Could President Trump have negotiated away America's Civil War?
To hear him tell it, someone should have. And maybe he, the great deal maker, could have. Sure.
Never mind that he hasn't been able to get even the first piece of legislation through the House of Representatives, let alone the entire Congress.
But let's not quibble.
What we're talking about here is the Civil War. Or to be precise, the Civil War was what Trump was talking about in an interview last week with Washington Examiner reporter Salena Zito. We know what he said because excerpts of that interview were played Monday on Zito's show on Sirius XM radio.
"They said my campaign is most like, my campaign and win was most like Andrew Jackson with his campaign. And I said, 'When was Andrew Jackson?' It was 1828. I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, 'There's no reason for this.' People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don't ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?"
First, Andrew Jackson would have been a "really angry" ghost. Jackson had been dead for 16 years and out of office for 24 years when the Civil War began in 1861.
But on that second part, Trump might be right, though not in the way he indicated if by "worked out" he meant negotiated - as in "The Art of the Deal" negotiated.
Trump has talked of his admiration for Jackson, our seventh president, and in March he visited Jackson's Tennessee tomb and home, the Hermitage, in Nashville.
Obviously no one can know what Jackson would have done in the days that led up to the Civil War. But it's fair to say that any president would have had to contend with the South's attempt to expand the institution of slavery into new U.S. territories.
"The expansion of slavery caused the Civil War. And you can't get around that, said Jon Meacham, who won a Pulitzer prize for his 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson, "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House." Meacham, a Tennessean and former Chattanooga Times reporter, spoke to both The New York Times and MSNBC on Monday.
"So what does Trump mean? Would he have let slavery exist but not expand? That's the counterfactual question you have to ask," Meacham said.
While Jackson was alive he dealt with the nullification crisis of 1832 - an historical version of a states' rights fight over taxes. Four years earlier Congress had passed a high protective tariff that benefited the increasingly industrialized north where cloth was made, but shrunk English demand for southern raw cotton and increased the final cost of finished goods to American buyers. (Sound familiar?)
South Carolina's response was to enact an ordinance of nullification. It would ignore the tariff and dare Jackson to do anything about it. Jackson saw the states' rights challenge as so serious that he asked Congress to enact legislation permitting him to use federal troops to enforce federal laws in the face of nullification. An armed confrontation was avoided when Congress, led by Henry Clay, revised the tariff with a compromise bill, permitting South Carolina to back down without "losing face," according to ushistory.org.
Meacham noted in his book that in the aftermath of the nullification crisis Jackson wrote on May 1, 1833: "[T]he tariff was only a pretext, and disunion and Southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question."
Thus Jackson, who took a firm stand for the union and federalization despite the fact that he was, in Meacham's words, an "unapologetic" Southern slave owner, would have faced continuing conflicts in any future negotiations.
History aside, let's face it: A whole lot of random stuff comes out of the mouth of our 45th president - stuff that can't be explained away by scores of reporter questions or the replies of his to-be-pitied spokespersons or even his own follow-up comments.
All too often when he speaks, we're left to wonder if the random stuff is just another Trump tick or if it's the beginning of some scary new policy - like a Muslim ban, border wall or the "deconstruction of the administrative state."
Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, told The New York Times that Trump's comments on Andrew Jackson and the Civil War were the "height of inaccurate historical revisionism."
Some pundits think Trump's fact-challenged claims about either Jackson or Civil War negotiation is yet another indication of his disinclination to read and his resultant scant grasp of history.
Meacham, who twice in a space of 24 hours compared Trump's mind to a pinball machine in which a ball riccochets from point to point, thinks Trump somehow "conflated" - read here confused and combined - the nullification crisis with the Civil War.
We think it's deeper and darker than that.
How much slavery would deal-maker Trump have allowed? Might he have expanded and franchised it?
Or perhaps he would have "deported" all the slaves to Africa as he would those Mexicans and Muslims he now so likes to defame? One of Andrew Jackson's primary claims to fame was the Trail of Tears - a de facto deportation of American Indians to the then-territory of Oklahoma.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Trump is an Andrew Jackson fan.