousands of dollars worth of the White House’s china. Jackson made almost the same racket when he began his presidency. Popularizing the “spoils system” that would dominate American politics for the remainder of the century, Jackson placed his friends and political allies in positions of power in the government. The Jackson Administration also conducted in-depth investigations of government waste, trying to exorcise whatever corrupt elements they believed to be present in the federal government. What they perhaps should have been investigating was the waste present just outside the White House in a putrid sewage bog that would contaminate the water supply and lead to the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841.
A wannabe king(as political cartoons of the day often depicted) Jackson was one of the most tyrannical presidents this country has ever seen. Much like Trump, Jackson targeted marginalized groups with his policies, infamously setting into motion the events that would lead to the tragic Trail of Tears, where sixty thousand Cherokee were forcibly displaced from their home and forced on an arduous march to Oklahoma that led many to die in the harsh winter conditions on the journey. In learning about Jackson we are reminded there was a time when another unruly president ran roughshod all over the federal government.
Often lauded as the “greatest president you’ve never heard of,” James K. Polk didn’t learn to read and write until he was eighteen. However, the ambitious Polk soon overcame his humble upbringing, graduating with honors from the University of North Carolina and mastering three languages just a few years later.
Andrew Jackson was a friend of the Polk family, and the young Tenessean James idolized Old Hickory. Early on in his political career, Polk aligned himself firmly with Jackson, advocating for the President in the Capitol when elected as a Congressman for Tenessee’s sixth district. Polk’s reputation as a Jacksonian stooge in Congress earned him the nickname “Young Hickory.”
Soon becoming a rising power in the newly formed Democratic Party, Polk became Speaker of the House in 1835. He was also elected governor of Tenessee in 1839 but fell out of favor when many rightfully blamed the Democrats for the economic crisis the country was suffering in the early 1840s. Despite these setbacks, Polk became a dark horse nominee for the Democratic Party for president in 1844. At the beginning of that year’s Democratic National Convention, no one on the floor believed Polk had a chance in hell of receiving the nomination. He gained support from delegates by staunchly supporting the annexation of Texas. Although not quite at the convention, Trump was also believed to have stood no chance in the crowded field of the Republican primary in 2016.
Like Trump, Polk was not shy about boldly declaring his goals. He called for the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of California and the Oregon Territory(present-day Oregon, Washington, and Idaho), similar to Trump’s bold proclamations of wall building, travel bans, and mass deportations. Our Copycat-In-Chief has gone full Polk these days, casting his eyes to the manifest destiny era in his pursuit of Greenland and Canada.
While Polk differed from Trump in many ways, pledging to serve a single term and cutting tariff rates to some of the lowest in history, his rampant expansionist mindset and willingness to intimidate foreign powers to accomplish his goals bears a striking resemblance to the current administration.
In the most infamous example of this, Polk claimed that he wanted the entirety of the Oregon Territory, all the way up to the top of modern-day British Columbia. This tactic scared Britain(who as luck would have it controlled British Columbia) enough with thoughts of war to persuade them to strike a deal with the United States, establishing the border we know today. It is easy to assume that Trump wishes Polk had never struck that deal and made good on his bluff.
The third President from the Volunteer State that our current one reminds us of for all the wrong reasons was once a great hero. Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator to remain loyal to the Union upon succession in 1860. During the Civil War, this was perceived as an act of self-sacrifice of the noblest order. But Johnson did it out of spite, wanting to see the Southern aristocracy he had so loathed as an impoverished young man in Greeneville humiliated.
Sparing nothing to achieve this goal, Johnson talked of civil rights for freedmen and harsh punishment for traitors when Abraham Lincoln shockingly selected the Southern Democrat as his running mate in 1864. However, Johnson’s first hiccup came on inauguration day.
Gravely ill in the weeks leading up to his swearing-in, he originally planned not to attend. Lincoln insisted he come, stressing the importance of showing unity in a troubled time for our nation. Remedying his sickness with several glasses of whiskey just moments prior to when he was scheduled to speak, Johnson was piss drunk by the time he took the podium on inauguration day. What followed was a nearly seventeen-minute expletive-laden drunken calling out of various members of the Lincoln cabinet that most newspapers chose not to print. The speech almost makes Trump’s “American carnage” fiasco barely watchable. Only five weeks after this embarrassing incident, Johnson would be President of the United States.
In the wake of Lincoln’s tragic assassination, Johnson was given one of the most difficult tasks any president has ever shouldered. He needed to reconstruct the Union and determine how much leniency he would grant to former Confederates as well as dictating what rights were to be afforded to the millions of freed slaves now living in the South. When readmitting Southern states to the Union, he provided a few provisions for civil rights and equitable treatment of freedmen, but never made overtures to enforce them aside from the presence of the military in the South. Decisions like these were ultimately left up to the states, and soon the aristocracy was allowed back into power, and “black codes” were implemented to firmly entrench black people as second-class citizens in the South.
Johnson’s hatred of Southern nobility was outweighed in the end by his hard-core racism and the realization that he had become one of them, at this time a wealthy man and our last President to own slaves before(and during) the Civil War. A man without a party, Johnson was often at odds with Congress and expressed this through his quite liberal use of the veto power.
He used this power to attempt to snuff out the Freedman’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 but was overridden by Congress, the first instance of this in American history. Johnson and Trump align with each other in this way, both positioning themselves as a rogue executive and disregarding the powers of Congress and the judicial branch. Johnson’s stubbornness was less effective if only for the fact that he did not have the groundswell of legislative support that our current president possesses, although the current administration has given little thought to creating lasting stability.
Despite a barnstorming tour of the midwest by Johnson for the 1866 midterm elections, Johnson ultimately failed and Congress gained a mandate to override any of Johnson’s vetoes. While he could not stop the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, he delayed them enough with his stubbornness to ensure their eventual failure.
After testing the constitutional legitimacy of the Tenure of Office Act by firing Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Congress responded by drafting articles of impeachment against the president for the first time in history.
Although Johnson does not possess the dubious honor of a double impeachment, he squeaked his way out of conviction and removal from office by merely a single vote. Johnson’s escape from eternal infamy provides a blueprint for the power of the Executive that Trump and others would go on to cultivate. If Johnson were to have been convicted, our present-day Congress would have considerably more power than the Presidency.
A retort always given to President Trump’s infamous “Make America Great Again” slogan has been to ask what America we are returning to. In the mind of our president, it appears to be the Gilded Age. This is evidenced by his recent fascination with William McKinley, renaming Alaska’s highest peak, Denali, to Mount McKinley. Trump’s recent tariff blitz can also be credited to McKinley, even earning our 25th President the glib nickname the “Napoleon of Protection.”
McKinley focused much of his political career on Tariffs, with his McKinley Tariff Act of 1890, which he drafted as an Ohio congressman, raising rates by 50%. McKinley was voted out of Congress when the law tanked the economy.
After serving as governor of his home state of Ohio, McKinley beat out populist William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in 1896. McKinley’s campaign slogan even had the same boisterous strongman message as Donald Trump’s now infamous rallying cry, “Prosperity at home, prestige abroad.”
McKinley carried with him into office the vestiges of the Gilded Age, lining the pockets of corporations and exercising his mandate for protectionist policy. After the sinking of the U.S.S Maine in 1898, a hawkish fever swept the country to go to war with Spain. McKinley initially advised caution, but would soon become one of the most rampant imperialists ever to occupy the Oval Office. With United States forces overpowering Spain in just four months, the US took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and The Philippines. Guam and Puerto Rico remain US territories to this day. The next year, McKinley annexed Hawaii.
Rejecting the idea of the US as an empire, McKinley thought that he was simply bringing the American dream to these territories. However, the United States occupation of the Philippines proved to be one of the darkest chapters in US history, resulting in over 200,000 Filipino civilian casualties and an outbreak of cholera throughout the islands.
Clearly, Trump sees himself as a McKinley-era expansionist, with his outlandish overtures to make Canada the 51st state and take control of Greenland seeming increasingly similar to colonialist ventures undertaken by our 25th president. At the same time proving that he, too, cannot learn the lesson William McKinley should have learned when his name-branded tariff act sent the country into a financial panic in 1890.
If we examine the past and present with a critical eye, there is much to be learned from the follies of our past leaders so we may build a firmer understanding of how to resist despotism and tyranny. The next time you hear someone say “Things have never been this bad” ask yourself, what if things have always been this bad?
Featured Image: Cian McKeown
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