Many pundits, and certainly a horde of President Trump’s supporters, are quick to cut him some slack when it comes to his governmental deficiencies. But it’s unforgivable for the nation’s leader to be so ignorant of American history, particularly some of the most popularly known milestones.
On Monday, that ignorance sank even lower than his approval rating. During an interview with Salena Zito, host of SiriusXM’s P.O.T.U.S. channel, Trump said that the Civil War could have been prevented if Andrew Jackson had been around. Like an earlier statement that suggested Frederick Douglass was alive and well, Trump seemed unaware that Jackson had been dead 16 years before the war.
Granted, our president is not a history buff, and if he gets his facts confused as he did recently when explaining his stance on Obamacare and pre-existing conditions, there is always the quick follow-up from his aides to correct his gaffes.
Even more egregious, Trump has expressed his admiration for Jackson, who was an unrepentant slaveholder. We are reminded of this from a tweet from Chelsea Clinton. “When Andrew Jackson died in 1845 (16 years before the war began), he owned 150 men, women and children,” she tweeted.
Professor Julian Zelizer of Princeton University said that Trump’s comments on Jackson and the Civil War are the “height of inaccurate historical revisionism.”
Well, the American people by now should be fully acquainted with Trump’s revisionism, his flip-flops and his general incompetency on a sundry of important matters, domestic and foreign.
His recent invitation to Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, and the cordial musings about a possible tete-a-tete with the leader of North Korea, are further indications of a commander in chief on a ship of state without a rudder and a helmsman with neither political nor moral compass.
Moreover, many Americans were alarmed to learn that Trump has promised to rearrange the menu for the nation’s 32 million children who receive federally funded lunches, intending to modify Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative to reduce obesity and the intake of calories and sodium.
Unable to push through his elimination of Obamacare, the president has targeted the other Obama and her program.
Each week, make that a day, brings another terrible consequence from our dumb president. We don’t need an ignoramus in the Oval Office, and we insist that to Make America Great Again—Trump Must Go!