Tag: Andrew Johnson

Donald Trump, Meet Your Precursor

New York Times logoAndrew Johnson pioneered the recalcitrant racism and impeachment-worthy subterfuge the president is fond of.

Last week, in defense of her father, Ivanka Trump tweeted out a quotation she wrongly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”

The misquotation came from an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal that has since been corrected. What is fascinating about this incident though, is that the quotation actually comes from an 1889 book, “American Constitutional Law,” that defends Andrew Johnson against his impeachment in 1868. By the time the book was written, emancipation and the attempt to guarantee black rights lay in shambles, and conservatives rallied to the defense of Johnson, one of the most reviled presidents in American history.

Much more than impeachment connects the presidencies of Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump. No one expected either man to enter the White House. Both presidencies began with a whiff of illegitimacy hanging over them: Johnson’s because he became president when Lincoln was assassinated, Mr. Trump’s because he won the Electoral College despite having nearly three million fewer popular votes than his opponent, the largest losing margin of any president who actually won the election. The size of the gap did not bode well for American democracy.

View the complete November 29 commentary by Manisha Sinha on The New York Times website here.

Presidential historian Jon Meacham explains why Trump has ‘joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history’

AlterNet logoWhen President Donald Trump, over the weekend, told four congresswomen of color to go back to the countries they originally came from, it was obviously a rally-the-base strategy designed to appeal to the so-called “patriotism” of his far-right supporters. But, according to presidential historian Jon Meacham, Trump’s bigoted comments were the polar opposite of patriotic. This week’s true American patriots, according to Meacham, are the four congresswomen Trump attacked on Twitter: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York City, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — and Trump is showing himself to be the most racist U.S. president since Democrat Andrew Johnson in the 1860s.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday night, Meacham told host Chris Matthews, “Johnson’s state message said that African-Americans were incapable of self-government and relapsed into barbarism if they weren’t closely supervised.”

Meacham noted that the history of the U.S. is about a “journey toward a more perfect union,” not authoritarianism. The 50-year-old historian told Matthews, “What the president has done here is yet again — I think he did it after Charlottesville, and I think he did it, frankly, when he was pushing the birther lie about President Obama — he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history.”

View the complete July 16 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.