Also, I may be a bit late to the party on this one, but I'm surprised (given the frequency with which it happens in cases much more specious than this) that Trump's comments about the civil war and Andrew Jackson haven't given rise to myriad and constant fresh accusations of racism.
To be fair, as many have said, never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, and it's most likely that Trump is just ignorant. But suggesting, first, that Jackson would have been able to solve this problem despite being a notorious slave holder, and second, that there was a compromise that could have been reached to avoid the war, leads to the inevitable question of what he thinks an acceptable solution would have looked like.
Would it have involved a compromise that kept the south in the union? Because that would almost certainly have involved some continued form of slavery. Would it have been some version of secession? That would certainly have involved continued slavery in any area that seceded.
By taking the position he did, he's implicitly saying that it wasn't worth it. Better to just allow slavery to persist. That's fairly horrifying.
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