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His request for the names of Department of Energy workers who support climate change also smacks of an administration that might seek political loyalty over experience and expertise. He appointed an official cabinet of political supporters and one close friend, Secretary of War John H. Eaton, and also relied on the assistance of an unofficial circle of advisers, including a nephew. Historians, however, have generally defended Jackson on the point of corruption. During his eight years, for example, Jackson replaced a percentage of officeholders comparable to his predecessors.

In these cases, Jackson more often than not placed national interests over his own. Another comparison, grounded in inaccuracy, has also been made about those who voted for Trump and Jackson. Unlike Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3,, votes, Jackson, in , won the popular vote handily and secured every region of the nation except for New England.

Contrary to popular opinion, however, he did not lead the charge toward democracy; instead, he benefitted from the expansion of white male suffrage that was already under way in the s. The lack of polling data makes it difficult to suss out what motivated the average voter in that campaign, but scholars have argued that, just like in , the election turned on a number of economic, ethnocultural, geographic, personal, and racial issues, not voter anger over the Adams administration.

But historical comparisons can be just as misleading as they can be enlightening. Many of the similarities between the two men are superficial and collapse quickly. Jackson had lost all of his immediate family members by the time he reached early adolescence and struggled to create a social network that enabled him to move into the southern gentry, which he eventually did.

Old Hickory possessed ideological principles that he believed would help the nation. One would be hard-pressed to say the same about Trump, the slogan Make American Great Again on his hats notwithstanding.

By contrast, today is not the s or s. Truman and his advisors were steeped in history, and took the opposite approach from that of Britain and France at Versailles, and American leadership succeeded in strengthening the European economies and countering the strong Communist parties in France and Italy. United States goals were as much geo-political in intent as well as humanitarian. Germany was divided into four zones—American, British, French and Soviet, with Berlin, located in the middle of the Soviet zone, subdivided into four sections.

The Soviet Union tried to take over all of Berlin by starting a blockade so that no food supplies could reach the Western sections. Truman countered with the Berlin Airlift, providing all the supplies Berlin needed for almost a year until the blockade was lifted. The next year, , North Korea invaded South Korea. Truman immediately turned to the United Nations, and the U. General Douglas MacArthur, who had been Allied Commander in the Pacific in the Second World War, became commander, and he conceived and directed brilliant military actions that forced the North Korean forces far back into their country within a year, almost to the border with China, against the advice of others.

His misjudgment led to the Chinese Army pouring across the Yalu River and pushing the Allies back almost to the original border between the two Koreas. MacArthur, and others. That is an example of how one arrogant leader, MacArthur, literally a loose cannon, if he had his way, could have led to war and disaster. Not too many years later, Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the U. Strategic Air Command, urged use of nuclear weapons against Communist China in the dispute over the Quemoy and Matsu Islands, but that was squashed promptly by President Dwight Eisenhower.

We must wonder and worry what President Donald Trump would decide under similar circumstances. Seeing Soviet and Chinese Communism as a monolithic force seeking to conquer the world, the U. That led under subsequent presidents to unjustified actions, overthrowing legitimate governments that the U.

Later the U. East Germany could not keep up with the progress in the West, and built the Berlin Wall in , dividing the city, in order to prevent people from leaving the country. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The final death knell came two years later as East and West Germans destroyed the hated Wall and soon West and East Germany reunited, becoming perhaps the most important democracy in Europe.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire was brought home to me in when I bought peaked caps of Soviet generals and admirals from Turkish sellers at the Brandenburg Gate. I remember thinking of T.

Not with a bang but a whimper. It did not take a war to bring down the Soviet Empire and the Communist system. The economic and tyrannical system was destroyed from within. Other nations should take note. The United States does not always live up to the hype of so many politicians, left and right, of the U. Nevertheless, the U. On balance however, the major theme of American leaders in the 20th century has been to seek peace, demonstrated by Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and also President Jimmy Carter with the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, and several presidents seeking peace between Israel and the Palestinians and elsewhere in the world.

But all too frequently, the U. American interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have been disastrous. At the same time, taking a back seat in Rwanda and Syria has been a failed policy as well. On social issues, the United States was the only so-called civilized nation that required a major war to end slavery, and it was a hundred more years before laws were adopted to insure the rights of African-Americans.

And unlike virtually every Western nation, the U. Economic inequality in America continues to plague our nation, a threat to social cohesion. Full equality in treatment of African Americans is still not the norm, racism is a major issue in the U.

But in certain other social matters, the U. The gay rights movement became powerful in the U. Human rights are deeply ingrained in American law and philosophy, and every recent U. The American giant then slumbered, mostly in disregard of what was happening abroad, until attacked at Pearl Harbor. But since that time the United States has been the dominant force in the world, not only in international diplomacy and military actions, but also in economic power, cultural impact, and certainly in the stated commitment to human rights and democracy as values to be encouraged, strengthened, and perhaps even enforced, although certainly not perfectly implemented back home in the United States.

The United States has been in a position to be the dominant power of the world from the time it entered the First World War in Only since entering the Second World War in , however, has the United States exercised that power and fulfilled the responsibility of leadership. The failure to do just that during the inter-war years constitutes the negative exercise of power; the United States had vast strengths and the potential to be the dominant world leader, but it was absent.

I regard this as the purposeful negation of power and leadership. Isolationism in the interwar years created a vacuum, which led to the Second World War. Thus, the question now is: Will the United States leave the field of leadership again and create a vacuum to be filled by others?

In spite of the economic issues deeply affecting rust belt regions of the United States voting decisively for Trump in the election, his winning the presidency was greeted everywhere in the world with disbelief, including in the United States Throughout his campaign, he had made clear his lack of commitment to traditional American values, and his endorsement of authoritarianism as a model.

He raised fear-mongering in politics to a level not seen in America in decades, attacking Mexicans, other Latino-Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, in the most vile terms. He quoted Mussolini with approval.

He encouraged violence at his rallies against hecklers. He stated that the election was rigged against him and if he lost, there would be violence.

He and his surrogates adopted outrageous slogans and name-calling of other candidates, bringing the election campaign into a sewer of insult. He single-handedly made it safe and common for Americans to openly hate again, resulting in countless acts of aggression, intimidation and scathing insults hurled at people often simply because they looked foreign.

None of those categories of people would have had any reason to vote for prior Republican candidates for president — not Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole, none of whom played the hate card, and most famously, certainly not George W.

But of course, the haters are all descended from immigrants too. American history would suggest that many of those also qualify as being descendants of illegal immigrants, an irony lost on them as well as on Trump.

The election was a perfect storm, with many mistakes of Clinton, her husband President Bill Clinton, as well as the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI all contributing to her defeat. The Republican party had also effectively suppressed voting in minority and poor neighborhoods in states they control, from the deep South to Ohio and Wisconsin, limiting polling hours, registration and early voting periods, and reducing the number of polling places in those neighborhoods.

Since his election, and against the expectation of many who hoped for better, Trump has continued his assault on American values and policies, evidenced by the character of his cabinet appointments, most of them intent on dismantling the departments to which they have been appointed and reversing the progress of recent decades in health care, the environment, education, social welfare, labor and civil rights, and of course immigration —even transferring national park lands back to states for development.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Around 48, people were pushed into poverty.

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