Trump’s Finger Is On the Button!
Fearing Trump, the Union of Concerned Scientists has advanced the Doomsday Clock, indicating their belief that the risk of nuclear war has increased. This is actually quite confusing. After all, the Clock has historically waxed and waned based on the perceived (by the pointy heads at the UCS, anyways) threat of a nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR, and since its demise, Russia. So wouldn’t Trump’s supposed softness on Russia and the prospect of a rapprochement between Trump and Putin (which elicits shrieks of horror from the Democrats) reduce the risk of such an event? Shouldn’t the clock have moved backwards, not forwards?
But that’s not the button I refer to in the title. Actually, I should have written buttons, plural, because what I am thinking of is Trump’s pushing of the progressive left’s buttons. We’re only a week into his administration, and already he has pushed so many of their buttons that they are on the brink of psychological collapse–many past the brink, actually.
I could mention several examples, but one stands out even though it is the most symbolic and least substantive of the things he’s done since January 20: the announcement that he will return a portrait of Andrew Jackson to the Oval Office.
Trump’s core constituency is Jacksonian America (as Walter Russell Mead and then I pointed out in 2015), but truth be told, most Jacksonians don’t know a lot about him. Pace Willie Dixon, he’s just one of those Dead Presidents they’d like to get their hands on: “Jackson on a 20 is really great.” But the left does know Jackson, and hates him with a passion: he is one of their bêtes noires. Slaveholder. Ferocious Indian fighter. Author of the Indian Removal Act (a/k/a Trail of Tears). Unabashed American nationalist (heaven forfend!). Further, the left also hates his political heirs: they are the kind of people that an execrable candidate for DNC chair said it would be her job to shut down.
So Trump’s announcement regarding the portrait probably didn’t really make a ripple in his Jacksonian constituency, and that’s not why he did it. But it did unleash an uproar among the progressives–and that’s exactly why he did it. A very deliberate push of a prog button.
Personally, I have considerable ambivalence about Jackson. Much of the criticism is presentism that ignores the historical context: of course men of the 19th century frontier thought and decided differently than those on the Upper West Side for whom Harlem is the frontier. Jackson’s greatest modern biographer, Robert Remini, argues that Jackson believed that removal was the only way to prevent the annihilation of the eastern tribes at the hands of rapacious whites. Others clearly disagree, and believe that Jackson was motivated by bigotry and hatred. The point is that the story is much more complicated than the morality play presented by the left.
Jackson’s economic policy was a very mixed bag. He was in favor of small government, and was the last president to leave the US with no government debt. But his banking policy was disastrous, and was directly responsible for the Panic of 1837.
Politically, of course, he was the avatar of populism and popular democracy. This is is also a mixed bag, but the pluses are bigger and the minuses smaller when the government is small than when it is large.
He was a slaveholder, but an ardent foe of secession, as his actions during the Nullification Crisis showed.
He was also one of the most consistently successful military commanders in US history, beating both Red Coats and . . . Indians (and Spaniards too) in both conventional and unconventional warfare.
But the progressive left is anything but ambivalent about Jackson. To them he is a devil figure, which Trump surely knows–and which is why his portrait will hang in the Oval Office.
As men, Jackson and Trump have myriad differences. Their biographies are obviously utterly different. Where Trump only mused about shooting people in the street, Jackson actually did it. But they have some great similarities, and these will loom large during Trump’s presidency. Both are outsiders who express their disdain for the system and the supposed elite–and the disdain is returned with interest. Neither is constrained by elite convention, and indeed, each takes great glee at sneering at convention and brutally trampling the political establishment. Both rely on advisers who are outside the establishment. Both easily take offense, hold grudges–and take revenge.
It is therefore deeply symbolic that one of Trump’s first acts was to restore Jackson to a place of prominence in the White House. It is pushing the left’s buttons, yes. But he is also signaling how he will act as president. Aggressive–indeed, truculent. In your face. Defiant of the political establishment. Totally unafraid of confrontation and driven to prevail–utterly.
I fully expect that Trump will share other similarities with Jackson. I think that it is likely that his economic policy will be a mixed bag with extremely varied effects: protectionist insanity will sit juxtaposed with a sensible rollback of regulation and the administrative state. Trump will face international issues as president that dwarf anything Jackson had to, but his American nationalism will also lead to very varied effects, as did Jackson’s various foreign engagements (most as a general, rather than president, as in Florida).
And along the way he will push many buttons. But not the nuclear one.