The portrait of Andrew Jackson has returned to the wall of the Oval Office, put up in time to greet President Donald Trump as he entered for the first time as the 47th president.

It’s a choice Democrats are poorly positioned to criticize, even though the seventh president owned slaves and ordered the Southeastern Indians west on the Trail of Tears. Inconveniently, Jackson was long a Democratic icon, nominated for his second term in 1832 by the first Democratic National Convention, and there is something to be said for the man who founded what is now the world’s oldest political party.

There are certain resemblances. Jackson’s demeanor, like Trump’s, appalled his predecessors. He was from the Tennessee frontier, killed a man in a duel, and abandoned Congress to become an elected general in the state militia. Angling for a national command, he became a celebrity for slaughtering the British at New Orleans in 1815.

Thomas Jefferson, who, as vice president, had presided as the 30-year-old Rep. Jackson exploded in fury, called him “a dangerous man” and told visitors to Monticello years later that he was, in his biographer Dumas Malone’s words, “a man of violent passions who had shown little regard for laws and institutions.”

As president, Jackson took things personally, ousting all Cabinet members because their wives refused to socialize with his secretary of war’s young second wife, who was accused, as Jackson’s late wife had been, of loose morals. After the Senate in one Congress voted to censure him, he got the next Senate to vote to rescind the rebuke and draw lines across the earlier censure in the Senate journal.

For all that, Jackson was a serious policymaker. He paid off the national debt. In vetoing the re-charter of the national bank, he established the precedent, though said he wasn’t doing so, that bills could be vetoed for policy and not just constitutional reasons. When South Carolina “nullified” a federal tariff, he sent troops to the border until it backed down.”

Jackson’s first election was opposed by his four living predecessors, as Trump’s was by his five. But Jackson was the first and so far only president who determined his party’s presidential nominees for the rest of his life. Trump, after the ructions of his first term, has at least momentarily established similar dominance over the party he adopted and proceeded to make his own.

When House Republicans’ ebullient fractiousness threatened to delay the seating of Congress and tally of the electoral vote, he made sure that only one Republican member, a chronic dissenter whose wife recently died, was allowed to dissent. Former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz, obviously unconfirmable, was allowed to withdraw, unmourned.