Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly compared himself to Former President Andrew Jackson, in some ways imitating the post-election behavior of Jackson. Donald Trump’s rhetoric of mass deportations also reeks of Andrew Jackson’s initiation of the ‘Trail of Tears’, the forced relocation of a hundred thousand Native Americans. Trump’s use of ‘Palestinian’ as a slur is also reminiscent of the antebellum rhetoric of 1960, when antislavery politicians were derogatorily referred to as ‘Black Republicans’ and another racist, derogatory term I cannot repeat here.

This pattern of comparing himself to people he sees as ‘strongmen’, even if those people are deeply controversial, speaks to Trump’s goal of being seen as a ‘savior’ figure for the country. Another piece of proof that he aims to be a ‘strongman’ is his promise to be a dictator for a day. This all adds up to a throughline of a desire to take unprecedented amounts of power to do what he sees as necessary to, supposedly, save the soul of the country.

However, despite claims to the contrary, Trump’s aims are to ‘save’ a country for specific groups of people, at the expense of others. For example, he has tried to paint an image of Christians as a targeted group within the country, a move that has led to his campaign having a deep connection to one particular religious group. Further, his America that is ‘great again’ would be without millions of undocumented immigrants, especially from Central America, who he plans to deport en masse. This shows how he has the desire to be a strongman, but his view of that entails alienating and expelling groups that makeup parts of the core of this country to supposedly improve the lives of the straight white Christian majority that he sees as the true America–something that would impact the lives of those who do not make up the majority group in a very different way than is implied by rhetoric such as ‘Make America Great Again’.