When Donald Trump cites history, watch out

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, is now recorded confirming that Trump, as president, expressed admiration for Hitler.

Opinion Columnist

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

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One of the most recent examples of Trump’s warped views is his promise that if elected he’ll employ the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, intended as a wartime measure, “to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil,” as he said in Coachella last week. On Monday in Greenville, N.C., Trump sounded so pleased with himself 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, unduly empowering the president to infringe on civil liberties. That sounds like a good thing to Trump, of course, but the backlash two centuries ago helped Thomas Jefferson defeat President John Adams in 1800.

Presidents Madison, Franklin Roosevelt and Truman invoked the Alien Enemies Act in wartime. Using separate but related powers, Roosevelt ordered the detention of Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals in concentration camps during World War II — a popular move then but such an enduring shame that Congress and President Reagan in 1988 authorized reparations and apologized on behalf of the nation.

Yet 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, which he calls more dangerous than Russia, China or Iran, Trump suggests he’d sic the National Guard or military on them. (“We should take those words seriously,” his former Defense secretary, Mark Esper, told CNN.)

In history the idea of domestic enemies is most closely associated with Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced demagogue of the early Cold War era. “Enemies from within” was the title of his speech 70 years ago in Wheeling, W.V., where he (in)famously waved a paper claiming that he had the names of “card-carrying” communists in the State Department. With that, McCarthy kicked off years of reputation-destroying, red-baiting lies. His oleaginous staff sidekick at Senate hearings? Future Trump mentor Roy Cohn. Trump learned from one of the worst.

Not since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which by the consensus of historians and economists exacerbated the Great Depression, has a presidential aspirant proposed such high across-the-board tariffs on imports as Trump does.

Against all historical evidence, he denies that the result would be retaliatory tariffs by foreign nations, higher costs for Americans and lost jobs. He pooh-poohs warnings from the Wall Street Journal editorial board and cites the 19th century tariffs of President McKinley, who in fact disavowed such protectionism late in his term. No one seeking to lead the nation in an integrated 21st century world should be looking to Industrial Age policies for inspiration.

When Trump frequently boasts that as president he’ll settle Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day (even Russia’s ambassador to the U.N. refutes him), he calls to mind British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” gambit — his appeasement of Hitler by allowing Germany to seize a hunk of Czechoslovakia. (Trump’s “America First” declarations are a throwback to the discredited U.S. isolationist movement of the time.)

All of Trump’s comments suggest he, too, would bend to an expansion-minded dictator, Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He praised Putin as “brilliant” after the 2022 invasion, opposed most U.S. aid to Ukraine and recently blamed Ukraine for starting the war (huh?). His idea of a quick peace? Likely a deal on pal Putin’s terms, allowing Russia to keep captured Ukrainian territory.

Perhaps nothing, however, says historical ignorance so much as Trump’s recent comment on Fox News — not his first such remark — 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, in the service of his ignorant, misinformed prejudices. Make America Great Again? No, keep America great.

@jackiekcalmes