Trump notes Andrew Jackson ‘continues to be on the $20 bill’
Harriet Tubman will have to wait a bit longer.
As President Trump boasted of his administration’s accomplishments at a campaign rally Monday in Johnson City, Tenn., he also touted something he hasn’t done: replace Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with a likeness of Tubman, the African-American icon who ran the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape to freedom in the North.
After noting that Jackson’s historical connection with Tennessee, Trump seemed to revel in the fact that the former president was still represented on U.S. currency.
“Andrew Jackson, who continues to be on the $20 bill, you know that,” Trump said. “I’m a big Andrew Jackson fan.”
In 2016, before he left office, then President Barack Obama and his Treasury Secretary Jack Lew floated the idea of replacing Jackson with Tubman, a plan that would have made her the first African-American to be represented on U.S. currency.
As he campaigned for president, Trump dismissed the idea to remove Jackson as “political correctness.”
When he took over for Lew, Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin proceeded to slow walk that idea.
“Ultimately we will be looking at this issue,” Mnuchin said in a 2017 interview with CNBC. “It’s not something I’m focused on at the moment.”
Trump has often spoken glowingly of Jackson, and has a portrait of the seventh president in the Oval Office.
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