By President Trump’s account, his desire to annex Greenland merely restores prewar borders, his trade policy returns Gilded Age fiscal policy and prosperity and his efforts to build a towering arch in Washington completes a 150-year-old architectural dream.
President Andrew Jackson’s spoils system was an anti-corruption purge, not unlike Mr. Trump’s own. President William McKinley’s protectionist stance was also downright Trumpian. Oh, and the Unabomber, too, evidently has a link to the 47th president, by his telling: His uncle once taught the notorious terrorist.
Since retaking office, Mr. Trump has spun many historical yarns that stretch the truth, strain credulity or are downright false. American history has become a mirror for his preferred policies and a mine for his favored narratives. The details are not as important as overarching themes, and facts take a back seat to entertainment.
Here’s a fact-check.
What Was Said
“To return power to the people, President Jackson cut 10 percent of the federal work force and fearlessly combated forces of corruption in our nation’s capital.”
— in a presidential statement from March 2025
This is misleading. As the Trump administration sought to remake the federal bureaucracy, Mr. Trump evoked a similar effort by Mr. Jackson more than a century earlier. While Mr. Jackson indeed fired a significant number of civil servants after he took office in 1829, Mr. Jackson then filled those positions and hired even more employees. Whether that shuffling reduced corruption is more ambiguous.
There is no doubt that “Jackson carved his way wholesale through the federal bureaucracy,” Daniel Feller, a historian and biographer of Mr. Jackson, said. But he then replaced all those people, Mr. Feller added, so “he didn’t really cut the federal bureaucracy at all.”
The White House itself cited a number of news and academic sources that said Jackson had “replaced” about 10 percent of the federal work force.
In fact, an even greater number were hired during Mr. Jackson’s two terms, said David Rosenbloom, a scholar who has studied Mr. Jackson’s approach to governance. For example, the best available figures show the number of postal employees actually grew from nearly 11,500 in 1831 to more than 18,000 by 1841.
Mr. Jackson did believe his system would reform the bureaucracy, which he characterized as inefficient and corrupt. Many incumbents at the time were upper-class elites who had held the same position for decades and viewed federal office as their right, historians said. Some were certainly unscrupulous and unprincipled.
Still, Mr. Feller said, “there were certainly as many examples of gross corruption and incompetence among Jackson’s appointees as there were among the people he purged.”
For example, Mr. Jackson removed a Treasury auditor who had embezzled about $3,000. Conversely, a staunch supporter he hired to collect customs went on to embezzle over $1.2 million.
This system that Mr. Jackson put in place, later called the spoils system, enabled presidents to appoint their political loyalists and fire those in the opposition party who might obstruct their policy agendas, Mr. Rosenbloom said. But historians broadly agree it also promoted “incompetence and vast corruption.”
What Was Said
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump’s timeline is garbled, his account of Mr. McKinley’s position on tariffs incomplete and his characterization of the tariffs’ effect on that era’s economic boom vastly overstated, historians said.
Congress raised tariff rates in the 1860s to finance the Civil War, but had largely paid off debts by the 1880s. Contrary to Mr. Trump’s suggestion, Congress did not view the large surpluses that resulted as a positive development, but rather one that could cause fiscal trouble by removing money from circulation.
In the early 1880s, a commission was created to study the issue and recommended reducing tariff rates. Democrats in Congress tried, but failed, to do so.
Mr. McKinley, then a Republican congressman representing Ohio, disagreed and sought to raise rates, not to “make the country rich,” as Mr. Trump said, but to reduce federal surplus by squeezing imports and thus reducing revenue, said Douglas Irwin, a trade historian at Dartmouth College. The dispute was known as the Great Tariff Debate of 1888.
Republicans prevailed and the McKinley Tariff of 1890 raised import duties by nearly 50 percent on average. The law was highly controversial, contributing to 93 House Republicans, including Mr. McKinley, losing their congressional seats that year. The tariff failed to stave off a major economic recession in the 1890s. Mr. McKinley then campaigned on a platform of trade protectionism during the 1896 presidential election and won.
But Robert Merry, a historian and biographer of Mr. McKinley, said that Mr. Trump had distorted Mr. McKinley’s view. While Mr. Trump “seems to think that McKinley’s view was basically, ‘We can’t let them take advantage of us,’” he said, “that was not McKinley’s view. That’s a Trumpism. McKinley wanted to protect industries.”
Moreover, Mr. Merry noted, Mr. McKinley changed his view later on, partly because he was stung from his earlier electoral defeat and because “he understood that something had been changing in the American economy.”
A day before he was assassinated, McKinley spoke at an exposition in Buffalo, endorsing trade reciprocity and announcing the end of isolation.
“The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem,” he said. “Commercial wars are unprofitable. A policy of good will and friendly trade relations will prevent reprisals.”
While it is true that the American economy grew at a rapid clip during the Gilded Age, including under Mr. McKinley, tariffs were not the sole or even a major factor. Mr. Irwin listed the expansion of the banking system, capital accumulation, westward expansion, increased immigration and labor force growth.
This lacks evidence. Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, never attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Moreover, Mr. Trump’s uncle — Dr. John G. Trump, an influential engineer who taught at M.I.T. for decades — died in 1985, years before law enforcement discovered the identity of the Unabomber.
Mr. Kaczynski was admitted to M.I.T. in 1958, according to his high school guidance counselor, but he chose to attend Harvard and studied mathematics. He attended graduate school at the University of Michigan and then taught at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Trump was an M.I.T. faculty member from 1936 to 1980 and a professor emeritus until his death in 1985, according to the university’s museum. (The university told Newsweek in 2024 that it knew of at least 10 people who had served longer than Professor Trump.)
There are no records of Mr. Kaczynski taking a class at M.I.T., a university spokeswoman said. Harvard’s course catalogs during this time also do not list Professor Trump as an instructor.
Between 1978 and 1995, Mr. Kaczynski mailed or hand delivered homemade bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others. The F.B.I. began investigating the cases in 1979, but he was not arrested and publicly identified until 1996, more than a decade after Professor Trump died.
This lacks evidence. For years, Mr. Trump has claimed that Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, told his troops to “never fight uphill, me boys,” but that his message did not get through before the Battle of Gettysburg. But there is no record that Mr. Lee ever said those words or anything close to it. Moreover, there are other examples of Mr. Lee mounting an attack uphill.
Mr. Lee frequently launched offensives against federal forces, said T.J. Stiles, a historian and biographer of Civil War-era figures. “Since armies in that era routinely took up defensive positions on hills, that meant Lee frequently ordered his men to attack uphill — as at the Battle of Malvern Hill, for example.”
Mr. Trump’s repeated suggestion that Mr. Lee’s warnings against fighting on unfavorable terrain failed to reach his subordinates is also wrong. In fact, the opposite is true.
An analysis of Mr. Lee’s loss by the National Defense University noted that James Longstreet, the corps commander in charge of the attack, advised against attacking the Union forces stationed on higher ground and favored withdrawal. Mr. Lee, however, believed the Union line could be breached despite their favorable terrain. After the defeat, Mr. Lee said, “The fault is entirely my own.”
“Because Lee had underestimated the enemy, expected too much of his own forces, dismissed Longstreet’s advice to fight differently and lost the battle at great cost to his army, he was right to shoulder full responsibility,” the analysis concluded.
