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President Trump admires Andrew Jackson’s legacy. Five days after his inauguration in 2017, Trump, with the blessing of Steve Bannon, hung Jackson’s portrait in the Oval Office in the White House. He often did photo-ops with that Jackson’s portrait in the background.

Andrew Jackson was an avowed racist who owned roughly 160 slaves at the time of his death in 1845.

The famed “Indian Fighter” spent most of his adult life killing as many Native Americans as he could while fighting the abolition of slavery in the process.

But Old Hickory, as he loved to be called, could not win a battle on his own. He had to have the help of other Native Americans to defeat the Creeks in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend during the War of 1812 and he needed the support of the infamous pirate Jean Lafitte in order to prevail against the British in the Battle of New Orleans during that same war.

Jackson was elected president through an Electoral College vote in 1828. The following year white people discovered gold on Cherokee land in northern Georgia. That discovery led to 3,000 of those Jackson-loving white folks to invade the land destroying Cherokee property.

Jackson knew how to appease his white constituency. He spearheaded the removal of the “Five Civilized Tribes”—Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminoles and Choctaws—of Native Americans on the East Coast——to the west of the Mississippi. He muscled Congress into enacting the Indian Removal Act of 1830 allowing for the voluntary relocation of these Native Americans.

That Act was ultimately abused by the federal government to forcefully remove by any means necessary the five tribes to the Indian Territory (what is now Oklahoma). Four of the tribes basically acquiesced to the removals’

The Cherokee tribe did not.

To Jackson’s pleasure, the U.S. Army in 1838 rounded up 16,000-plus Cherokee, and, without allowing them time to gather their personal belongings, forced them to march some 2200 miles across nine states in the winter, many of whom were barely clothed and shoeless. Upwards of 4000 Cherokee died during what is now known as the “Trail of Tears.”

It was, and remains, probably the worst travesty inflicted upon Native Americans by the U.S. government in this nation’s history.

Andrew Jackson, more than any other person, was the author of that travesty—and he had absolutely no remorse for the brutal toll in human suffering and loss of life he caused.

The end result of Jackson’s actions is that the government got the land and the white folks in Georgia got the gold—not to mention all the wealth and property the Cherokee were forced to leave behind. Some white Georgians even dug up the graves of Cherokee in a greedy plunder for jewelry or any other valuables buried with the dead.

Those Georgians were Jacksonians.

Finally, some 200 years after the travesty former President Barak Obama, the nation’s first African American president, signed a measure of formal apology to the Cherokee people.

Ironically, had President Jackson gotten his way, African Americans would never have escaped the bonds of slavery, much less ascending to the presidency.

Trump admiringly called the author of the Trail of Tears “an amazing figure in American history – very unique in so many ways.”

When shown Old Hickory’s portrait, President Biden ordered it removed from the White House and replaced with Benjamin Franklin.

Former President Trump admires the racist Jackson who believed in an authoritarian form of government rule while President Biden admires the enlightened Franklin who believed in a democratic form of government.

Does that say anything about our upcoming presidential election?