But the funny thing about Trump's nostalgia is that the president has proved, time and again, that he doesn't know much about the past after all.

That was obvious on Monday after Trump was interviewed on radio by the Washington Examiner in which he extolled President Andrew Jackson and suggested Jackson could have prevented the Civil War from taking place.

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Here's the full excerpt of what Trump said:

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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 — if 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?

As we wrote earlier, the White House has overtly embraced Jackson's proto-populist legacy. Trump showed off a Jackson biography on his desk at the Oval Office and paid a visit to Jackson's grave in Tennessee in March. His advisers grandiosely described Trump as a "Jacksonian" president. But there are so many dubious claims in just a few sentences here that they cast doubt on Trump's basic grasp of his own branding, let alone American history.

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"One glaring issue here: Jackson wasn't really angry about what was happening with the Civil War, because he died more than a decade (1845) before it started (1861)," observed my colleague Aaron Blake, who generously pointed to the source of what may have been Trump's confusion. "Jackson in 1832 and 1833 oversaw the Nullification Crisis, in which Jackson used the threat of military force to make South Carolina pay tariffs. The situation was eventually resolved but is viewed as a precursor to the Civil War."

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Later on Monday, the president went on to tweet:

But while Jackson may have preserved the Union during his time in office, he was hardly opposed to slavery — the fundamental issue at the heart of the Civil War. Jackson was a slave owner and displayed no "big heart" for the human chattel who secured him his livelihood. My colleagues at the Retropolis blog wrote about a notice Jackson published in the Tennessee Gazette in 1804 urging the return of a "runaway" slave, a "mulatto" who "talks sensible, stoops in his walk, and has a remarkable large foot, broad across the root of the toes" and "will pass for a free man."

Jackson's vicious campaigns against the indigenous populations of the American South paved the way for the expansion of slavery there. When he was in power, he banned the post office from delivering abolitionist literature in slave states.

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"Jackson had a big heart for white farmers," Nicole Hemmer, a historian at the University of Virginia, told Yahoo News. "Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over non-white Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness."

Trump's rhetoric echoes that of people who cling to an earlier revisionist reading of the Civil War, which sought to minimize the significance of slavery as a cause of the war and, instead, framed the conflict as a tragic blunder that could have been avoided.

That reading underlies the "Gone With the Wind" romanticism and Confederate nostalgia that sees the 150-year-old flag of a treasonous, white supremacist breakaway faction still plastered on American cars, flown from houses and even enshrined in some state capitols. But, as Post columnist Jonathan Capehart pointed out, it's also simply wrong. "Forget the 'War Between the States,' 'War of Northern Aggression' or 'The Lost Cause,'" he wrote. "They are euphemisms to make a war about maintaining the evil of slavery and the economy it built seem like a noble effort by a noble people."

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"The entirely uncontroversial consensus among professional historians is that slavery caused the war, although this conclusion has not reached much of the general public," wrote the Atlantic's Yoni Applebaum, who is also a former academic in American history. "Leaders like Jackson, then, only postponed the inevitable reckoning."

So, yes: When Trump asks why the Civil War "could not have been worked out," he's asking a question that historians have spent years debating and pursuing. But as the president, he shouldn't be naive about the racial tension at the heart of that question.

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Trump's brand of populism may invoke a romantic past, but it needs to be distanced from the real one to succeed. The same is true across the pond, where French far-right leader Marine Le Pen — recently praised by Trump as the candidate "strongest on borders" — constantly plays a double game, invoking an older, more glorious France while also playing down her own party's connections to neo-fascism and Holocaust denial. If she loses a run-off election this weekend, her opponents might well consider it history's own kind of revenge.

But for Trump, barely more than 100 days into his term, there's a lot more reckoning to come.