Mike Huckabee Inadvertently Invokes The ‘Trail Of Tears’ While Advising Trump To Ignore The Travel Ban Block

Former Republican presidential candidate turned Donald Trump surrogate Mike Huckabee is on a roll. He recently jumped into the fray between Trump and rapper Snoop Dogg (albeit largely unnoticed), while his daughter — a White House spokesperson — failed to make sense of the president’s since disproved (and baseless) wiretapping claims. Not to mention the fact that his use of Twitter has increased dramatically in the months since November, like when he tried advising Trump regarding a federal judge’s decision to block the president’s second travel ban in a Hawaiian court.

“Hoping @POTUS tells Hawaii judge what Andrew Jackson told overreaching court,” the supposed historian tweeted Wednesday night while Trump issued his own response in Jackson’s home state of Tennessee. “‘I’ll ignore it and let the court enforce their order.'”

As Talking Points Memo points out, however, Huckabee’s attribution to the populist president is not entirely accurate. To make matters worse, both the apocryphal words Huckabee referenced, and the context in which Jackson’s actual words came about, don’t survive comparison. Why? Because the words Jackson purportedly said — “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” — refer to the 1832 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Worcester v. Georgia. And by ignoring the court’s decision, Jackson went ahead with his Indian Removal Act — which resulted in the infamous “Trail of Tears.”

Of course, what Jackson actually said comes from a letter to John Coffee, a former Tennessee militia general who served with him. “The decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born,” wrote the president, “and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.” Said lack of yield resulted in the forced migration of 15,000 Cherokee people from east of the Mississippi River to Oklahoma. Over 4,000 died along the way.

(Via Talking Points Memo)