The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
Yet again, Donald Trump has provided a reminder of the irony in his slogan “Make America Great Again” — besides the fact that America is great.
Whenever the ahistoric former president approvingly cites some event in U.S. history, it’s usually a chapter that we learned in civics class was something more infamous than famous, something that stood as a lesson of what not to do.
Detention camps, punishing tariffs, discredited “America first” slogans, appeasing dictators and, in a bizarre what-if, even suggesting compromising on slavery. His former White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John F. Kelly, has now confirmed that Trump, as president, expressed admiration for Hitler.
A recent example of Trump’s warped views is his promise that if elected he’ll employ the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” On Monday in Greenville, N.C., Trump sounded pleased to be citing a 226-year-old law, as if he were a student of history instead of a revisionist poser: “Think of that, 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We’re not going to play games.’”
The law is the only survivor of the Alien and Sedition Acts. I recall being taught that those laws were a big mistake perpetrated by an infant republic, empowering the president to infringe on civil liberties.
These days, candidate Trump doesn’t shy away from talking about peacetime roundups and camps for about 11 million undocumented residents, including those with U.S. citizen children, starting on Day One of a second presidency.
Then there’s his repeated talk of “the enemy from within,” by which Trump explicitly means his Democratic enemies, “radical left lunatics.” To thwart these supposed threats, Trump suggests he’d sic the National Guard or military on them.
In history, the idea of domestic enemies is most closely associated with Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced demagogue of the Cold War era. “Enemies from within” was the title of his speech 70 years ago in Wheeling, W.Va., where he claimed to have the names of “card-carrying” communists in the State Department. With that, McCarthy kicked off years of reputation-destroying, red-baiting lies. His staff sidekick? Future Trump mentor Roy Cohn. Trump learned from one of the worst.
Perhaps nothing, however, says historical ignorance so much as Trump’s recent comment on Fox News that Abraham Lincoln should have cut a deal with the South to prevent the Civil War. “Why wasn’t that settled?” he said on Fox & Friends, prompting a rare pushback from a host, who noted that Southern states had seceded before Lincoln took office.
There had been futile compromises in 1820 and 1850. Southerners started the war, and they did it to preserve slavery. As Lincoln said before his election: “What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right.” Is that what Trump would have condoned? He did, after all, attack opponents of Confederate statues for trying to “defame our heroes.”
Unlike so many of his predecessors, Trump doesn’t read histories and biographies; he’s said so. Having failed to learn from history, he’s poised to repeat its sorriest sagas.
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