President Donald Trump will lay a wreath on former president Andrew Jackson’s grave on Wednesday before holding a rally for supporters in Nashville, Tennessee, according to CNN.
It’s another symbolic gesture towards Jackson’s legacy as a self-made man who represented the common people over the elites enraged by his rise. Trump hung a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office five days into his presidency.
“There hasn’t been anything like this since Andrew Jackson,” Trump said at the time of his inauguration. The president admires Jackson, calling him “an amazing figure in American history—very unique so many ways.” Trump especially respected Jackson’s “ability to never give up.”
Trump’s advisors have compared him and his populist, nationalist movement to Jackson. White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon called Trump’s inauguration speech “Jacksonian,” and said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that “like Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement.”
“I’d say [Donald Trump] is the best public orator since William Jennings Bryan, and he has a better sense of the pulse of the people than any President at least since Andrew Jackson,” White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller told ABC News in February.
As Breitbart News’ Warner Todd Huston pointed out, the elites excoriated Jackson for letting the common man make themselves heard. Like Trump, Jackson rallied enormous numbers of Americans together while pursuing a populist agenda.
“No one who was at Washington at the time of General Jackson’s inauguration is likely to forget that period to the day of his death,” journalist and author Arthur J. Stansbury recalled at the time, as explained in a biography of Francis Scott Key.
“To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a different point of the compass,” he continued. “The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it. On that memorable occasion you might tell a ‘Jackson man’ almost as far as you could see him. Their every motion seemed to cry out ‘Victory!’”
The Obama administration had wanted to remove Jackson from the $20 bill.
Read Breitbart News’ explanation of Jackson’s legacy, and the Trump agenda’s connection to it, here.
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