
Evan Vucci/AP Photo
I’ll start with the caveat that this comparison is somewhat unfair to both Jefferson Davis and Donald Trump. In defense of Davis, even though he authorized the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the war that then ensued, he didn’t revel, as Trump does, in the infliction of casualties on the enemy. His first question to his generals wasn’t “How many Yankees did you kill?” Of course, his support for slavery, for which reason he directed the South to wage war, was support for the torture, rape, family separation, constant degradation, and occasional murder of Blacks, in which many thousands of Southern white males indeed reveled, as it provided them with sex with enslaved women and feelings of superiority they couldn’t otherwise claim.
And in fairness to Trump, he never, to my knowledge, has endorsed slavery as such, though he has certainly enjoyed some of slavery’s defining practices, such as (as a court found) nonconsensual sex, and revived large-scale family separation, in this case, at the border. The racist assumptions that provided the entire foundation of the Confederacy are assumptions to which he’s given voice. And above all, the degradation that was at the center of slavery is also at the center of Trump’s mindset and policies—not, in this case, centered on race, but on everyone who fails to show him sufficient fealty.
Hence, civil war, fought, in this instance, with a unitary executive’s state power that relegates Congress and the courts to the role of handmaidens, daring them daily to raise so much as a peep.
The figures Trump has nominated to staff his government only make sense if we understand that waging civil war is the paramount objective of his reign. Some—Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—seem selected as much to enrage his enemies (and compel his fellow Republicans to bow to his will despite their better judgment) as to implement his policies. But most of them have also been selected because they share his belief that the primary enemy the nation faces is all the Americans who disagree with him because they believe in different cultural norms or rely on empirical modes of thinking. The 19 nominees he’s plucked from Fox News were thus qualified by the incessant falsification, magnification, and vilification of liberal threats that they spewed forth, and that are the very purpose of Fox News.
Hegseth as the secretary of defense, weekend Fox News host credibly accused of sexual assault and with a reported drinking problem, only makes the slightest degree of sense if the purpose of his job is to wage war on the defense establishment and the half of the nation that Trump wants to attack and degrade. Ignoring constitutional prohibitions, Trump is going beyond deploying troops on the border with threats to deploy the Army in blue states and cities that don’t join in the roundup of immigrants and people who look like immigrants and the citizen children of immigrants. Hegseth has been appointed because he’s all for that. (If Trump is actually serious about an armed takeover of Greenland, which, the Financial Times has reported, was the substance of his recent phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, he’s likely counting on a drunken Hegseth responding, “Wha -err” [Whatever].)
The figures Trump has nominated to staff his government only make sense if we understand that waging civil war is the paramount objective of his reign.
Likewise, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, conspiracy theorist and QAnon apostle Kash Patel, again only makes sense if the primary purpose of the FBI is to investigate and arrest Trump’s domestic critics. His twofold mission is essentially the same as Hegseth’s: eliminating any opposition within the agency he heads to waging civil war, and then waging that civil war. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, may not be quite as consumed by the need to degrade and persecute MAGA’s critics as Trump’s first choice for that post (Matt Gaetz) would have been, but that would be a high bar for almost anyone to clear. For Trump’s purposes, she’ll do just fine.
By every measure, Trump’s most important adviser and policy formulator, Stephen Miller, is more consumed by these hatreds than even Matt Gaetz was. Miller (now Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy) is the one member of Trump’s entourage we can be sure would be baying for liberals’ and moderates’ heads even if he’d never met Trump, or if Trump and MAGA had never arisen. The architect of Trump’s first-term short-lived ban on immigrants from Muslim countries and its separation of small children from their parents at the border, Miller is now also the source of Trump’s threats to more than 250 state and local public officials that they’ll face arrest and prosecution if they don’t abet Trump’s every effort to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Well before Trump entered politics, Miller worked for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, almost certainly because Sessions was the most xenophobic member of the Senate. He accompanied Sessions to the Justice Department when Trump appointed him attorney general, but when Sessions failed to do everything Trump asked of him, Miller moved to the White House with his fears and loathings intact.
Raised in liberal Santa Monica, Miller’s bile has never been confined to immigrants; it demonstrably encompasses the better part of Enlightenment values and those who espouse them. He is to Trump, as I wrote last year, much as Himmler was to you-know-who: no mere henchman or consigliere, but someone whose hatreds burn as fiercely as Trump’s, and with the ability to translate them into policy and make sure those policies are enforced. Should Trump opt to condition aid to California on its renouncing its defense of immigrants and its advocacy for climate mitigation, that would outrage the very same north Santa Monica neighborhood whose liberalism surrounded Miller as a child, and at which he surely and savagely wishes to strike back.
Once we accept that Trump’s primary purpose in returning to power is to wage his civil war, his pardon of the January 6th mob, most particularly those who violently attacked the police and sought to do the same to members of Congress and Trump’s vice president, makes perfect sense. And if their attack marked Trump’s Gettysburg—the high-water mark of Trumpism before it was defeated—the purpose of his second term is to reverse Appomattox, to defeat the current-day equivalent of the North, the Union, which, as in Lincoln’s time, seeks to preserve the constitutional order and that belief in humans having been created equal, which Donald Trump has never fallen for in his life.
It’s worth noting that just days before Trump issued his January 6th pardons, both his incoming vice president, JD Vance, and AG nominee Bondi assured listeners that Trump would surely not pardon the thugs who’d been convicted of attacking the police. That only shows that even those Trump chose to do his bidding failed to understand, or had denied to themselves, that the primary purpose of his presidency was to wage civil war, and that having the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers at the ready was a necessary prerequisite for that.
Well, the folks Trump is putting into the positions that can really facilitate his waging civil war (Hegseth and Patel) and come up with the plans to do that (Miller) do understand that.
We need to understand that, too, and how best we can counter it.