Historian Jon Meacham: Trump now with Andrew Johnson as 'most racist president in American history'

Presidential historian Jon Meacham said Monday that President Trump's latest attacks against a group of minority congresswomen placed him alongside former President Andrew Johnson as the "most racist president in American history."

"What the president’s done here is yet again, because I think he did it after Charlottesville, and I think he did it frankly when he was pushing the birther lie about President Obama, is he has joined Andrew Johnson as the most racist president in American history," Meacham, who has written biographies on past presidents Thomas Jefferson and George H.W. Bush, said on MSNBC's "Hardball."

Meacham described the 17th president's history with racism, noting that Johnson once said in a state message that "African Americans were incapable of self government and relapsed into barbarism if they weren’t closely supervised."

The historian drew the parallels between Trump and Johnson one day after Trump targeted four freshman House lawmakers, saying that they should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came" before speaking out about how the United States government should be run.