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After Obama Took Andrew Jackson Off $20, Trump Honors the 7th President's Image

Donald Trump
Donald Trump / Getty Images
March 14, 2017

The Obama administration announced that Andrew Jackson will be removed from the $20 bill, but it appears the seventh president might get a new image boost by President Donald Trump.

While Andrew Jackson might not be on the $20 bill anymore, he does have an admirer as a late successor. On Trump's fifth day in office, he hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office, according to CNN. And on Wednesday, Trump will travel to Nashville, Tennessee, where he will visit the Hermitage, Jackson's home, and lay a wreath at the former president's tomb.

Trump has called Jackson a "an amazing figure in American history — very unique so many ways."

Jackson was the first president to be elected on a populist message. Similar to Trump, Jackson asserted the system was rigged against him. Jackson won the popular vote in 1824 but none of the four candidates won the electoral college. This resulted in the vote going to the House of Representatives where they chose John Quincy Adams to be president.

 

Steve Bannon, White House Chief Strategist, has compared the two presidents of being similar in terms of their populist message.

"Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement," Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter.

Obama's Treasury Secretary Jack Lew made the announcement that Andrew Jackson would be replaced by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill by the year 2030. Secretary Lew also announced that women and civil rights leaders would appear on the back of the $5 and $10 bill.

When the Obama administration announced that Jackson would be taken off the $20 bill, Trump called the decision "pure political correctness," although he also called Tubman "fantastic."