In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Trump stated that he was unclear as to why the Civil War wasn’t prevented, something he seems to think would have been simple if Andrew Jackson didn’t die over 10 years prior to it.
“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 a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
Trump praised late President Andrew Jackson, referring to him as a “swashbuckler.” He went on to suggest that if Jackson was alive when the war was coming to be, he could have prevented it, noting that Jackson, a plantation owner who owned 150 people at the time of his death, “had a big heart.”
“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. 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.”
Jackson died after contracting tuberculosis 16 years before the Civil War began, so Trump was most likely referring to the buildup of tensions between the North and South over slavery before the war started, a time period in which Jackson sided with the South.
This isn’t the first time Trump has sang Jackson’s praises. In March, Trump visited the Hermitage, Jackson’s Tennessee home, and slave hotbed, for his 250th birthday, and compared Jackson to himself.
“It was during the revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite,” Trump said at a rally while he was in Tennessee, likely using ‘an arrogant elite’ as a metaphor for the Democratic party and the media. “Does that sound familiar to you? Oh, I know the feeling, Andrew.”
A more accurate history lesson on Andrew Jackson can be found here.
