Donald Trump Is Not a Twenty-First Century Andrew Jackson

I’ve written about the Trump-Jackson comparison several times (here, here, and here), so when I was asked to contribute a piece on it to the OAH‘s The American Historian, I took the opportunity to bring together my thoughts into something more coherent than a blog post.

You can read the entire American Historian piece, but here’s the last part of it:

Ultimately, the comparisons fail because the current president-elect is outside of the bounds of traditional American political culture. Whatever we think of Jackson today, he was a military hero who served his country in combat and a politician who (generally) placed the nation’s best interests over his own. Not so with Trump, who will become the nation’s first president without military or political experience and who has repeatedly demonstrated that he cares more about himself than about the American people and what is best for the nation’s future. If history has judged Jackson harshly, it will likely treat Trump with contempt.