Trump thinks Andrew Jackson’s statue is a great monument — but to what?

Amid weeks of reckoning with America’s history of white supremacy, protesters have brought down monuments to the Confederacy and statues of Christopher Columbus. This week, demonstrators tried to topple the most well-known statue of Andrew Jackson, featured on horseback in military attire, in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. President Trump called it an attack on a “great monument” and said of the protesters, “They’re bad people, they don’t love our country, and they’re not taking down our monuments.” He also warned of criminal penalties for those toppling statues.

But Jackson’s legacy is worth examining closely. Known to Creeks as “Sharp Knife” for his viciousness during the 1814 Creek War, Jackson went on to become an advocate of removing eastern Indians to west of the Mississippi. Elected president in 1828, he moved quickly to secure the Indian Removal Act and signed it into law on May 28, 1830. The Jackson monument at Lafayette Square has copies that can be found in Nashville (Jackson’s hometown), New Orleans and Jacksonville, Fla. The statue’s immediate reference is to Jackson’s victory over the British in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. More broadly, however, the statue celebrates the violent dispossession of Native Americans.