Will Donald Trump Spark Another Civil War?
Don't get too hot and bothered over right-wing threats of violence. We've been down this road before.
Last year, the Department of Homeland Security warned, “In the coming months, factors that could mobilize individuals to commit violence include their perceptions of the 2024 general election cycle and legislative or judicial decisions pertaining to sociopolitical issues. Likely targets of potential violence include U.S. critical infrastructure, faith-based institutions, individuals or events associated with the LGBTQIA+ community, schools, racial and ethnic minorities, and government facilities and personnel, including law enforcement.” In its threat assessment for 2024, DHS views the domestic violent extremist threat as “largely unchanged.” However, the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict raises the danger to “a whole other level,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee late last year.
And Donald Trump adds fuel to the fire with his increasingly violent rhetoric, warning there will be “bedlam in the country” as a result of legal prosecutions against him, and one of his lawyers asserting that a president could order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate political rivals. Earlier, Trump suggested that former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley deserved to be executed.
We have good reason to worry about politically-driven violence, particularly from the radical right. Some pundits wonder if the nation can survive should militant groups and individuals engage in widespread terrorist acts against the government and other entities. Many experts compare today’s fraught political polarization to that of the 1850s, leading up to the Civil War.
Author Bryan Burroughs reminds us of what the country went through in the 1970s, when radical leftist groups carried out terrorist acts:
In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. . . News accounts rarely carried any expression or indication of public outrage.
The epidemic of bombings eased as the decade wore on, though this wasn’t readily apparent in San Francisco, where explosions remained so prevalent that, after an especially nasty series of attacks in 1976, an FBI spokesman termed the city “the Belfast of North America.”
I was a college student in Washington at the time. I went to my bank on F Street one day to cash a check. Roped off in yellow ribbon, it was a crime scene. The Weather Underground had bombed it. DC was epicenter of leftist demonstrations, sometimes violent. I recall citizens, myself included, living in fear of being caught up in a bomb attack.
From the late 19th century till the 1920s, the U.S. and Europe underwent numerous deadly attacks by anarchists. An anarchist assassinated President McKinley in 1901. In 1910, anarchists blew up the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21. In 1914, anarchists set off bombs in New York City. In 1916, ten persons were killed and 40 injured by a suitcase bomb in San Francisco. Nine policemen and a bystander were killed in Milwaukee in 1917 by a time bomb left at a Catholic church. In 1919, authorities uncovered an anarchist plot to mail 36 letter bombs to prominent Americans, including J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.
Also in that year, bombs went off in Paterson, NJ, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. The explosion in the capital damaged the homes of Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin Roosevelt and Attorney General Palmer, who, in response, launched the infamous “Palmer Raids” during the first “Red Scare” in the aftermath of World War I. Thousands were arrested and hundreds deported.
In 1920, a horse cart loaded with 100 pounds of dynamite was set off by remote control on Wall St., killing 38 and maiming hundreds more. It was the worst terrorist bombing in the United States until the Oklahoma City attack in 1995 and the worst in New York until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
Those disruptive times are largely forgotten today. But it’s worth recalling that we’ve been through far worse than what we’ve seen in recent years in terms of political terrorism. And if we do descend into rampant violence launched by domestic terrorists, our law enforcement and justice system should be able, as before, to cope with it.
The joker in the deck, of course, is Trump. As the legal walls close in on him, he will increasingly lash out in desperation, almost certainly egging on his cult followers to take extreme measures as he did in January 2021. And should he return to the Oval Office, his promises to wage acts of retribution against his many enemies and to act like a dictator would certainly spark counteraction among citizens, leading to widespread civil strife à la Weimar Germany, as I warned six years ago (“Weimar America: Could Germany’s Past Be America’s Future?”) The hope among most of us, of course, is that Trump will be convicted and sentenced and again lose election, after which his orange-tinted, superannuated, deranged self will soon fade from the public consciousness as responsible leaders get around to enacting reforms that rectify the conditions that led to his rise.
The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.