I don’t expect the President of the United States to be an expert on the Civil War. I would have hoped – perhaps no longer expected, but hoped – that he would have at least been able to start from a basic grade-school understanding of the matter. You know, something like: “Well, there was slavery,” (which, as he recently learned, was “really bad”), and “one side really wanted to keep on having slavery”.
Now, I don’t deny that to arrive at a detailed, nuanced picture of how the American Civil War came about requires understanding decades of American history and politics, including economic factors – but at the heart of the matter was slavery. Of course this has all been the subject of a large body of academic research, as everyone knows.
Well, almost everyone.
And as if that all weren’t bad enough:
Sure, I suppose if we’d still had an unrepentant slave owner as President, the South would have lacked the proximate cause of seccession, and the Civil War might have been delayed (not prevented) with slavery continuing for some additional years. But I doubt that’s the outcome Trump is envisioning.
I’m finding it increasingly hard to guess just how far Trump’s ignorance extends. I’m genuinely unsure if Trump even knows Jackson owned slaves, despite having had Jackson’s portrait put up in the Oval Office. (If he did know, I’m genuinely unsure if he would care.) And while I would hope that on some level he does, in fact, know that slavery had something to do with the Civil War (I mean, surely he must… right?), I’m genuinely unsure if he somehow forgot this fact when making the above comments, or if he simply imagined that a strong-man he admires could have brushed that problem aside through the sheer force of his will.
But I am sure of at least one thing: This bloviating ignoramus is a disgrace to the office he occupies.
I’m sure he’s thinking that if we’d just been able to continue owning people until the cheap offshore labor logistics got worked out it would have been a lot better off for the people who owned people. You know, slavers. Why doesn’t anyone ever think of the slavers?
Or maybe he’s suggesting Jackson would’ve let the South secede without putting up a fight, allowing slavery to continue unchecked for God knows how long.
Which is actually worse than your interpretation. At least with an intact union, the south would be subject to the laws of a future president.
Because if we’d had a great deal maker who made the best deals, the greatest deals, HUGE deals, then we could have found a compromise that worked for everyone. Except for, you know, the slaves. But they don’t count.
That raises an interesting question. No, not the one Trump asked; I’m just wondering, would a brand-new poster yesterday have gotten banned as an obvious troll if their first post here had been “Andrew Jackson 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: if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question! But: why was there the Civil War?”
The problem here is not that Trump doesn’t know slavery was the issue for the Civil War. I’m sure he knows that. The problem is that he thinks everything is easy, as long as he’s doing it (or someone he admires). Then we’d be left with: “No one knew it would be so hard to negotiate with the Souther States over the issue of slavery!”
Yes and no. The other problem is that he apparently thinks no one has considered the question before. The profound ignorance that exhibits is breathtaking.
If that’s Trump’s idea about Jackson, he’s wrong. Jackson owned slaves, but he was no secessionist.
He would always support the Federal Union over States Rights. The battle over nullification was one of the sore point of his battles with Senator Calhoun.
I had a funny moment when I glimpsed it, because the news was on and those EXACT three words were going through my head a second before I saw the thread tile.
But again, I think this one goes back to the Fox News Breitbart influence. Here’s what I think happened.
Every now and then, the Fox News crowd gets into relitigating the Civil War, bitching about Northern Aggression and making the odd claim that slavery was dying out anyway and that it would’ve ended sooner if not for the Civil War.
Then they gloat about the hypocrisy of the North and yammer on and on about how Northerners didn’t really care about the slaves and the Civil War was about overreaching government and taxation.
It cracks me up how they try to use this stuff against 21st century Democrats.
Especially since they love to drag out Lincoln and put him on the “Worlds Greatest Republican other than St Ronnie” pedestal whenever it suits them.
But anyway I’m sure Trump’s heard these alternative Civil War facts on “his” news.
2.) The Fox News crowd also has deep and abiding love for Andrew Jackson. As far as I can tell, this isn’t really rooted in anything that Andrew Jackson said or did. It mostly stems from the debates around last years decision to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill with Andrew Jackson.
Three guesses how the Fox News cohort felt about that! And their strategy involved not only putting down Tubman, but making Jackson out to be the greatest president ever (except for St Ronnie)
So Fox News has spent a lot of airtime talking up Jackson.
Then Fox further morphed into “the channel that knows Trump is watching and only shows things he wants to see and hear.” So they started comparing Trump to Andrew Jackson.
4.) Then all this stuff hits a Trumps ears,
80% makes it to his Mixmaster of a brain
Some totally garbled nonsense with elements of 1, 2 and 3 exits out of his mouth but no one is sure what it means. Trump included.
Trying to figure out this stupid thing being thrown around. It’s clearly obvious what he was saying, you guys are some messed up biased individuals. lol
Trump was referring back to the nullification crisis during Jackson’s time and the tariff’s derived from that. It was the expansion of slavery that caused the Civil war, not slavery in of itself. You guys need to understand the culture of the era and the political nature of that time period and more importantly for this discussion, the economy. Jackson preserved the union in the 30’s…that lived on in the Civil War.
Where Trump says “I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.” He was clearly giving opinion on what he thought potentially could have been.
The nullification crisis helped lead to the Civil War because it boiled sectional tensions between the north and hesSouth to the surface.
That leaves the obvious counter question, but I seriously don’t think that’s what his contention was. I think his contention was that all of everything going on, including slavery could have been worked out to end slavery without a war…which was possible.
The media…and some here, completely ignored his reference to Jackson and Civil War because they didn’t put it all together.All you guys wanted to see what was taken out of context, the final quote. Likely not knowing anything about the nullification of 1832, the tariff’s and everything leading to the Civil War or why the war existed at all and probably didn’t know that Abraham Lincoln, always insisted that slavery was wrong and must be contained to the South. contained as in no expansion, Lincoln may have seen it as wrong but had no intention of abolishing until the War…talk about stupid.
Granted Trump could have worded more clearly, it wasn’t an efficient interview and looks very edited from the start. Then again Trump has always been more of a business man than a social butterfly.
Fact check:
Yeah, I know. For all we know, Jackson would have waged a bloodier war than Lincoln did to preserve the Union.
Among other things, what I take away from Trump’s blather is that had he been President in 1961, he would not have taken a hard, principled stand like Lincoln did. He would not have considered war a necessary means of ending Southern secession, and he damn well would not have considered slavery an issue worth fighting a war over.
I would find this all depressing and scary and surreal as fuck if Trump hadn’t already depleted my capacity for Trump-specific outrage months ago.