One way to look at much of the second Trump administration is that it is a recapitulation of some of the worst episodes in the history of the United States.
The president’s crusade against diversity programs — his efforts to purge the federal government, private businesses and elite universities of D.E.I. — is reminiscent of the second Red Scare: the postwar effort to banish and blacklist Americans with left-wing views from positions of authority and influence in and outside government. It’s not that D.E.I. is left wing, but that the president views it as a pernicious and dangerous ideology to be rooted out by every available means, including targeting those thought to represent the drive for greater diversity in our institutions. You could also see the push to punish private citizens who refused to indulge the state’s official narrative of the life of Charlie Kirk as another moment with parallels to the Red Scare.
The president’s mass deportation program — spearheaded by the masked men and women of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — is by his own admission an indirect callback to President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” a militarized campaign of intimidation and harassment aimed at the millions of Mexican immigrants who had entered the United States, many of them legally. Then, as now, federal agents crowded immigrants, legal and illegal, onto buses and planes for quick removal from the United States. Then, as now, all of this is marked by the unmistakable scent of racism.
And the actual immigration raids themselves, such as the one in Chicago where federal agents detained citizens, including children, for questioning, are reminiscent of the Palmer Raids under president Woodrow Wilson during the first Red Scare in 1919 and 1920. The raids, ordered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, saw federal agents sweep through cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, where they made warrantless arrests of thousands of suspected radicals, many of them recent immigrants. Hundreds were detained in makeshift camps with abysmal conditions. At one such location, the historian Beverly Gage observes in her biography of J. Edgar Hoover, who was involved in planning the raids, 600 men were “jammed into barracks planned for three hundred, with no heat and dwindling food.” At another, “eight hundred prisoners had been stuffed into a windowless corridor with only one working bathroom and no beds.”
I mention these antecedents because yet another came to mind while observing the president’s latest actions.
On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, with the backing of the White House, announced that soldiers from the Texas National Guard would be sent to assist federal operations in Chicago and Portland, Ore. Both cities stand as bugbears for the far right in general, and for President Trump in particular. Portland, to Trump, is a shorthand for “antifa,” which to his mind seems to be the primary domestic terrorist threat facing the United States. And in the right-wing imagination, Chicago has long been a byword for crime and violence.
As Trump describes it, both cities are in the grip of anarchy and destruction. Portland is “burning to the ground,” he says, with “insurrectionists all over the place.” Chicago, he asserts, is “like a war zone.”
“You can go to Afghanistan, you can go to a lot of different places, and they probably marvel at how much crime we have,” Trump said. This is a fantasy, easily disproved by walking outside in either city. If anything, beyond the issue of street crime, what chaos and disorder there is in either Portland or Chicago has more to do with the lawless behavior of federal officers with ICE and Customs and Border Protection than it does with any resident on the streets.
On Saturday, a federal district judge blocked the president’s efforts to federalize and the deploy the National Guard to Portland. “This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law,” Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon wrote. Undeterred, the White House has sent the Texas troops to occupy Chicago, under the familiar pretext of violence and mayhem. Trump also floated use of the Insurrection Act to circumvent any opposition from state and local leaders. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up,” the president said. For his part, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois has called this what it is, an “unconstitutional invasion.”
“Their plan all along has been to cause chaos, and then they can use that chaos to consolidate Donald Trump’s power,” he said.
Although there are no doubt clever lawyers skilled enough to spin some logically plausible argument that the president’s actions are above board, both history and the Constitution say otherwise. As the legal scholar Stephen I. Vladeck wrote in a guest essay for this newspaper, “Can presidents unleash the armed forces on their own people based on facts that they contrive? The text of the relevant statutes doesn’t answer that question. But our constitutional ideals, to say nothing of common sense, should — and the answer must be no.”
Here, I will say that this effort to use the military against American citizens — an effort backed, it seems, by almost the entire Republican Party — makes a mockery of the longstanding conservative claim that theirs is a movement of small government and states’ rights. Trump’s push to invade cities using the National Guard is as aggressive a use of federal power as one can imagine. And as we think about antecedents to this administration, this particular episode is structurally similar to the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required the citizens and officials of Northern free states to act as slave catchers against their will and often against the laws of the states in which they lived.
The Lost Cause cliché about the Civil War is that it was fought to settle the question of states’ rights. We know that, for the seceding states, this is false. They were less concerned with states’ rights than their so-called right to preserve and extend slavery. What’s lost in this conception of the war, however, is that states’ rights were a real concern — for the North.
In the two decades preceding the 1860 secession crisis, northern legislatures had lost much of their power to keep the institution of slavery out of their states. First, in 1842, the Supreme Court invalidated a set of Pennsylvania laws that, it said, unconstitutionally interfered with a slave-owner’s right to retrieve a fugitive slave; then, in 1850, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act that all but required the residents of northern states to assist slave catchers. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and raised the specter of slavery’s return to the North, and the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford allowed slave owners to retain slave property in free states. This led many Northerners to fear that the court, backed by slave interests in the national government, would soon force free states to accept the legality of slavery within their borders.
After the war, Southern reactionaries cried “states’ rights.” But before the war, they eagerly used federal power for their own ends, curbing and crushing the rights of those Americans who opposed them. They were happy to wield the heavy hand of the state in defense of their own interests, and more than willing to use both Congress and the courts and the presidency to impose their vision on the public as a whole.
Here again, in 2025, the national government is in the grip of determined reactionaries. And here again, we see that their commitment to small government is merely rhetorical. It is not small government to abuse the National Guard to invade the cities of your political opponents. It is not small government to send roving bands of masked agents across the nation to intimidate and harass the people you’ve deemed to be outside the political community. It is not small government to turn the federal law enforcement apparatus into a machine for the persecution of your political opponents.
The reason this antebellum battle over slavery and the scope of federal power is a useful antecedent to the Trump administration is that like the slave owners and their minions, the MAGA movement and its allies are opposed only to those aspects of government that they can’t wield against their political enemies. They will happily enlarge the scope of federal authority beyond the limits of our Constitution so that they can subject the country to nakedly authoritarian rule.
To recognize this dynamic is to see something important. Consistency is only worthwhile inasmuch as it is useful. Trump and his allies will use whatever political approach is necessary to achieve their goals. As their opponents contemplate a response, they should take this as a lesson.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
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