The New York Times reported this of then-new President Donald Trump’s first day in the Oval Office in 2017:
The president spent a part of Tuesday poring over artwork from the White House collections, settling on a portrait of Andrew Jackson — America’s first populist president, who has been invoked by Mr. Trump’s aides as inspiration — to hang in the Oval Office.
The Trump–Jackson parallel has been made often enough, as both are fierce populists with a loyalty to what Jackson described as “the common man.”
Now there is one more quite notable similarity between the two. Both presidents have narrowly escaped assassination attempts.
The History Channel records this of the attempt on Jackson:
On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson becomes the first American president to experience an assassination attempt.
Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, approached Jackson as he left a congressional funeral held in the House chamber of the Capitol building and shot at him, but his gun misfired. A furious 67-year-old Jackson confronted his attacker, clubbing Lawrence several times with his walking cane. During the scuffle, Lawrence managed to pull out a second loaded pistol and pulled the trigger, but it also misfired. Jackson’s aides then wrestled Lawrence away from the president, leaving Jackson unharmed but angry and, as it turned out, paranoid.
Trump is not the paranoid type, to say the least. But, like Jackson, he responded instantly. Jackson responded by attacking his attacker and clubbing him with his walking cane. As the world saw the other day, Trump’s attacker was nowhere in sight, but the former president had the sense to duck instantly. As Jackson was surrounded by aides, Trump was instantly covered by the bodies of Secret Service agents who hustled him, bleeding, to his waiting limo.
But there is more to this Trump–Jackson connection. Each man was, in their day, the very embodiment of the common man. One was a military man, an actual general. The other was a businessman, a business general if you will. Both brooked no nonsense when dealing with political opponents. And both had a thoroughgoing commitment, as mentioned, to the “common man.”
The New York Times headlined Trump this way shortly after his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton:
Donald Trump Rode to Power in the Role of the Common Man
It was duly noted that Trump pledged to defend:
the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals
the forgotten men and women of our country … people who work hard but no longer have a voice.
The Times wrote:
He pledged: “I am your voice.”
The message resonated especially in the Midwest, where a stunning victory in Ohio helped give Mr. Trump the Electoral College votes he needed to win.
Note that what the Times called his “stunning victory in Ohio” stands now to be replicated with the choice of Ohio’s thoroughgoing populist senator, JD Vance, as his running mate.
And the Vance selection reminds of an earlier GOP ticket.
That would be the 1952 election when GOP nominee Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower picked young California Sen. Richard Nixon as his running mate. Like JD Vance today, Nixon was 39. And perhaps most importantly, his youth made it possible for Nixon to have a seriously long career at the very top of the political world.
Nixon served two terms as vice president, won the 1960 GOP nomination, lost narrowly to John F. Kennedy, lost a race for governor of California two years later, and finally scored his comeback in 1968, being elected twice to the presidency. Nixon’s shadow loomed large for almost three decades of American politics.
In Vance’s case, a reelected Trump will be able to serve only one more term, setting up Vance for a 2028 nomination race that, as a young vice president, he would surely dominate.
Even more to the point is that a Trump–Vance administration would be able to seriously rework both the Republican Party and the presidency to represent the decidedly pro-working man populism that has in fact become a mainstay of the Trump campaign.
In short? As the accident of an attempted assassination has clearly shown, Donald Trump has come to represent a populist tidal wave that is flooding the country. With a young vice president and potentially future President Vance at his side, it may well stay at flood-tide levels for a very long time to come.
And doing it in a manner Trump’s long-ago populist predecessor Andrew Jackson would surely approve of.
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The post Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump — and JD Vance appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
