Trump is trying to compare himself to Andrew Jackson. Andrew Johnson is more apt.
Egged on by his top political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump is touting an analogy between his populist administration and that of Andrew Jackson, who was first elected in 1828 as the tribune of Appalachian backwoodsmen — and whose portrait now hangs significantly in the Oval Office.
They’ve got the wrong Andrew. The past White House occupant Trump most closely resembles is the 17th president, Andrew Johnson, who served briefly as Abraham Lincoln’s vice president before Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 — then ruled turbulently, barely staving off impeachment, over the next three years and 11 months.
As it happens, ostentatious admiration for Jackson is the first point of similarity between Trump and Johnson — though the latter, a Scotch-Irishman of humble origins who rose to represent Jackson’s home state, Tennessee, in the Senate, came by his more honestly.
Like Jackson, Johnson believed there was no contradiction between strong states’ rights and unconditional commitment to the Union, and he never wavered, not even after the Civil War broke out. His pro-Union stance led to his selection as Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 presidential election: Republicans saw this rare loyal Southern politician as a ticket-balancing pick.
Johnson’s open and thorough racism mattered less to Lincoln’s party than the onetime tailor’s animosity toward the Southern planter class (faintly echoed in Trump’s Queens-bred insecurities regarding Manhattanites and other “elites”). Their aristocratic pretensions annoyed Johnson even if their slave-holding per se did not.
Republicans of Johnson’s time, in short, intended to use Johnson for their own purposes, not for this ideological misfit to become president.
Once he did, however, his stubborn, conflictual and erratic personality proved a constant source of irritation and embarrassment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-trying-to-compare-himself-to-andrew-jackson-wrong-andrew/2017/02/08/483d77a8-ee1f-11e6-b4ff-ac2cf509efe5_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_3_na&utm_term=.117212062624
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