Opinion | Donald Trump’s Secret? Channeling Andrew Jackson
I taught ESL one summer to Mexicans in the US. They said they moved to the US, and had no respect for anti-immigration laws. They said they were justifiably reclaiming the land stolen from them in the 18th and 19th centuries, by white Europeans. No matter how many times they were deported, they would still return, until the white Europeans thieves were willing to share it. They had a point.
I’ve been reading a history of the Cherokee “removal’ from the South in the 1830s, authorized by president Andrew Jackson and Georgia governor George Gilmer. Trump really does reflect the dastardly deeds of Jackson and Gilmer.
The US government ignored treaties, ignored the US Constitution, ignored land and livestock theft, destroyed homes, encouraged violence, and permitted torture and murder of the Cherokees, the native people, so they could steal their land.
Their final solution inspired Hitler and his Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe 100 years later. Jackson’s Trail of Tears forced winter march killed thousands of Cherokees. Trump’s threats to remove 11 million American residents has a similar ring.
I especially consider that most of the “illegal” deportees were natives descended from people who had populated the US and Mexico for thousands of years. They were deceived and decimated by the Europeans, just like the Nazis did to the Central Europeans when told they would be sent to “Work Camps.”
“The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners. They have been dragged from their houses, and encamped at the forts and military posts, all over the nation. In Georgia, especially, multitudes were allowed no time to take anything with them except the clothes they had on. Well-furnished houses were left prey to plunderers, who, like hungry wolves, follow in the trail of the captors. These wretches rifle the houses and strip the helpless, unoffending owners of all they have on earth.”
Will Trump repeat?
The Republican front-runner is winning because, like Old Hickory, he is a wealthy…
NYTIMES.COM
