Our Populist Past

The is a quote from Person of the year Time with Trump on the cover December 19th 2016:
The article is "Our Populist Prologue" by Jon Meacham page 86 at the beginning:

It was dusk on Monday, September 3, 1827 when the party from South Carolina drew up at the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's plantation near Nashville. One of the travelers, a young woman named Julia Ann Conner, left a diary account of her surprise at finding that Jackson, who she had expected to be a wild backwoodsman with a dictatorial bent that led his opponents to call him an American Bonaparte, was in fact nothing of the sort. He was, she recorded, a "venerable, dignified, fine looking man, perfectly easy in manner." The Hermitage was filled with history. A brace of pistols that the Marquis de Lafayette had given to George Washington were on the mantle piece, a gift to Jackson from the Washington Family.

"They are preserved with almost sacred veneration," as was a small pocket spyglass of the first President's," Conner wrote. And most important, the visitor benefited from her hosts help during a game of chess.  An "excellent player", Jackson "frequently directed my moves--apparently much interested in the fate of the game---there were no traces of the 'military chieftan' as he is called!"

This sketch of Jackson the tactician--a player of chess, a game that rewards careful thought and foresight--explains much about his character. He could at times be reckless, but more often he played the games of politics and war with skill and patience. And Conner was surely right when she observed that Old Hickory was "much interested in the fate of the game"-- he was always interested in the fate of the game, or of the battle, or of the vote. She had detected something deep and fundamental about Jackson in her days under his roof: he was more than a frontier politician or a mindless populist rabble rouser. His enemies--and much of posterity--never quite understood that the largest fact about Jackson was not a problem with his "passions" (or temper, in contemporary terms) but his ability, more often than not, to govern them and harness the energies that would have driven other political figures to ruin.

With Donald Trump's rise to power as America's 45th president, those in serach of an illuminating analogy have frequently cited the example of the seventh. Steve Bannon, now Trump's senior White House Strategist, has made this explicit, arguing that the Trump revolution is akin to Jackson's populist insurgency in the 1820s and 30s. There are, of course surface similarities. Both, movements gained popularity based on freeing the country form established, ossified interests with a promise to return the nation to greatness (in Trump's formulation) or to Jeffersonian republican simplicity (in Jackson's). Both startled the existing order (the Clintons and the mainstream media in Trump's case; John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay in Jackson's. And both had powerful personalities at the head of the ticket.

There is, however, an essential difference, one that will tell us much about the coming years in the U.S. life and politics. For all his bombast, Jackson was an experienced public figure--he had served as a judge, a Senator and a general--who understood his weaknesses and took care to compensate for them. He could thunder and storm: he was prone to fits of rage and temper. Yet he was self-aware, and with that came a kind of self restraint. He was, as his visitor to the Hermitage noted, as at home with a chessboard as he was charging blindly forward. We simply don't yet know whether Trump possesses the kind of discipline that Jackson brought to the presidency."

end partial quote from page 86.

I agree. We simply don't know yet whether Trump is self aware enough yet to pull this all off. We know he relies a lot on his children for guidance. However, was Trump elected president or his family?

This might be an important question. We do have examples like in Ronald Reagan's case that as he began to slip away in his mind while still president, Nancy Reagan made him seem still together and on top of it by her counsel. And she also steadfastly protected his legacy at every point and turn as long as she was alive.

Whether Trump's children can do this for him too is yet to be seen.