What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act
“Trump’s policies, including mendacity, xenophobia, and contempt for journalism, echo troubling aspects of American history, such as McCarthyism, reactionary populism, and anti-immigration raids.
Americans took to the streets to defend their neighbors in the nineteenth century, too.
One measure of the numbing effect that the constant heedless and cruel assault on democracy and on simple reason that Trumpism has imposed upon American life is the fact that we no longer flinch at the word “unprecedented.” Now, a full decade since Donald Trump’s arrival on the national scene, we have reached a point where the violation of norms has become a norm in itself. At the same time, however, there has been a tendency to overlook the ways in which various of the President’s policies are consistent with those of some of the darker moments of American history.
Trump’s mendacity and conspiratorial reasoning, along with his contempt for journalism, recall the attitudes of Senator Joseph McCarthy—a connection that some early Trump observers attributed to the fact that the Senator’s chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy hearings, Roy Cohn, became something of a mentor to Trump in the nineteen-seventies. Trump’s incendiary populism mirrors the tradition of reactionary populists from Senator Thomas Watson to Governor George Wallace. The aggressive xenophobia of Trump’s immigration policies shares DNA with the anti-immigration raids launched by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer during the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The point is not simply that so much of what Trump represents is unprecedented as that, where his actions have echoes from the past, they are almost universally troubling.“
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