A History Lesson for the President

In an interview with Salena Zito of the Washington Examiner, President Trump offered his thoughts on Andrew Jackson and the Civil War, which gave everyone something to talk about besides North Korea and health care.

Parsing Trump’s remarks is complicated by his stream-of-unconsciousness style. Drilling down, he turns out to have been half right and half wrong. Scholars’ reactions to him were as mixed, in their way, as Trump himself.