A hero history loves to hate

President Trump commemorated the 250th anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s birth by praising the seventh president as a man who pursued all things “with courage, with grit, and with patriotic heart.”

To be sure, this was not in keeping with the fashion of the times. Most academics in this first fifth of the 21st century despise Jackson, and most young Americans — if they know Jackson at all — equate him with the worst dictators of the 20th century. They see in him a brutal slaughterer of Indians, the author of the “Trail of Tears.”