Civil War

Trump tells NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 30, 2025

On the Fox News Channel this morning, Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said: “President Trump has a long run vision of a golden age of America and we’re working really, really hard to get it out there in time. But I can’t give you any forward-looking guidance on what’s gonna happen this week. The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he’s gonna make the right choice, I’m sure.”

The National Economic Council is the primary group the president uses to develop domestic and international economic policy, so the fact that Hassett appears to have no idea what’s coming is concerning. Trump has declared April 2 “Liberation Day” because he will announce big new tariffs, posting on his social media site on March 21: “For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!”

Other Trump regime officials appear similarly uninformed about Trump’s plans. Fox News Channel personality Shannon Bream asked Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, what to say to consumers who worry that tariffs are going to raise prices, he answered: “Trust in Trump.” He then claimed that “tariffs are tax cuts,” which makes sense only if he means that tariffs, which raise prices on consumers, might provide enough revenue for the government to enable Republicans to justify tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations.

Trump campaigned on the promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One,” but his tariffs have already helped to push inflation upward. Josh Dawsey and Ryan Felton of the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Trump warned the chief executive officers of “some of the country’s top auto manufacturers not to raise prices because of the 25% tariffs he has just put on cars and car parts, telling them that the tariffs are good for them.

On Saturday, Trump denied he had made such a request and told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American cars.”

“I couldn’t care less,” he repeated. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are going to buy American-made cars. We have plenty.” A White House aide told NBC News that the president was referring to foreign car prices.

And then there is Friday’s story that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been taking not only his brother but also his wife along with him to “meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.” Katherine Long, Max Colchester, Daniel Michaels, and Lindsay Wise of the Wall Street Journal note that her inclusion in such meetings is unusual. Jennifer Hegseth also accompanied Hegseth to his private meetings with senators during the process of his Senate confirmation, “making it awkward to ask questions about allegations related to infidelity and sexual misconduct.”

Both Trump and Hegseth have made it their goal to purge the United States of what they call “Marxism” and what Hegseth calls “woke sh*t”: that is, the racial, gender, and religious diversity that Americans have embraced since World War II. That means taking the government the country has built over the past 80 years down to the ground and rebuilding it as they imagine it was before, with men like them in charge.

The Trump regime is the result of at least 45 years of Republican rhetoric that undermined the idea of a government that worked for the good of everyone by claiming that such a government was “socialism” or “Marxism.” That argument had nothing to do with actual Marxism, which called for the people to take over farms and factories, and everything to do with America’s peculiar history.

During the Civil War of the 1860s, the Republicans in Congress both ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for crime and invented the nation’s first system of national taxation, including the income tax. After the war, racist former Confederates in the South refused to accept the idea that Black Americans were equal to their white neighbors and tried to force formerly enslaved people into subservience. To stop that from happening, Americans in 1868 added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, putting the weight of the federal government behind equal rights. In 1870, Americans added to the Constitution the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing the right of Black men to vote. Also in 1870, Congress established the Department of Justice to prosecute those in the South who continued to persecute their Black neighbors on grounds of race.

In response, former Confederates in 1871 began to maintain—falsely—that they had never objected to Black rights on racial grounds. What they opposed, they said, was that poor Black men, impoverished because of their time in slavery, had the right to vote. Those men would, they said, vote for services like roads and schools and hospitals, and such services could be paid for only through tax levies on propertied Americans who overwhelmingly were white men. Thus, permitting Black men to vote meant “socialism” that would destroy the United States. To restore true American values, former Confederates and their northern counterparts insisted, Black Americans must be shut out of a voice in government.

That rhetoric resurfaced after World War II. In that era, the vast majority of Americans embraced a government that worked for everyone by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, promoting infrastructure, and protecting civil rights. But those Republicans eager to avoid regulation and taxation reached back to Reconstruction to insist that a government that worked in the interest of all Americans was redistributing wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women. Restoring true American values, they said, meant making sure that “Marxists” and minorities could not influence politics, especially after the 1965 Voting Rights Act restored voting rights to Black Americans and people of color.

That rhetoric that tied racism and taxes elected Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980, and it has since metastasized until the top seven donors to the 2024 political cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

Trump’s government is also firing women, Black and Brown Americans, and gender minorities from public positions and working to erase them from our history. MAGA Republicans have fired up their base against immigrants they claim are “invading” the United States, an exaggerated vision in which White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, for example, claims that “[w]e were invaded and occupied. Entire neighborhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered. [sic]”

That wildly exaggerated vision has enabled Republicans to justify throwing overboard the due process on which American rights are based. On Friday, Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) told booing constituents: “You violated the rules, you are not entitled to due process.” In fact, in the United States, the due process of law is what establishes whether someone has violated the “rules,” otherwise known as the law.

Just how profoundly the administration is violating civil rights came through today when news broke of an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The guide lays out a point system by which officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if an immigrant is eligible for rendition to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. The guide tags people as members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang if they reach 8 points on a point system in which officers determine what seems to them a “gang tattoo” or a gang sign, or interact with those ICE says are gang members.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that nearly all of the criteria on the list are subjective, which helps to explain why so many people who are apparently unaffiliated with TdA were swept up in the rendition. “With this checklist,” Reichlin-Melnick writes, “ICE can declare any Venezuelan an ‘Alien Enemy’ without ANY concrete evidence—based solely on an ICE officer’s interpretation of tattoos and hand signs which may be completely innocent or the bad luck of having a roommate ICE thinks is TDA.”

The MAGA Republicans’ worldview is the same as that of the Confederates who preceded them: some people are better than others and have the right to rule. It is no coincidence that Trump recently called for the restoration of Confederate statues. But if that worldview is correct, then getting rid of President Joe Biden’s inclusive economy and hiring practices and putting white men in charge of everything should mean exactly what Trump is promising: a golden age of America.

Instead, the strong economy the Biden administration created is tumbling, and Trump administration officials seem to have no plan to stop it except to “Trust in Trump.” The officers in charge of keeping the nation safe have instead broken the law in an epic fail demonstrating that they have no foreign policy plan except military strikes highlighted with emojis. They appear to disdain national security procedures.

And the Signal scandal appears to have been just the tip of the iceberg. Tonight, Alexander Ward, Josh Dawsey, and Meridith McGraw of the Wall Street Journal reported that two U.S. officials told them that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz “has created and hosted multiple other sensitive national-security conversations on Signal with cabinet members.”

When the former Confederates called for cutting Black men out of the vote in the 1870s by insisting their votes would usher in socialism, Americans didn’t know whether a government elected by a wider range of Americans than in the past would thrive. In 2025 we have experienced not only 80 years of a government that created a strong economy and a stable world as it worked for all Americans. We have also experienced the four years recently past, in which the Biden administration demonstrated that such a government worked. It left us with a booming economy and strong national security that the Trump regime is now mangling.

Nonetheless, Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”

HCR: “Saving America” – just as white supremacists “saved” the Jim Crow South

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

May 14, 2021

This morning, as expected, the House Republicans elected Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Trump’s choice for conference chair, to replace Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY). This means that the four top House Republican leaders—Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), Stefanik, and Policy Committee Chair Gary Palmer (R-AL)—all voted to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. 

Stefanik thanked “President Trump for his support,” saying “he is a critical part of our Republican team.” She went on to say that “House Republicans are united in our fight to save our country from the radical Socialist Democrat agenda of President Biden and Nancy Pelosi.”

Today’s vote confirmed that the leaders of the current Republican Party are willing to abandon democracy in order to save the country from what they call “socialism.”

But what Republicans mean when they say “socialism” is not the political system most countries recognize when they use that word: one in which the people, through their government, own the means of production. What Republicans mean comes from America’s peculiar history after the Civil War, when new national taxation coincided with the expansion of voting to include Black men.

In the years just after the firing stopped, white southerners who hated the idea that Black men could use the vote to protect themselves terrorized their Black neighbors. Pretending to be the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers, they dressed in white robes with hoods to cover their faces and warned formerly enslaved people not to show up at the polls. But in 1870, Congress created the Department of Justice, and President U.S. Grant’s attorney general set out to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. 

In 1871, southern leaders changed their tactics. The same men who had vowed that Black people would never be equal to whites began to say that their objection to Black voting was not based on race. No, they said, their objection was that Black people were poor and uneducated and would elect lawmakers who promised to give them things—hospitals, and roads, and schools—that could be paid for only through tax levies on people with property: white men. In this formulation, voting was not a means to ensuring equality; it was a redistribution of wealth from hardworking white men to African Americans who wanted a handout. Black voting meant “socialism,” and it would destroy America.

With this argument, northerners who had fought alongside Black colleagues and insisted they must be equal before the law on racial grounds were willing to see Black men kept from the polls. Black voting, which northerners had recognized as key to African Americans being able to protect their interests—and, for that matter, to defend the national government from the former Confederates who still wanted to destroy it—slowed. And then it stopped. 

The South became a one-party state ruled by a small elite class, defined by white supremacy, and mired in poverty. For its part, the North also turned on workers, undermining the labor movement and focusing on protecting the new industrial factories whose owners claimed they were the ones driving the economy. 

In the 1930s, the Great Depression changed this equation. When the bottom fell out of the economy, Democrats under Franklin Delano Roosevelt transformed the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure. As early as 1937, Republican businessmen and southern Democrats began to talk of coming together to stop what they considered socialism. But most Americans liked this New Deal, and its opponents had little hope of attracting enough voters to stop its expansion.

That equation changed after World War II, when Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower began to use the government to advance racial equality. Truman’s 1948 desegregation of the military prompted southern Democrats to form their own short-lived segregationist party. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional enabled opponents of the new government system to tie racism to their cause. They warned that the expanded government meant the expensive protection of Black rights, which cost tax dollars. They argued it was simply a redistribution of wealth, just as their counterparts had done in the Reconstruction South.

With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that argument increasingly fed the idea that Black and Brown people were lazy and wanted to receive government handouts rather than work. Businessmen and social traditionalists eager to get rid of the popular New Deal government told voters that government programs to help ordinary Americans were “socialism,” redistributing money from hardworking white people to lazy people of color. They talked of “makers” and “takers.”

To purge the nation of socialism, then, and return it to the pre–New Deal government, they set out to limit voting. In 1980, Paul Weyrich, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation that has designed much of the legislation currently being passed in Republican-dominated states, said “I don’t want everybody to vote….our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” 

By 1986, Republicans were talking about cutting down on Black voters through “ballot integrity” drives. As Democrats sought to expand voting, most notably with the 1993 Motor Voter Act, Republicans began to charge that they were losing elections only because of voter fraud, although experts agree that voter fraud is exceedingly rare and does not change election outcomes. Since then, arguing that they are simply protecting the vote, Republicans have become dependent on ID laws and other voter suppression measures. 

But by 2020, it was clear that the Republicans’ drive to slash the government back to its 1920 form, along with the racism and sexism that had become central to the party to pull voters to their standard, had become so unpopular that it was unlikely they could continue to win elections. And so, Republicans began to say that the United States is “not a democracy,” as Utah Senator Mike Lee tweeted in October. “Democracy isn’t the objective,” he continued, “liberty, peace, and prospe[r]ity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” 

With the election of Democrat Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with a Democratic Congress, the leadership of the Republican Party has taken the next step. They are rejecting the legitimacy of the election, doubling down on Trump’s Big Lie that he won. Claiming to want to combat “voter fraud,” they are backing bills across the country to suppress Democratic voting, making sure that no one but a Republican can win an election.

Just as white southerners argued after the Civil War, Republican leaders claim to be acting in the best interests of the nation. They are standing firm against “the radical Socialist Democrat agenda,” making sure that no wealthy person’s tax dollars go to schools or roads or social programs. 

They are “saving” America, just as white supremacists “saved” the Jim Crow South.

The aim of the GOP is voter suppression and to make sure the government does not spend tax dollars on public services

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American | March 28

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

Since the Civil War, voter suppression in America has had a unique cast.

The Civil War brought two great innovations to the United States that would mix together to shape our politics from 1865 onward:

First, the Republicans under Abraham Lincoln created our first national system of taxation, including the income tax. For the first time in our history, having a say in society meant having a say in how other people’s money was spent.

Second, the Republicans gave Black Americans a say in society.

They added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, outlawing human enslavement except as punishment for crime and, when white southerners refused to rebuild the southern states with their free Black neighbors, in March 1867 passed the Military Reconstruction Act. This landmark law permitted Black men in the South to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions. The new constitutions confirmed the right of Black men to vote.

Most former Confederates wanted no part of this new system. They tried to stop voters from ratifying the new constitutions by dressing up in white sheets as the ghosts of dead southern soldiers, terrorizing Black voters and the white men who were willing to rebuild the South on these new terms to keep them from the polls. They organized as the Ku Klux Klan, saying they were “an institution of chivalry, humanity, mercy, and patriotism” intended “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States… [and] to aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws.” But by this they meant the Constitution before the war and the Thirteenth Amendment: candidates for admission to the Ku Klux Klan had to oppose “Negro equality both social and political” and favor “a white man’s government.”

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