The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he reentered for the first time as the 47th president.
It’s a choice Democrats are poorly positioned to criticize, even though the seventh president owned slaves and ordered the Southeastern Indians west on the Trail of Tears. Inconveniently, Jackson was long a Democratic icon, nominated for his second term in 1832 by the first Democratic National Convention, and there is something to be said for the man who founded what is now the world’s oldest political party.
There are certain resemblances. Jackson’s demeanor, like Trump’s, appalled his predecessors. He was from the Tennessee frontier, killed a man in a duel, and abandoned Congress to become an elected general in the state militia.
Angling for a national command, he became a…
