Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Ignoramus Trump

POLITICS  | WHITE HOUSE MEMO 

With Civil War Remark, a President Who Doesn’t Go by the (History) Book

By PETER BAKER and JONAH ENGEL BROMWICH
A statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House.Stephen Crowley/The New York Times 
WASHINGTON — If nothing else, President Trump has already secured a place in history. It is his grasp of history that seems less secure.
In his latest foray into what might be called the alternative past, Mr. Trump suggested that Andrew Jackson had been “really angry” about the Civil War, which did not break out until 16 years after his death. And for good measure, Mr. Trump questioned “why was there the Civil War” in the first place, suggesting that it should have simply been worked out.
The comments, made in an interview broadcast on Monday, may have been attributable to imprecision, but for historians they underscored what seems to be a tenuous understanding by Mr. Trump of the course of events that preceded his ascension to power. At various points, he has seemed to suggest that Frederick Douglass is still alive, appeared surprised that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and mounted a plaque at a golf course marking a Civil War battle that never happened.
“Presidents should have some better sense of the nation’s history as they become part of it,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton.
White House officials said that Mr. Trump was being misinterpreted and that a few random comments had been twisted into meaning something they did not. The criticism of his remarks, they said, reflects a “gotcha” game by intellectual elitists who fail to understand him.
“There’s a certain amount of hunting for ‘what is it that Trump has done that’s dumb?’” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who taught history as a college professor in Georgia and has written multiple historical novels. “Trump’s not a student of history. Trump’s an extraordinarily successful, entrepreneurial personality who learns what he needs to know when he needs to know it. Trump is learning history as he governs.”
After Mr. Trump’s comments led to criticism, he tried to clarify Monday night on Twitter. “President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry,” he wrote. “Would never have let it happen!”
Many presidents find history absorbing, since they live it and make it. President George W. Bushread 14 books about Lincoln during his time in office, seeking inspiration and comfort. President Barack Obama made a point of regularly hosting historians like Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert A. Caro, David Kennedy and Robert Dallek for dinnersexamining how the travails of his predecessors offered lessons for his presidency.
But even presidents with more evident interest have tripped up over history from time to time. Mr. Obama mangled World War II events when he said his great-uncle helped liberate Auschwitz, which would have been possible only if his great-uncle had been a Soviet soldier. Aides later clarified that Mr. Obama meant Buchenwald, which was liberated by American troops. Similarly, when Mr. Obama referred to “Polish death camps,” he generated a storm of protest in Warsaw, which always insists that they be referred to as German death camps on Polish territory.
Mr. Trump has made questionable comments a regular feature of his public discourse, going back years. During the campaign, he talked about thousands of Muslims in the United States cheering after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, despite a lack of evidence. At a golf course in Virginia, he posted a plaque honoring the “River of Blood” where so many soldiers died in the Civil War that “the water would turn red,” even though historians said no such battle took place there.
At an African-American History Month celebration in February, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that the 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass was still around. “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,” he said.
At a later fund-raiser for the National Republican Congressional Committee, he seemed surprised that Lincoln belonged to the Republican Party. “Great president,” he said. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anyone know? Lot of people don’t know that.”
No doubt many Americans are not fully aware of the country’s history, but most do know Lincoln was a Republican, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2012. Fifty-five percent of those polled correctly said Lincoln was a Republican. Still, perhaps Mr. Trump was thinking about the 28 percent who thought the Great Emancipator was a Democrat.
Even his staff has found trouble over historically loose comments. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, asserted at a briefing that Hitler did not use chemical weapons against his own people. Mr. Spicer quickly apologized.
“Trump seems almost uniquely ill equipped to process history, whether because of his lack of empathy, his allergy to complexity, or his tendency to keep distant from anything that might carry the whiff of defeat,” said Paul Starobin, author of the newly released “Madness Rules the Hour,” about the confrontation at Charleston, S.C., that led to the Civil War. “History is not tidy. Trump likes tidy. He likes slogans. History doesn’t offer any.”
President Trump speaking during a Holocaust memorial service at the Capitol last month.Doug Mills/The New York Times 
The latest historical question mark came in an interview Mr. Trump gave to The Washington Examiner in which he discussed Andrew Jackson. Mr. Trump has embraced Jackson as a kindred populist spirit railing against the establishment ever since Mr. Gingrich and Stephen K. Bannon, now the president’s chief strategist, told him of the similarities last year. Mr. Trump has hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office and visited his estate in Tennessee.
“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” he told The Examiner. “He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War; he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’”
Mr. Trump added: “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
While he demonstrated knowledge of other details of Jackson’s life, the Civil War comments set off a wave of scorn online. “POTUS says that Andrew Jackson (who died in 1845) ‘was really angry’ about the Civil War,” Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate last year, wrote on Twitter, using the initials for president of the United States. “Paging the Department of Education …”
John Weaver, a longtime adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and other politicians, mocked Mr. Trump with a reference to a supposed terrorist attack in Kentucky that one of his aides once cited erroneously. “Too bad Pres. Jackson didn’t ride up to Bowling Green/sit down with Frederick Douglass at besieged Nordstroms & figure out Civil War thingy,” Mr. Weaver wrote.
Jackson, a slave owner who believed in the use of force if necessary to preserve the Union, did not live to see the Civil War, but Mr. Trump may have been thinking of the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, when Jackson threatened to send troops after South Carolina declared tariffs imposed by the federal government null and void and threatened to secede. That was a precursor, in a sense, to the crisis that precipitated the Civil War in 1861.
“That’s similar in vein to what one would say about the Civil War,” said Michael Dubke, the White House communications director. “I’m sure something along those lines is what the president was referring to.”
Mr. Gingrich suggested that Mr. Trump was onto something in suggesting that Jackson would have been more suited to stopping the slide to war than James Buchanan, who was passive as Southern states seceded. “Compare Jackson with Buchanan, and you could make a pretty good argument that had Jackson been president in 1856, there wouldn’t have been a Civil War because he would have crushed it,” Mr. Gingrich said.
Jon Meacham, a Jackson biographer, agreed that Mr. Trump probably meant the Nullification Crisis, but he said the question on what caused the Civil War suggested that Mr. Trump might have been referring to a deal to avert conflict short of the abolition of slavery. “The expansion of slavery caused the Civil War,” he said. “And you can’t get around that. So what does Trump mean? Would he have let slavery exist but not expand? That’s the counterfactual question you have to ask.”
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Historian Trump


MONDAY, MAY 1, 2017 10:00 PM CDT

Donald Trump thinks Andrew Jackson could have avoided the Civil War: Words cannot capture how ignorant and offensive that is 

Couldn't the Civil War have been "worked out," asks the actual president? Sure — by keeping black people in chains VIDEO

SKIP TO COMMENTS 
TOPICS: AMERICAN HISTORY, ANDREW JACKSON, CIVIL WAR, DONALD TRUMP, DONALD TRUMP INTERVIEW, HISTORY, PARTNER VIDEO, RACE AND RACISM, RACISM, SLAVERY, U.S. HISTORY, VIDEO, , 
Donald Trump thinks Andrew Jackson could have avoided the Civil War: Words cannot capture how ignorant and offensive that isAndrew Jackson; Donald Trump  (Credit: Wikimedia/Getty/Chip Somodevilla/Salon)
Whenever we observe that President Donald Trump answers questions like an eighth-grader who didn’t do his homework and has to BS his way through an exam, part of me thinks he’ll eventually conjure some discipline and admit he’s not up to speed on whatever the topic happens to be. 
Or maybe he’ll do what most politicians do, faced with a zone of ignorance: Reject the premise of the question and pivot to the message of the day. Deflection often worked for Ronald Reagan, but Trump always — always! — takes the bait because he has apparently deluded himself into believing he’s an expert on everything. In this regard, he’s the perfect chief executive for this era in which every anonymous screecher on social media thinks he or she knows everything about everything.
When asked about Andrew Jackson by SiriusXM’s Salena Zito, Trump lapsed into a familiar routine: pretending to know more than he does, consequently embarrassing himself and revealing that, yes, in fact he knows nothing. In this case, he not only delivered a typically hagiographic overview of Jackson, who was at best a sociopath and at worst a genocidal madman, but the president also seemed to suggest that Jackson was still alive during the American Civil War. On top of everything else, Trump told Zito that the bloodiest war in American history could have been avoided through a political solution brokered by Jackson himself. 
Total gibberish.
Donald Trump thinks Andrew Jackson could have avoided the Civil War: Words cannot capture how ignorant and offensive that is
 
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Trump began by saying he agreed with Jackson that politics killed Jackson’s wife shortly after the 1828 election: “They destroyed his wife and she died.” There’s no way of knowing whether the election exacerbated Rachel Jackson’s cardiac condition, leading to a fatal heart attack. Jackson always believed that, but that doesn’t make it true.
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Donald Trump's Unpredictable 100 Days
In the middle of lamenting the death of Rachel Jackson, Trump shoehorned into the proceedings the fact that he had visited Jackson’s grave in Tennessee, as if we’re supposed to be impressed by that. It reminded me of the time in 2006 when George W. Bush told a German reporter that the “interesting” thing about George Washington was that Bush had read “three or four books” about him. (This actually happened.)
Then without prompting, Trump launched into a completely bungled rant about the Civil War, noting that Jackson hated the war and would have concocted a solution had he still been president. In other words, Trump seemed to think Jackson was still alive during the war or perhaps had died just before it began — and furthermore that it was a war Jackson apparently opposed.
“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” Trump said. “He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War.” In the real world, Jackson died in 1845 — almost 16 years before Confederate artillery under Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter. 
In an effort to reverse engineer Trump’s ignorance, loyalists have correctly noted that the existential debate that led to the war went on throughout the first half of the 19th century. But Trump was much more specific, citing the war by name. He wasn’t talking about the debate over slavery, otherwise he would have said “the debate over slavery.” Trump was talking about the war itself. Jackson was long dead before secession fever ignited after the 1860 election, rapidly disintegrating into unprecedented carnage. It’s almost like saying that Franklin D. Roosevelt hated the Vietnam War or that Richard Nixon opposed the invasion of Iraq. 
Case closed. Trump knows nothing, right?
But wait: There’s more. Trump went on to claim that Jackson had said, “There’s no reason for this,” with “this” apparently meaning the Civil War. Um, no. Andrew Jackson never examined the circumstances of the Civil War because, to repeat, he was dead. 
“People don’t realize,” Trump continued, “you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
I . . . I just . . . This is madness. First of all, yes, millions of people “realize” what caused the Civil War. For more than a century, revisionists pushing the “lost cause” mythology sought to whitewash Southern slavery and secession by injecting “states’ rights” into history books as a sanitized excuse for the war. In the modern era, it’s widely accepted outside neo-Confederate circles that slavery was absolutely the original sin that sparked the war. 
There’s a great deal of pedantry orbiting this topic, but contrary to what Trump said, people are literally always asking about what caused the war. What the hell leads him to believe that no one asks questions about it? It could be that Trump  thinks he’s always the first human being in existence to learn about a topic and that everyone else is dumb about it. This is the behavior of a clinically delusional man. Oh, and by the way, there are at least 1,210 books about the causes of the Civil War. “People don’t ask that question,” Trump said. Mind-blowingly, galactically stupid.
Trump also seems to think the political conflicts of mid-19th-century America could have been “worked out” before the Southern states seceded and hostilities erupted. The only deal that could have been reached to avoid the war would have involved preserving slavery into the indefinite future — and in all probability expanding it greatly. Otherwise, no deal. The South was not prepared to relinquish the cornerstone of its economy: unpaid labor, bound for life. 
Much like Trump supporters today who are unmoved by facts or reality, Southern leaders were similarly uncompromising, driven by racist and anti-abolitionist propaganda of the worst kind, marketed by “fire-eaters” — the Victorian equivalent of today’s Fox News punditry. Regardless of all that, Trump, perhaps by accident, seemed to say he would have been amenable to a pre-emptive solution that might have prevented the war. Does he even realize that any such deal would have meant continued slavery on the North American continent?
To make matters worse, Jackson was a slave-owning Southerner with absolutely zero interest in the rights of African-Americans. If Jackson, per Trump, had said, “There’s no reason for this,” it was probably because by the time he was inaugurated, he owned 150 people, including women and children. I challenge Trumpers of any variety to logically explain Trump’s cockamamy Jackson theory to Civil War scholars: Slave owner Andrew Jackson — had he been, you know, alive — would have come up with some solution to the Civil War that would have abolished slavery while preserving the Union. Can you explain how that might have worked? If you can’t, we have no choice but to conclude that Donald Trump would have been cool with preserving the institution of slavery in order to avoid the war.
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Nevertheless, Trump blindly accepts Jackson as his spirit animal, perhaps not being aware of the fact that President No. 45 has little in common with No. 7, beyond the fact that both men are flawed, sinister and deeply deranged characters. Despite being America’s first despot, Jackson famously kept the White House open to public visitors, complete with his big block of cheese in the lobby. Trump, while insisting he’s the people’s president, cut funding for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; he shut down the sidewalk in front of the north portico of the White House, keeping the people far away; he has allowed mining corporations to dump toxic sludge into rivers and streams that provide drinking water to people; and he has supported various versions of Trumpcare that phase out the expansion of Medicaid as early as next year. Man of the people? Bull crap.
Not to bury the lede here, but Andrew Jackson did something Trump openly dreams of doing: Jackson defied the Constitution by overruling a decision of the Supreme Court. The result was the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands in Georgia, a notorious act of genocide committed with total impunity.
This is Trump’s hero? 
Our president isn’t very smart. We get it. But what does this latest idiotic outburst say about Trump and his belief about genocide, slavery, states’ rights, the American Civil War, secession and the “lost cause” mythology? There’s no other way to describe this latest bit of insanity other than intellectually violent. On which side of history does Trump reside? Someone should ask him. 
Meanwhile, since he is actually the president, perhaps Trump needs to spend less time hanging on every word of Fox News’ Steve Doocy and more time reading about the history of the United States and how its government functions. You never know: He might learn something. 
Bob Cesca
Bob Cesca is a regular contributor to Salon.com. He's also the host of "The Bob Cesca Show" podcast, and a weekly guest on both the "Stephanie Miller Show" and "Tell M
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Early to bed, Early to rise

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy and wise. Is this still true in retirement? I'm giving it my best shot to find out. My father always said that if a man weren't up by daybreak he was lazy. It's not like I have to plow and feed the farm animals and worse have a job to show up for. But still there is something mystical to get to watch the sun come up and contemplate early in the morning the vagaries of life. Those vagaries can sometimes slip up on you and I like to be prepared.
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