Trump's Political Roots

"If you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on." —Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal

 If we are to understand Donald Trump’s roots as president, we must go back to two of his predecessors, early champions of conservative populism, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Trump is America’s most idiosyncratic president, fusing Jackson’s frontier spirit and unorthodox behavior with Jefferson’s impeccable conduct in office and constitutional judgment.

Many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others, had various business interests as plantation owners, though their focus was gerundively on politics. The start of the Great Depression in 1929 marked a sharp bevel away from presidents with substantial business acumen or private sector connections. Of course, in the 1970s, there were candidates like Carter and George Bush père with business backgrounds, but a political class had already developed, leading to a shift towards lawyers, candidates with military honors, and career politicians. Naturally, business may have been a factor in the lives of many, but it was never prominent or indispensable in the aspirations of hopeful public servants for the highest of political ambitions. It was an ancillary phenomenon.  

Trump was a rarity for a major party nominee since he had never held elected office, an important government post, or elevated military credentials. Trump was not a member of the “Club.” He was inevitably resented as an outsider, a gatecrasher, an apostate who refused to play the cynical game of thrones for power, position, and wealth. He is probably the most “civilian” and non-political Commander in Chief in the entire annals of the presidency — but he knows and certainly acts like his two major antecedents. 

His experience in business and in the “frontier” affairs of the world, in labor, construction, and entrepreneurship, rendered Trump the best choice for president on the contemporary political scene, in this respect utterly unprecedented among his peers. Trump is a man who draws his MAGA principles from his pragmatic knowledge of what makes America work and from Jefferson’s and Jackson’s passionate love for what both felt to be, as does Trump, the greatest country in the world.

Obviously, differences of personality and accomplishments between Trump and his mentors are significant, but their economic doctrines and political endeavors are distinctly similar. 

With respect to Jefferson’s policies, we have seen how Donald Trump’s program to eliminate or reduce domestic taxes, close unnecessary political offices, and return the power and jurisdiction of crucial three-letter agencies to the states where they belong, except in moments of national emergency, is very much in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson as opposed to the centralizing diktats of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln, as Thomas DiLorenzo stresses in "Hamilton’s Curse."

Unlike Hamilton, Jefferson did not approve of tariffs, but Trump’s tariffs are another matter. They are essentially reciprocal, an attempt to even trade imbalances and to inshore American firms back to the mainland. Moreover, Trump’s stated opposition to the income tax is very much in line with Jefferson’s proposal in his 1801 First Inaugural Address that “a wise and frugal government shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” The author of the Declaration of Independence knew whereof he spoke.

It has been said that Jefferson was more than a politician. Trump is other than a politician. Trump is not a representative of a disintegrating state of affairs, as anti-Trumpers and TDSers insist, but the revisionary answer to it. He is in some ways reminiscent of Calvin Coolidge, whose maxim was “The business of America is business” — though Coolidge, plainly, did not recklessly advance corporate monopolies at the expense of the people.

Prior to 1860, states reserved to themselves the obligation to protect the rights of their own citizens from Federal laws they believed were unconstitutional, as prescribed by Thomas Jefferson’s Nov. 10, 1798, Kentucky Resolve. Jefferson was a man of many turns and turnabouts, as befits the inventor of the swivel chair. Though a strong proponent of liberation, for example, he was also a slave owner, which has clouded his reputation over the years. Yet he continued to argue for the abolition of slavery, a contradiction he never managed to resolve. 

The fact is that Jefferson pushed Congress to pass the Act to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves in 1807. In Notes on the State of Virginia, he denounced slavery as a moral evil. Trump, too, has swivelled about in his often tabloid and stelliferous life, but like Jefferson, despite his flaws, he has always been a fundamentally decent man and a fair employer.

One recalls Jefferson’s axiom that “the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among general bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others." In the context of the Trump presidency, the injunction clearly applies to a judiciary gone off the rails by encroaching on executive privilege. 

Again, Jefferson saw what lay in the offing. As he wrote in a letter of Oct. 20, 1821, to Congressman Nathaniel Macon, “Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit, by consolidation first; and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the two other branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.” Here is the essence of Trump’s major struggle against the internal machinations of a logrolling and ultimately venal system that violates the Constitution. 

Daniel Mallock writes in "Agony and Eloquence" that “Jefferson considered involvement in politics as a means to an end (the goal being the eradication of tyranny and the victory of democracy/republicanism). Politics then was something of a necessary evil. He was not unaware, however, of the sometimes high personal costs of political engagement.” Mallock might also have been thinking of Trump. In a real sense, Trump is a Jeffersonian president.

As for Andrew Jackson, Bradley J. Birzer points out in his "In Defense of Andrew Jackson" that Trump was also a profound admirer of Jackson and had Jackson’s portrait hung in the Oval Office, praising his forerunner for acting “with courage, grit, and with patriotic heart. To clean out the bureaucracy, Jackson removed 10% of the federal workforce. He didn’t want government corruption and battled the centralized financial power,” which he regarded as professional embezzlers. “To him, two classes of Americans existed, those who labored and those who stole.” 

Andrew Jackson has got a bum rap. As Robert Remini writes in "Andrew Jackson and the Bank War," we forget that Jackson was skeptical of unredeemable paper money flowing from the Bank of the United States, which Jackson castigated as “the instrument of the swindler.” Jackson believed that paper money had to be redeemable in specie to avoid inflation and unlimited patronage payoffs. “Far from being the ignorant bumpkins that most historians have depicted,” wrote Murray Rothbard in "A History of Money…," “the Jacksonians were steeped in the knowledge of sound economics.” The Panic of 1819, in the wake of the 1812 War, the first boom-and-bust cycle of the American economy, was the result of the Hamiltonian system of government debt and a national bank to print money to fund that debt copiously. 

This was among the pivotal factors that accounted for President Jackson facing down the second BUS (Bank of the United States), many of its investors being British. Jackson considered the Bank “a wide and unnecessary departure from just principles,” a menace against states’ rights and citizen liberties. He brought it decisively to heel, emphasizing there was nothing in the Constitution to justify a national bank. Trump’s animus against the Federal Reserve is a contemporary version of Jackson’s hostility.

Big government advocates and liberal historians have misconstrued Jackson for his strict constitutional principles, which is one reason almost all progressivists have so viscerally attacked him. True, Jackson had his swiveling tendencies: he was a seminal Union man, yet he believed in state sovereignty within a larger unit (imperium in imperio, as it was known). Irrespective of his Union sympathies, Jackson’s strong support for states’ rights also reignited the displeasure of liberal historians and intellectuals in general, especially the New Leftists of the '60s, '70s and '80s, as the Leftists of today disingenuously denounce Trump as an unabashed Jacksonian president, with his effort to bring Federal authority and state legitimacy into harmony, when it should accrue to his credit.

Other similarities were equally pronounced. Both men distrusted centralized political authority held in place by what is now called “the Swamp.” Both were of Scottish ancestry, vigorously independent, irreverent, and self-confident to a fault. Both nearly lost their lives to seeing-eye bullets. The newspaper attacks against Jackson were as vitriolic, degraded, and false as those against Trump today. And as Birzer puts it, in the re-orientation of American politics and demography in the Western expansion of the time, the voice of the common people rang louder than incumbent John Quincy Adams’ Eastern states, very much as was the case currently with regard to Trump.

It is poignant to note that in the run-up to Jackson’s election, it was said in the popular periodical The Letters of Wyoming that “it will take an outsider to fix Washington,” a city where “intrigue passes for talent and corruption has usurped the place of virtue.” Sometimes a presidency can be interpreted as a kind of replevin operation to restore to the people what is rightfully theirs. The resemblance to the figure of Trump coming to clean up the cruft of decadent privilege is uncanny. 

Interestingly, there was considerable friction between Trump’s two significant precursors, particularly on the part of Jefferson, who regarded Jackson as rhetorically inept, “most unfit,” and even “dangerous.” Yet Jackson was an ardent Jeffersonian, as William Graham Sumner made clear in his classic Andrew Jackson. The ironies of history! Trump has reconciled Jefferson and Jackson in his second administration and brought them into sync with one another as early leaders of extraordinary courage and vision. Look to these two American greats to provide an interior compass for Trump’s presidential trajectory.

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