Donald Trump’s new “American Midnight” is upon us

These days, time often feels like a flat circle, where the past, present and future are collapsing into a disorienting blur as President Donald Trump and his supporters escalate the collapse of our civil society, institutions, norms and democracy. Many are framing this moment of political vertigo as a new Red Scare, a 21st-century McCarthyism. But this is only partly true.

In his award-winning book “American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” leading historian Adam Hochschild draws a parallel to an even darker and more perilous time in American history: A century ago, in the years following World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson’s administration and its allies crushed dissent by targeting newspapers, imprisoning political rivals, inciting political vigilantism and engaging in a mass deportation campaign to root out supposed communists and socialists, and other “undesirables,” in America.

As one of our leading historians — and the author of other bestselling books including “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa” — Hochschild has often turned his incisive eye to examining tumultuous times in world history. I recently spoke with him about this era’s frightening echoes in Trumpist America, our embattled democracy, the importance of collective action and maintaining hope — and his warning that Trump is quickly moving to declare martial law in Democratic-led cities to achieve a chilling end.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling, given all the horrible things that have happened so quickly with Trump’s return to power?

I am worried and apprehensive. We all knew in advance that Trump’s second term would be far nastier than the first, but few of us appreciated just how much worse. The Republicans control both the House and Senate. The Democratic leadership is weak at the national level. This makes everything much worse.

But we still have the ability to fight back. One thing that is really different today than a century ago: We have powerful state governments that are fighting Trumpism very forcefully [in] Illinois, California, Oregon. Those governors are speaking out, and states are going their own way in many fields. For example, Trump is madly pushing oil and gas, but my home state of California — the world’s fourth largest economy, were it a separate country — generates two-thirds of its electricity from renewables, and that percentage rises every year.

History is being whitewashed, and there are now literal thoughtcrimes that the Trump administration and its allies are enforcing. What is the role and obligation of the historian in these troubled times?

The ability to see history clearly is precious. And that, too, is something Trump is trying to ban — telling the Smithsonian, for instance, that its institutions emphasize slavery too much. We need to fight to preserve our right to see history clearly, without superpatriotic blinders. To see the good, the bad, the previous Trump-like demagogues, here and abroad, and to take inspiration from fights for justice that have been successfully fought.

Nothing is more important at this point than looking closely at exactly how, in the past, major countries moved from democracy to dictatorship — whether, for example, [Adolf] Hitler taking power in Germany in 1933, or [Vladimir] Putin doing so in Russia in the early 2000s. We need to familiarize ourselves with every phase of that process so we can recognize it when it happens here. An early signal that it is indeed happening here is Trump’s eagerness to get troops on the streets of cities where he is unpopular. Dictatorship always has the threat of armed force behind it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about your prescient book “American Midnight,” and the crackdown on civil rights and freedoms in the post-World War I years. The parallels to the Trump administration’s assault on democracy, free speech and the rule of law are uncanny.

I certainly agree that there are many eerie parallels between the assault on democracy in this country in 1917-1921 and the similar assault Trump is mounting today. I think that’s a reason why “American Midnight” has found a good number of readers.

I began it during the first Trump administration because I saw so many parallels between what he wanted to do and what the second-term Woodrow Wilson actually did do: Censor the critical media, stir vigilante movements to action and throw political enemies in jail. It is strange how different those two presidents are in style and personality. Wilson would have looked down his nose at Trump as a crude, uneducated lout. But the two men are also very similar in their desire to ruthlessly silence their enemies.

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One difference is that in 1917, the Russian Revolution happened, and the ruling elites in both Europe and the United States feared that its spirit would spread. Today, no matter how much Trump fumes against “radical Left Marxists,” the Democrats he attacks are neither radical nor Marxist, and are pretty mild by historical standards. The rhetoric is still there, although I think it has less power than it did when many in the United States really did fear revolution. But reality has never been a constraint when it comes to Trump’s rhetoric.

As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

I think the biggest rhyme to watch out for is the way Trump spews venom at his enemies, calling them vermin [and] enemies of the people. This, in turn, legitimates attacks on them by his followers, which have sometimes turned violent, and could well do so again.

Why is McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 1950s the go-to reference point — and warning — for so many political observers? The post-World War I crackdown, which was in many ways much worse, is generally ignored.

No country likes to remember embarrassing periods of its history. McCarthyism is remembered so well because it was finally extinguished by the mainstream: Congress censured McCarthy, and Eisenhower criticized him. So, its end is easy to celebrate as a triumph of reason and of middle-of-the-road politics. But no such thing really happened to end the post-[World War] I crackdown, and nothing brought back to life its principal victims: The Socialist Party and the [Industrial Workers of the World], both of which were in effect crushed for good.

What are some lessons from your book “American Midnight” about resistance, and perhaps even triumphing, in the fight for real democracy?

Let’s focus on the heroes. Even people who are persecuted can inspire others. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to jail in 1918 for speaking out against the First World War. But in 1920, still in prison, he received nearly a million votes as the Socialist candidate for president. Emma Goldman was expelled from the country in 1919 and spent her last 20 years in exile from a United States she loved. But her example still inspires many radicals and feminists today. Louis F. Post, a high-ranking federal bureaucrat — [who was] very much a fixture of what Trump would call the Deep State — saved thousands of people from being deported from the United States.

One of the notable villains in the period I chronicled in “American Midnight” was Wilson’s attorney general in his second term, A. Mitchell Palmer. Ambitious to run for president in 1920, Palmer promised wave after wave of deportations — does that sound familiar? — and staged raids to arrest thousands of people to be deported. Post largely and brilliantly foiled him, using a variety of legal maneuvers, and then Palmer turned to another scare tactic: He predicted a nationwide Communist uprising on May Day [in] 1920. Scaring people this way is a common maneuver of ambitious demagogues. His predictions were headline news, and millions of people believed him. May 1 came, and absolutely nothing happened. It took the wind out of the sails of his presidential campaign.

How did those targeted by Wilson and other authorities endure? What lessons do such people have for us today?

I think people endure best when they see they are not alone. That’s why taking part in marches and demonstrations matters — you see how many people out there agree with you. We are indeed not alone. Trump has a majority of people disapproving of him in the opinion polls right now. Let’s not forget that!

There are all kinds of examples in history when what seemed impossible happened. In the 1960s or 1970s, if you told anybody in South Africa that that country would have a Black president, they would have laughed. In the same decades, if you’d told anyone in the United States we’d someday have a Black president, they would have laughed. In the 1780s, virtually every continent on earth had some form of slavery, often widespread and always taken for granted. By a century later, it was outlawed, at least formally, almost everywhere. Take heart from times when the impossible happened!

Your book is titled “American Midnight.” What time of the day is it now in America?

It was a period dark as midnight back then, and we’re in another midnight right now. But we have much more overt resistance to it than was the case in 1918 or 1919.

A century ago, we did not have millions of people in the streets like we had in the No Kings demonstrations, and we will have again, I hope. We did not have federal district and appeals courts that were willing to repeatedly rule against the administration, as today’s lower and middle-level federal courts have done. We did not have outspoken state governors willing to call the president a would-be dictator. Instead, in 1917-1921, we had totally craven state governments who rushed to pass their own versions of the federal law that was the cornerstone of the repression, the Espionage Act. These differences give me some hope for today.

What do you think comes next with Trump and his MAGA forces’ attacks on democracy? What do you want to prepare the American people for?

The biggest dangers now [are] Trump declaring martial law in Democratic-ruled cities, and Trump seizing control of election machinery nationally — which he is trying to do.

There’s a strong connection between these two things, and [Democratic] Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently summed it up shrewdly: Trump “wants to militarize major cities across the United States, especially blue cities in blue states, because he wants us to get used to the idea of military on the streets” before next year’s elections. Pritzker said, “I believe that he’s going to post people outside of ballot boxes and polling places. And if he needs to in order to control those elections, he’ll assume control of the ballot boxes.”