TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “After puzzling comments about 19th Century abolitionist Frederick Douglass and marveling that no one knew Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, President Donald Trump has just unloaded another historical non sequitur.
In the latest strange aside, Trump said that Andrew Jackson, the populist rabble-rousing President with whom he has begun to claim political kinship, had strong thoughts about the Civil War — even though he died 16 years before the conflict broke out.
‘He was really angry that — he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War,’ Trump said in an interview with Salena Zito, a Washington Examiner reporter and CNN contributor, on Sirius XM radio. ‘He said, *There’s no reason for this.* ‘
Trump’s comment makes little sense because Jackson died in 1845 and therefore could have had limited knowledge about events leading up to the conflagration pitting his native South against Northern states.
It was not clear whether Trump might have been trying to suggest that Jackson had extreme foresight and believed that a clash between the North and the South was inevitable sooner or later over the issue of slavery.
But considering the fact that Jackson was a slave owner himself, it seems unlikely that he held any views that would not have focused on preserving an institution that has come to be viewed as a stain in US history.”
-Stephen Collinson, “Trump’s wacky history lessons continue,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, May 1, 2017 3:14pm