Plan B Forum

Note to President Trump: Andrew Jackson wasn't alive for the Civil War

In audio posted on Monday, President Trump said Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was "really angry" about what was happening with the Civil War.

There's one major problem with that statement: Jackson died in 1845, nearly 16 years before the Civil War began.

Let's dissect the full quote, sentence by sentence.

"I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little bit later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War."[Maybe Trump believes this because his friend Frederick Douglass told him...]

This is in the vein of imagining various alternate histories of the United States.

"He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart."

Jackson was known for his temper and his loyalty to his friends, so this is OK.

"He was really angry that-- he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War."

Jackson did not, because Jackson was dead.

"He said, 'There's no reason for this.'"

See above.

(Jackson in 1832 and 1833 oversaw the Nullification Crisis, in which Jackson used the threat of military force to make South Carolina pay tariffs. The situation was eventually resolved but is viewed as a precursor to the Civil War.)

Trump's quote came during an interview with the Washington Examiner's Salena Zito. The two discussed Trump's visit to Tennessee in March, during which he toured the Hermitage, laid a wreath at Jackson's tomb and called him the "people's president."

The two discussed Trump's visit to Tennessee in March, during which he toured the Hermitage, laid a wreath at Jackson's tomb and called him the "people's president."

• The president further questioned why the country could not have solved the Civil War.
  
  "People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?" Trump said during the edition of "Main Street Meets the Beltway" scheduled to air on SiriusXM.
  
  "People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"

Thompson also notes that “Trump’s appeal as a presidential candidate depends significantly on the belief that he is a truth-teller who will have nothing to do with the conventional language of politics,” warning that:

“We shouldn’t confuse anti-rhetorical ‘truth telling’ with actually telling the truth. One of the advantages of this positioning is that once listeners are convinced that you’re not trying to deceive them in the manner of a regular politician, they may switch off the critical faculties they usually apply to political speech and forgive you any amount of exaggeration, contradiction, or offensiveness. And if establishment rivals or the media criticize you, your supporters may dismiss that as spin.”

Here is the great danger: Many people expect a political lie to sound slick, to be delivered by intellectual elites spouting $5 words. A clumsy, folksy lie delivered by a shyster using broken English reads as truth.

It is an upside-down world in which easy lies sound more true than hard facts.

• WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A class of fourth-grade students touring the White House on Monday had a chance encounter with Donald Trump and were able to answer several of his questions about the Civil War.
  
  The students, on a field trip organized by their Bethesda, Maryland, elementary school, happened upon Trump outside the Oval Office and “cleared a lot of things up for him,” their teacher said.
  
  After Trump invited the children into his office, the ten-year-olds briefed him on the causes of the Civil War, including slavery, states’ rights, and regional economic differences.
  
  “It was really cool,” Tracy Klugian, who had done a diorama about the Civil War while in third grade, said. “Someday I’ll be able to tell my kids that I met the President and taught him about history.”
  
  But another student in the class, Zach Dorrinson, said that his attempt to explain the abolitionist movement to Trump was not successful.
  
  “He needs to learn how to sit still for longer without fidgeting,” the fourth-grader said.

• when Trump says "nobody knew" something, he means that *HE* didn't know that thing;
• when he says "nobody ever thinks" (or "nobody has ever thought") about something he means that
  *HE* never thinks (or has never thought) about that thing;
• when he says "nobody has ever done" something it means that *HE* has never done that thing;
• when he says "everybody knows" something he means that *HE* believes that thing.