Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, and those ubiquitous Gold advertisements on Fox News
Andrew Jackson was most famous for his war on the Bank of the US, the “swamp” of the 1830s. One cultural manifestation of that war is that it became “cool” for Jackson supporters to eschew paper money and instead use actual gold and silver in their daily exchanges. Paper was aristocratic money, effeminate money not suited for the use of manly Jackson men. When America was great, according to the Jacksonians, we used real, hard, “constitutional” money like gold coins…none of this floppy paper stuff. Of course, this is an inaccurate depiction of the “good old days,” but who cares. This rhetoric tapped into the real economic anxieties of Jackson men and gave them an easy salve for it — gold!
Here’s a wonderful depiction of how gold and paper money became politicized in the 1830s. It comes from Michel Chevalier, a Frenchman who spent 1834 in the US: “Gold is called Jackson money; the United States mint has been actively employed in striking gold coins, half-eagles and quarter-eagles. The principal journals of the Jackson party pay the daily wages of their journeymen printers in gold; the warm friends of the Administration affect to carry gold pieces in their pockets, and as paper only is generally used here in business transactions, even of the most trifling amount, you may be certain that a man who is seen with gold in his hands, is a Jackson-man. The President lately made a visit to his seat in Tennessee, and paid his expenses all along the road in gold, and the Globe, his official organ, took care to inform the public of it. At a dinner, given in honour of him, by the citizens of Nashville, he proposed this toast: ‘Gold and silver, the only currency recognised by the constitution!’”
Obviously there are many ways in which Jackson and Trump differ from each other in their politics and their personas (for one, Jackson was a veteran with zero bone spur deferments). Jackson was, arguably, more of a genuine economic populist than Trump has shown himself to be.
But what they share is an uncanny ability to transmute the economic anxieties of their respective historical moments into a humorless and hyper-masculine language of nostalgic authenticity (restoring the “Old Republic” was Jackson’s “MAGA”). The mythology of “stable, timeless gold” is what ties Trump-world and Jackson together. Both Jackson and Trump were disrupters, entrepreneurial wild men who bucked all hard restraints (such as rule of law) to their will to power and success. They benefitted from that world of fluidity that they, as wealthy white men, could command and dominate.
For those other white men who ended up on the short end of that fluid world, what Trump/Jackson offered was solidity, toughness, gold. That substitute was materially hollow, but rhetorically powerful. And that, IMHO, is one way in which we might link Trump to Jackson. He’s in the long tradition of selling a gendered and racialized shadow of populism as a substitute for the substance of economic justice.