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President Donald Trump said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “Main Street Meets the Beltway” show Monday that if Andrew Jackson had been president in 1860, the Civil War would have been averted. “Had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” he stated, and he asked, “Why could that one not have been worked out?”

I asked David Blight, a Yale University historian whose work has focused on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, what he thought of Trump’s remarks. Here’s his response: