Twitter and Facebook have been abuzz for two days about Donald Trump's latest encomiums to Andrew Jackson.  Orange Hitler looks at Jackson and sees a "swashbuckler."  Presumably he thinks that he, too, is a "swashbuckler."  The key sentences in the offending interview were:

“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. 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?”

So people got all caught up in the statement "He saw what was happening" and reacted quickly by mocking Trump's apparent ignorance of the fact that Jackson was dead fifteen years before the secession crisis in the winter of 1860-61.  But Trump's awkward attempt later in the day to cover that error up actually doubles down on the most outrageous parts of his thinking.  When he tweeted the claim that Jackson "would never have let it [the Civil War] happen, Orange Hitler reveals his white supremacist thinking.

Anybody who says that the Civil War was "unnecessary" or a "tragedy" is saying that ending slavery was not important.  Throughout the first half of the 20th century a popular historiography saw the war as a failure of compromise.  Compromise on whose backs?  That view said that slavery would have wound itself down within twenty or thirty years anyway.  There is no evidence for that belief, but even if there were, it looks only at the tragedy of white war casualties on both sides and completely fails to look at African-American casualties in the concentration camps that white people picturesquely renamed "plantations."  It fails to look at the daily violence of slavery.  It fails to consider Black people as Americans, or even humans.  "Why could that one not have been worked out?" means that Trump thinks there should have been some sort of "deal" with enslavement.

Shortly before his execution, John Brown wrote: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."  By his second inauguration, even President Lincoln apparently understood this, saying:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Andrew Jackson was a man of great violence, as were all those who succeeded in whipping others to clear land and plant and harvest cotton for their enrichment.  In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist calls American slavery a "whipping machine" that yielded inhuman levels of production... literally, because those levels were only finally matched when cotton culture was eventually mechanized.  Today's Washington Post contains a reference to an advertisement that Andrew Jackson placed in the newspaper offering a $50 reward for the apprehension of one of his captives, a mixed-race man, who had escaped.  Jackson added: "- and ten dollars extra, for ever hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred."  Three hundred.  This is the daily violence of Orange Hitler's hero and of the slave power with which he thinks a compromise was desirable.

Jackson's violence -- and the violence of slavery -- wasn't only directed at Black people.  The forced removal west of the Mississippi of the tribes of the southeast was a massive land theft, but the Trail of Tears was also a death march.  Roughly half of the Cherokees that Jackson forced out died on the way.  Half.  And then there was Jackson's violence against other white men.  He was lionized by a certain class for threatening a steamboat pilot with a rifle because it got too close to the steamboat on which Jackson was a pilot.

In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist uses a North Carolina politician named Robert Potter as a paradigm for the violence of white supremacy, a violence of men terrified of being reduced to the status of women or Black people.  Potter castrated two men because he believed they might have had sex with his wife.  This was especially true on the frontier, as Baptist writes:

One North Carolina migrant wrote back home that in his new Alabama community, “no man [is] safe from violence, unless a weapon is conspicuously displayed on his person.” In North Carolina, he continued, “it is considered disreputable to carry a dirk or a pistol. [But] in Alabama, it is considered singularity and imprudence to be without one: in fact, nine persons in ten . . . you will see with the dirk handle projecting from their bosoms.”

And Baptist quotes the language of a former Black captive to clarify the psychology of this violence:

“They’re mighty free with pistols down there,” an escaped slave told an audience in 1842. “If a man don’t resent anything that’s put upon him, they call him ‘Poke-easy.’” The way white men saw it, being poke-easy was for men toiling in the field, and for the women out there, too— people either forced or willing to be the helpless target. Dirks, pistols, and physical assault asserted that one was un-poke-able.

So Trump reveals more about himself than he intends with his hero worship, whether of Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong Un, or Rodrigo Duterte.  His reveling in bomb dropping is of a piece with his boasting about sexual abuse.  And he reveals more than he intends with his "Why the Civil War?" He clearly thinks that compromising on continuing slavery would have been a good idea.

But there is one more question about that compromise and he himself asks it: "Why could that not have been worked out?"  The answer is there in the history books and it is the utter and complete intransigence of the owners of those concentration camps who styled themselves "masters."  They insisted on voting secession and seizing military posts before Lincoln was even inaugurated.  They insisted on a Fugitive Slave Law that turned every police agency in every part of the country into slave patrols and refused due process to accused "runaways."  They insisted on a Dred Scott decision that made slavery the law everywhere and that denied Constitutional rights to any African American person.  They insisted on war.

Trump is an easy target for his lack of knowledge of the basics of history.  But I think we should be looking closely at his views of history as well.