Trump’s Worst Positions Aren’t ‘Un-American.’ They’re Flashbacks To Our Ugly History.
Threats to jail opponents and claims of rigged elections have dangerous precedents in the U.S.
10/19/2016 03:55 pm ET |
Updated 21 minutes ago
Paul Blumenthal Money in Politics Reporter, The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON ― For months,
Donald Trump has whipped his crowds into a frenzy with details about
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state and the ensuing FBI investigation. The crowd would break into chants of “Lock her up!”
But the GOP nominee didn’t go there himself until the second presidential debate, when he pledged to direct his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton, should he win the election. “You’d be in jail,” he told her.
Trump has since made his desire to see the Democratic nominee in shackles a central part of his increasingly unhinged stump speech. Instead of basking in the “lock her up” chants, he’s now leading them.
To many observers, this behavior is un-American and anti-democratic. It certainly violates our modern conception of individual rights and democratic norms.
Many of the critiques have classified Trump’s policies and rhetoric as distinctly foreign ― the stuff of distant dictators. He is reminiscent of a
Latin American strongman, wrote McClatchy’s Franco Ordoñez. Esquire’s Charles Pierce refers to Trump as “
El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago.” Others have said Trump is just like some
African dictators, and The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah, a South African native,
made that comparison in a sketch showing the candidate uttering phrases identical to those of such notable tyrants, past and present, as Uganda’s Idi Amin and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Trump has also been compared, fairly, to
former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was also a wealthy sex maniac with right-wing anti-immigrant tendencies.
But Trump and the policies he has endorsed are thoroughly American. Jailing political opponents, rounding up people based on race, threatening journalists with libel suits, and rejecting the legitimacy of elections ― all have precedent in the darkest parts of our history. Trump has favorably cited some of these past policies in his speeches.
The connections to America’s shameful record aren’t surprising, given that Trump’s political mentors include
Roy Cohn and
Roger Stone. Cohn was the infamous counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his witch hunt to weed out supposed communists in the 1950s. Stone was a hatchet man carrying out President Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricks,” which included
sabotaging his opponents’ campaignsthrough programs of spying, theft, misinformation and infiltration.
Here are a few of the ways Trump’s seeming heresies actually fit into American history.
‘Lock Her Up’
If Trump made good on his promise to throw Clinton in prison, it wouldn’t be the first time a president prosecuted a rival candidate.
In 1918, Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party and five-time presidential contender, was
sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving a speech opposing U.S. entry into World War I. Debs had received more than 900,000 votes, or 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912. He was charged under the Espionage Act, which had been amended to ban “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”
President Woodrow Wilson, who won the 1912 and 1916 races, refused to pardon Debs despite public calls for his release. Wilson’s Justice Department, under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer,
cracked down on socialists like Debs, labor unions and other perceived radical groups as part of a campaign to stifle dissent against the first world war.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs was imprisoned for criticizing the U.S. entry into World War I.
Debs ran for president again in 1920, while still in prison, and topped 900,000 votes again ― more than 3 percent of the vote that year. President Warren Harding pardoned Debs in 1921.
Over a century earlier, the U.S. government under President John Adams had set out to lock up political opponents. The Federalist-controlled Congress
passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, an attempt to curb the growing political power of Thomas Jefferson and the first Republican Party. Jefferson and his allies praised the French Revolution, while Adams and the Federalists saw it as dangerous barbarism.
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The Federalists drummed up support for the Alien and Sedition Acts, which placed strict controls on immigration and allowed the government to jail people for speech deemed anti-government, by casting them as protection from French immigrants fomenting revolution in the United States. They then used the acts to go after their opposition. Rep.
Matthew Lyon, a Republican from Vermont, was jailed for denouncing the government. Newspaper publisher
Benjamin Franklin Bache of Pennsylvania was imprisoned and died of yellow fever before he could be tried for sedition. Anthony Haswell, a Vermont printer, was sentenced to two months behind bars for reprinting Bache’s newspaper. James Thomson Callender, a Scottish writer living in Virginia, was sentenced to nine months for insults directed toward President Adams in his book
The Prospect Before Us.
The laws backfired politically. The Sedition Act expired in 1800, and
Jefferson and the Republicans won election that year. The Federalists never recovered, and the party disbanded in 1816.
Mass Deportation
Trump has pledged to immediately deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, while claiming that he would “round them all up in a very humane way, in a very nice way, and they’re gonna be happy, because they want to be legalized.”
He has pointed to
President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1954 Operation Wetback, which rounded up and deported Mexican laborers, to buttress his own case. Eisenhower was a “good president,” said Trump, because he “moved 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country.”
But that program suffered from
widespread civil rights abuses, including crackdowns on Latino neighborhoods, deportation of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent and, in some cases, the killing of people. Beyond that, the term “wetback” is considered a slur.
The government also forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans during the Great Depression, kicking them out of the country amid fears that they were taking the limited jobs after the 1929 stock market crash. This policy came to be known as “
Mexican repatriation.” In 2012, the California government issued a formal apology for the forced expulsion of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent during that wave of deportations.
Law and Order
“
I am the law-and-order candidate,” Trump has declared. But what exactly does that mean?
The use of law-and-order rhetoric threads through American history from the post-Civil War South to today. It’s most often used to describe efforts to control those who challenge the established power structure ― more specifically, to control African-Americans.
When Jim Crow was the law of the land, “law and order” meant the defense of white supremacy, even if that included extrajudicial mob violence.
Martin Luther King Jr. notes this in his “
Letter From Birmingham City Jail” in 1963: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negroes’ great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ ‘Counciler’ or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice...”
“I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail to do this they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress,” King continued.
Law-and-order rhetoric exploded into presidential politics a few years later with the campaigns of Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. Amid riots, assassinations and student protests over the Vietnam War, the
famed segregationist Wallace said in 1968, “There has to be some law and order in our country.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Alabama Gov. George Wallace campaigned for president in 1968 on a “law and order” platform.
Nixon copied Wallace’s call for law and order with a campaign of racially coded messages around crime and disorder. In his speech accepting the 1968 Republican nomination, Nixon
told delegates, “When the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness …then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.”
Nixon promised to marry “order” with “progress” in that speech. But what came next was a crackdown on radical groups, particularly the Black Panthers, and the so-called
War on Drugs, which raised penalties for drug possession, increased incarceration rates and specifically targeted black communities for enforcement.
Law-and-order politics drew votes and launched public policy through the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. Politicians from both parties pushed for “tough on crime” initiatives that would
swell the U.S. prison population and
reduce the number of African-Americans eligible to vote, thanks to
felon disenfranchisement laws largely adopted during the Jim Crow years.
Crime has overall been
on the decline since 1995, prompting efforts to scale back those policies that put some communities under near-constant police watch. Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric, however, indicates that he wants to continue targeting minority communities for greater surveillance and imprisonment.
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