It should come as no surprise that President Donald Trump Donald John TrumpBarr criticizes DOJ in speech declaring all agency power 'is invested in the attorney general' Military leaders asked about using heat ray on protesters outside White House: report Powell warns failure to reach COVID-19 deal could 'scar and damage' economy MORE takes as his role model Andrew Jackson, the most autocratic of American presidents. Trump has expressed similar admiration for today’s authoritarian leaders, from Vladimir Putin in Russia to Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

To burnish the Jackson legend, Trump distorts and manipulates the record of history. Trump said, "I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn't have had the Civil War … he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said 'There's no reason for this.'" Jackson, of course, died in 1845 some 16 years before the Civil War began.

ADVERTISEMENT

Worse yet is Trump’s apparent presumption that there was no reason for the Civil War and that if the strong-man leader Andrew Jackson, not Abraham Lincoln, had been president in 1861 he could have prevented the conflict. Trump ignores the powerful moral imperative behind the Civil War, which was ending in our country one of the history’s greatest crimes against humanity: the enslavement of our fellow human beings.

As the historian Jim Grossman has said, "If one sees the Civil War as a war of liberation, which it was, then it shouldn't have been avoided."

Jackson traded slaves and held hundreds of slaves during his lifetime. In one of his ads for the capture of a runaway slave, Jackson wrote, “ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.” As president, Jackson condemned abolitionists as “monsters” and recommended that Congress should prohibit the circulation of anti-slavery tracts in the South.

Trump says Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before Civil War, was "really angry" about Civil War: https://t.co/hiEAPz3y52 pic.twitter.com/I8hTqNnDR1 — The Hill (@thehill) May 1, 2017

During the War of 1812, Jackson was waged a brutal campaign against the Creek Indians. He forced the defeated Creeks to forfeit huge tracts of their land to white slave-holding settlers, foreshadowing his policies as president. In 1830, President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that forced tens of thousands of Native Americans to abandon their homes in the East and migrate to unfamiliar lands beyond the Mississippi River. Jackson’s insistence on the forced removal of the Cherokees led eventually to their tragic journey along the “Trail of Tears,” where some 4,000 of 15,000 unwilling migrants perished from starvation, exposure, and disease.

Jackson’s legacy is not all negative. He was a strong leader who successfully challenged the rich and privileged leaders of the Bank of the United States and blocked South Carolina’s attempt to nullify federal tariff law and weaken the Union. Still, it is a fantasy to believe he could have averted the Civil War had he only served as president a quarter century after he left office. The South insisted not only on the retention of slavery, but on its expansion to new territory. These demands were not negotiable to the South and were unacceptable to the North.

Jackson the slaveholder would never have understood what Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “If God wills that it (the war) continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

My column @thehill. Shouldn't @POTUS meet a high knowledge bar? Trump-after your 'Civil War' comments, crack a book https://t.co/Xb0db4KVh2 — Maria Cardona (@MariaTCardona) May 2, 2017

Trump’s distortion of Jackson’s legacy and the Civil War exposes the greater danger of Trump’s presidency, the destruction of truth. Early in his administration, Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway confirmed that lies are not lies, but “alternative facts” that can be whatever best serves Trump’s interests of the moment.

This assassination of truth is recalls George Orwell’s world of doublethink, where reality dissolves and the totalitarian Big Brother holds sway by telling deliberate lies that he simultaneously believes to be true. The Ministry of Peace provokes war. The Ministry of Love inflicts torture. To know is not to know; freedom is bondage. In doublethink, there are no contradictions, no evidence, no objectivity. One word that Big Brother erased from the language: science.

But Trump is not a dictator and lying could lead to his downfall if it lures us into a national crisis. Trump himself once said that George W. Bush should have been impeached because “He got us into the war with lies!” He was surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t “look to impeach Bush and get him out of office. Which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing.”

Allan J. Lichtman is distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington. He is the author of the new book The Case for Impeachment (Harper Collins, April 2017). Follow him on Twitter @AllanLichtman.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.