Muddled view of American history

By Juana Summers
Updated 7:42 PM ET, Sat August 19, 2017

... the President has suggested that Andrew Jackson was "really angry" about the Civil War, which began nearly two decades after his death, has spoken of Frederick Douglass as though he were still alive and referred to human trafficking as "a problem that's probably worse than any time of the history of this world," seemingly ignorant of African slave trade.

"He doesn't see any need to learn from anybody else in history or contemporaneously," Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, said of Trump. "There obviously have been people with healthy egos who have been president -- you don't become president unless you have one -- but there's never been anybody who's been as staggeringly ignorant of policy and history" ...

Wehner, the former Bush speechwriter, said that in his experience at the White House, both staff and the presidents themselves would "go back and see what other presidents had said to try to learn them, to try to refine your approach to things."

Trump, he said, "in this respect and so many respects is sui generis; there's never been anybody out there, and he's paying the cost" ...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/19/politics/trump-history-facts-historians/index.html