The Return of a Demagogic Populist President After 200 Years
Image Source: Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl – Public Domain
This year, our nation experienced the mobilization of the lowest economic class against the establishment controlled by the elites for the second time. It’s not a Marxist revolution or a fascist coup; it’s a significant portion of American voters uprising to overthrow the established order.
This bare majority may not endure, but a visible eruption has abandoned the liberal normality of prioritizing rational and humane behavior. But it is not a foreign-inspired movement. It is a domestic insurrection born from our political culture dating back to the 1800s.
Many voters probably saw the Democrat’s and Liberals’ Presidential campaign as a cry that the sky is falling. It may be, but it won’t be the first time. Two hundred years ago, a prior demagogic populist president was elected, and our democracy survived. It remains to be how if it will again.
Demagogic Populists Rise from Outside the Political Parties
Upon winning his first term, President Donald Trump prominently hung a portrait of Jackson behind his desk in the Oval Office. President Andrew Jackson was President Donald Trump’s hero. Trump visions himself as another populist outsider and the scourge of Washington elites.
Perhaps he would also like his portrait to be seen by 11 billion people, which is the number of $20 bills in circulation stamped with Jackson’s picture – a larger number than the world’s population.
Donald Trump’s and Andrew Jackson’s political trajectories are eerily similar. Both ran for president three times and lost twice. Both claimed that the election was unfair when they lost. Both had two different vice presidents and were sympathetic to having their first one hanged. And they both dominated their cabinet, forcing out members who would not execute their commands, preferring to concentrate power in the White House with handpicked advisors.
More importantly, they projected images that won them the presidency by running against the establishment to defend the common man. Jackson’s disdain toward the “better classes,” which he said claimed a “more enlightened wisdom” than commoners, can be seen in Trump’s MAGA movement, which disdains “elitists,” like federal scientists who supported shutting schools during the Covid pandemic.
Yet, both presidents were from the wealthiest 1% of all citizens, with Trump’s wealth far more significant than Jackson’s. However, they considered themselves savvy businessmen who occasionally sustained substantial losses from speculative land and property ventures.
Trump has Mar-a-Lago as a home that also operates as a recreational club for the elite. Jackson’s thousand-acre Hermitage was his home and was one of the most extensive cotton-growing plantations in his home state of Tennessee, sustained by over 100 enslaved Black people.
Before becoming president, Trump and Jackson were nationally known among ordinary people but not for their government experience. Trump had none, and Jackson held two short-term appointed positions that lasted less than six months.
Nevertheless, they had a national persona. After hosting the reality TV show The Apprentice for ten years, Trump gained popularity. It was a clever publicity stunt for Trump, having businesspeople vie for the show’s prize: a one-year $250,000 contract to promote one of his properties. The show’s audience averaged just over 10 million a year, with its 2004 first-season finale drawing 28 million viewers. Trump also appeared on TIME’s cover five times before election day between June 2015 and October 2016.
Jackson and Trump had a popular base of admirers who wanted them to lead the country. Their supporters did not seek a government manager but a disruptor of a perceived docile government that did not meet their needs. They were angry, and Jackson and Trump magnified their anger and rode it like a general on a warhorse into an electoral battle.
Jackson achieved fame by getting results even if he had to break the rules. He was the hero who saved New Orleans from the British in the War of 1812. He then declared martial law in the city and arrested a Louisiana legislator for writing a letter in the local paper criticizing his continuation of martial law.
Two years after the war, as a military general, Jackson tried to seize Spain’s Florida territory, an act that neither Congress nor the president had sanctioned. Subsequently, some in Congress called Jackson a “man on horseback” who wanted to transform the U.S. into a military dictatorship.
Jackson’s political opponents accused him of steering up discontent among poor farmers and frontiersmen and characterized them as the “mob.”
Something akin to when Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton let slip her comment that Trump’s supporters were “deplorable.” However, Congressional resolutions condemning Jackson’s actions failed, much like Trump’s House impeachments were not sustained in the Senate.
Trump and Jackson’s Presidential Campaigns overturned existing parties and brought about a new alignment of voters.
Each instigated a new political movement that dislodged the existing dominant political party. Jackson was the critical founder of the Democratic Party and ran as its first presidential candidate. In less than a decade, Trump overhauled the Republican Party into a new MAGA Republican Party loyal to him, not to its entrenched elected leaders.
Eight years earlier, when he won the presidency in 2016, his first White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, declared that Trump would follow in Jackson’s footsteps. Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter, “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement.”
Jackson and Trump created their new parties by appealing to low-propensity voters or new voters. Jackson’s votes came from poor white farmers who gained the right to vote for the first time. Trump beat out the Democratic party by appealing to the economic and safety-security needs of those rarely voting.
Glenn Young explains in The Winning Words V1 that Jackson’s approach was to begin the most significant voting rights campaign up to that time. While he had the plurality of the votes in 2024’s election, he lost the electoral votes. In 2024, the nation’s population was nearly 11 million. However, only 360,000 votes were recorded, with six states choosing the electors by state legislatures, not the popular vote.
Jackson made sure he would win in 2028. The number of new voters exploded when Jackson called for “universal” suffrage, ending the property requirements that barred small landholding, mainly white farmers, from voting.
These new voters had an overriding concern to acquire the land that was available for them to exploit once Jackson used the military to force Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi. Jackson’s campaigns honored rural folks while ridiculing big city voters, as later presidential candidates William Jennings Brian and Donald Trump did.
Similarly, after losing his 2020 election, Trump doubled down on going after “low propensity” voters, which traditional Democratic and Republican party campaigns mostly ignored.
Consequently, Trump appealed to these voters’ need for greater security from a domestic enemy. They weren’t “Indians” living close to you. They were “illegal immigrants” moving into your neighborhood. It wasn’t land they possessed that you needed, but jobs you should have, not them.
Accompanying that economic threat was the physical threat of illegal immigrants being rapists, just as Jackson characterized “Indians” as savage warriors.
The people have spoken. Our nation is about to experience a second Jacksonian revolution. The next step is to prepare for its unfolding.
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