The Only 'American President' Trump Resembles Is Jefferson Davis

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-27-only-american-president-trump-resembles-jefferson-davis/



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].)

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