President Donald Trump will be back in Nashville today and will be visiting Andrew Jackson’s mansion, The Hermitage, to lay a wreath at his tomb, commemorating Jackson’s 250th birthday. Afterward, he will be holding a rally at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium. This is Trump’s first official visit to Nashville since last November.
Trump’s admiration for the former president is known since his arrival to the United States presidency when a Jackson portrait was hung in the Oval Office at the White House. Also, Trump keeps a biography of Jackson on his desk.
“I talked to Trump in May about history and role models, and Jackson never came up,” said Jon Meacham.
However, according to an interview published in The Washington Post, the idea of being a “Jackson fan” was never in Trump’s mind.
Is it Donald Trump a real follower of Jackson’s legacy?
While Obama and the Democrat Party has been “ignoring” Andrew Jackson, until deciding to remove him from annual dinners and replace him on the $20 bill for Harriet Tubman, a black abolitionist leader, Trump’s administration is recovering, in a certain way, the historical image of Jackson.
As to some journalists and analysts, this is not casual. They say that Trump’s advisors are looking forward to bringing back Andrew Jackson to 2017, trying to make a simile between Donald Trump and “the people’s president.”
“We like it (populism) because we like the idea of people having power over government. And we don’t like it because it has within it an undercurrent of racism and violence,” said Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College, according to The Washington Post.
She said that, as Americans see populism, they see Andrew Jackson, so Trump’s strategy could be seen in one or the other way, or maybe in only one way.
Trump is not the first president honoring Andrew Jackson’s memory with a visit to The Hermitage. Before him, at least four presidents visited the mansion in Nashville: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson – exactly 50 years ago -, and Ronald Reagan.
Lyndon B. Johnson’s reference has been present in the analysis and reports of Trump’s visit. In that opportunity, Johnson highlighted the relevance of Jackson’s politic transformation to the American democracy, bringing the power to people and believing in the indivisibility of the Union.
Jackson, according to The Hermitage website, helped to set up an American “sense of promise and hope.”
“The idea that anyone can succeed through hard work and natural ability, rather than through unearned power and privilege,” writes the website.
Jackson also was the first president born to immigrant parents, the only president to pay off the national debt, and the first one to have been held as a prisoner of war.
Trump will talk about health
After visiting The Hermitage mansion, Trump will hold a rally at Nashville Municipal Auditorium, and the press is expecting that his speech is focused on the health care subject, which is one of the topics that has everyone talking.
People are hoping that Trump talks about the Health Care Act as the Congressional Budget Office published a report about the Republican alternative to the controversial Obamacare. This report says that 14 million fewer Americans would have health insurance by 2018 and 24 million by 2026.
According to Time, people also expect that the president talks about school choices since Nashville is at the center of the debate over publicly funded schools versus privately run charter schools.
Maybe Trump will talk about the budget’s proposal that is expected for tomorrow. This project could include a new type of scholarships tax credit plan, but also it could represent an increase in the financing of charter schools. It is good to remember that Trump’s administration could be thinking about launching a $200 million pilot program for the school choice topic, but until now there are no clear answers.
“The primary focus is going to be health care, specifically repealing and replacing Obamacare. The secondary theme is going to be school choice,” said to WBIR an anonymous source related to the event.
The wait for a speech focused on school choice takes force with the fact that Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn will be there today. He is chairman of the Senate education committee and former education secretary under President George Bush.
Source: The Washington Post