Andrew Jackson, Not William McKinley
The best parallels for Trump’s excesses can still be found in the Jackson administration.
The pseudonymous essayist
recently argued in a short but incisive Substack post that the past decade is best understood as “the Age of Trump,” in the same sense that Andrew Jackson’s two terms became known as the Age of Jackson.She explains:
“Around 40% of my entire life has been in the Age of Trump, and at this point we have to call it the Age of Trump, just as we had the Age of Jackson two centuries ago. Politics and American life have been polarized around him and remade in his image. The most essential question of someone’s political, social and cultural beliefs is if you are for him or against him, and it is rare to find someone who does not have an opinion on him.”
Over the last year, William McKinley has become the most common historical touchstone to ‘explain’ Trump, at least in my personal experience. That Trump’s monomaniacal obsession with tariffs as an economic panacea has led him to repeatedly claim McKinley made America rich is largely at fault.
But as Daniel Immerwahr notes in a recent piece for the New Yorker, “McKinley was not a businessman but a lawyer and a career politician.” Immerwahr quotes Timothy Shenk as saying McKinley “possessed a ‘titanic blandness’” and Robert W. Merry describing McKinley as a “sweet-tempered adjudicator.” Hardly a ready parallel to Trump.
During the first Trump term though, reporters and editors were calling up Andrew Jackson biographers and historians who could help explain his presidency. Trump still seems to have a personal affinity for Jackson1 but in 2017 and 2018 Steve Bannon’s influence made “Old Hickory” much more prominent.
Personally, I still believe that save for the tariffs Jackson provides the best historical parallel to the present Trump administration.2 Namely, both men thought themselves to be the true voice of the American people, essentially coronated by reelection as a Hobbesian Leviathan with the executive branch as their political body.
Trump and his appointees have repeatedly defended administration policy by declaring that the president has a mandate. For example, in a statement about the 3,000 arrests a day quota set by Stephen Miller, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that “we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.”
Even during the leadup to Trump’s second inauguration, the man began floating the idea of adjourning Congress in order to appoint his coterie of sycophants. (Given the weak moral character of our modern senators, this proved unnecessary.) And the unofficial official motto of DOGE, as featured on its website, is “the people voted for major reform.”
Trump’s electoral victory over Harris, the argument goes, was so large3 it is both antidemocratic to push back against his agenda and unnecessary to actually consult the legislature.
Jackson too viewed his more considerable electoral victory as a mandate capable of conveying immense power. Near the end of his first term, Jackson had vetoed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, a decision Congress proved incapable of overturning. Upon his reelection, Jackson decided to unilaterally remove the United States’ deposits from the Bank of the United States and place them in state banks, in direct violation of federal law. Treasury Secretary William Duane, who had been reticent to break the law at Jackson’s direction, was removed shortly thereafter.
In a statement read to his cabinet on Sept. 18, 1833, and later seized upon by his political opposition, Jackson relayed that “Whatever may be the opinions of others, the President considers his reelection as a decision of the people against the bank.”
Jackson, like Trump, felt that his being granted a second term meant he rather than Congress embodied the will of the people.
Senator Henry Clay, the famed Whig from Kentucky, responded venomously to Jackson’s power grab, spending the next few months supporting the first and to date only censure of a president by the Senate. In a lengthy speech midway through December of 1833, Clay eviscerated the president’s statement to his cabinet:
“The truth is, that the re-election of the President no more proves that the people had sanctioned all the opinions previously expressed by him than, if he had the king’s evil or a carbuncle, it would demonstrate that they intended to sanction his physical infirmity.”
Jackson’s decision to remove Duane from office also spurred a furious debate over the scope of the presidential power to remove appointed officers from their posts. In Jackson’s response to his official censure for “assum[ing] the exercise of a power over the Treasury of the United States not granted to him by the constitution and laws,” he defensively claimed the Vesting Clause granted him the “unqualified power of removal.”
Today, Trump’s administration has similarly taken recourse to the Vesting Clause and the “executive power” as they have sought to cleanse independent agencies of Democratic appointees in contravention of “for cause” dismissal requirements.
The suit Trump v. Wilcox, which appears likely to end favorably for the president, began following his illegal removal of NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox and MSPB member Cathy Harris. In an April filing with the Supreme Court, U.S. solicitor general D. John Sauer opened with a reference to the Vesting Clause and called reinstating removed officers “a grave affront to the President’s ability to run the Executive Branch.”
I already tried to detail in a previous post how members of Congress during the New Deal sought to limit the president’s ability to remove select officials in the name of good administration. And I’m hoping to explain just how in flux this presidential power was during the first decades of the American republic in a to-be-written essay for Liberal Currents.
Given the narrower scope of this piece though, I hope it will suffice to say that as drafted the Constitution left the power of removal up for grabs. The first Congress eventually, after weeks of spirited debate, seemed to narrowly decide the president ought be able to remove those he appointed but much remained unclear.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Congress would repeatedly seek the ability to restrict the president’s purported removal power, with the most incisive critics arguing for a theory of congressional delegation. Unfortunately, Myers v. United States (1927) and to a lesser extent Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) strongly limited Congress’ ability to guard the administration of the laws from presidential passions.
Jackson viewed and Trump views Congressional limits on their ability to say “you’re fired” as undemocratic checks on their hard-won power. Both men found in their reelection “proof” that their will and the will of the American people was one and the same, and that their whims could therefore justify extraconstitutional, anti-constitutional measures.
Today as in the 1830s, the president of the United States believes he, in the words of Daniel Webster, possesses “the especial guardianship of the constitution” and that his every action has been sanctified by a single election.
I am unable to disagree with Athena. We do live in the Age of Trump. The question is, where shall we find our Clay, our Webster? Who can still defend true republican freedom?
“Mr. President, the contest, for ages, has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. Whoever has engaged in her sacred cause, from the days of the downfall of those great aristocracies, which had stood between the King and the people, to the time of our own independence, has struggled for the accomplishment of that single object. On the long list of the champions of human freedom there is not one name dimmed by the reproach of advocating the extension of executive authority; on the contrary, the uniform and steady purpose of all such champions has been to limit and restrain it.”
Excerpted from a speech delivered in the Senate by Daniel Webster on May 7, 1834.
Here are some great articles from other folks to check out:
Alex Bronzini-Vender on WelcomeFest for The Baffler
Andrew O’Hagan on Joan Didion for the London Review of Books
And E.J. Dickson on a conservative women’s summit for The Cut
And a couple things I wrote this week as well:4
An op-ed on Tuberville’s Johnny-come-lately support for SNAP
And another article about the probable effects of the OBBBA
When Biden entered office, he replaced a portrait of Jackson Trump had installed with one of Benjamin Franklin. Earlier this year, the Trump White House kept the portrait of Franklin but again added a painting of Jackson, this time from the White House art collection.
A nineteenth century Democrat and elected in large part due to backlash over a tariff John Quincy Adams had signed into law, Jackson was no “tariff man.”
Personally, I have already noted that I find Trump’s 2024 victory nowhere near a landslide.
In the days since these pieces were published, the OBBBA has seemingly been changed significantly by the Senate parliamentarian. See this article in The Hill for more.