This dark history uncovers the roots of Trump's racist paramilitary police

ICE thugs dragged a Minnesota woman out of her car and assaulted her, stopping only when local police showed up, leaving her with cuts and bruises from being dragged on the ground. Her “crime” was following and tracking Trump’s violent, racist, masked federal modern-day Klan goons.

Joe Scarborough expressed the shock and outrage of most Americans, when he said:

“This is so out of control, and it looks like a paramilitary force from the third world! And so [the] police chief — not Antifa, Republicans, not Antifa, liars on the right — she calls the police to ask for help in America from paramilitary-type officers. It’s disgusting!”

What Scarborough and most Americans probably don’t know — particularly since Ronald Reagan gutted civics education — is that this is nothing new for America.

Between the 1830s and the 1860s the American South ceased to be a democracy altogether, more closely resembling a Nazi-style race-based fascist oligarchy.

Thus, Trump and today’s Republican Party aren’t offering something new. They’re simply resurrecting the old Confederacy — something factions within the GOP have demanded for years — dressing it up in the trappings of modern politics and media.

They’re not so much expressing nostalgia for Dixie as much as they’re engaging in a deliberate effort to bring back the very systems that tore our nation apart the last time the morbidly rich tried to end our democratic republic and replace it with an early fascist form of neo-feudalism.

At the heart of the old Confederacy was neofascist oligarchy, as I laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. A tiny elite of plantation owners controlled the politics, law, and the economy across the entire region; by the mid-1850s democracy in the Old South was entirely dead. Even white people who spoke up against the system risked losing their lives.

That same racist, fascist goal animates today’s GOP politicians, who fight tooth and nail to defend the interests of white men, billionaires, and giant corporations while undermining any effort to preserve genuine democracy.

Taxes on the morbidly rich are cut to the bone, while working people and the professional middle class carry the burden.

Government subsidies in the hundreds of billions now flow to “friends of the administration,” while towns, industries, and communities that refuse to go along with Trump and his lickspittles are punished both by the withdrawal of federal support and the brutal attacks on their people by armed, masked ICE punks.

And, it appears, they’re rehearsing now to use those same terror tactics this November to intimidate voters of color in the relatively small handful of states and congressional districts where control of the House and Senate will be decided this fall.

They don’t need to attack or control the entire country; half a dozen cities, or maybe a dozen, and they will definitely keep control of the Senate and probably the House.

It looks like Black Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, a crucial state for Democrats, are next on their list.

Both Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) can see this coming, with Warner saying:

“I’m deeply concerned about the potential for Trump to send ICE agents to polling places to intimidate voters in this year’s elections.”

For years, white supremacist groups have worked to infiltrate and evangelize within our military and police departments; now, thanks to Trump, Miller, and congressional Republicans there’s an entire federal agency — with a massive budget — devoted exclusively to their beloved racial enforcement.

They’re so into using the racial profiling Brett Kavanaugh legalized with his so-called “Kavanaugh stops” that (Minneapolis-area suburb) Brooklyn Park’s Police Chief Mark Bruley publicly said that several off-duty police officers from local departments — every single one a person of color — have been stopped by ICE agents even though they were U.S. citizens and not suspected of any immigration violation.

One reported incident involved an off-duty dark-skinned Brooklyn Park officer who was “boxed in” by federal agents, had agents draw weapons and demand “paperwork” proving her citizenship, and had her phone knocked out of her hand when she attempted to record the encounter. Once she identified herself as a police officer, the agents immediately left without apology, Bruley said.

The chief said multiple local officers have had similar experiences, including two from the St. Paul Police Department who said they were pulled over in situations that seemed outside legal authority for immigration agents, and one who was pulled over on two different occasions for driving while brown. All were people of color.

These actions resemble the old Slave Patrols that terrorized both Black people in the South and abolitionists in that region (mostly poor, working-class white men, many unemployed) who argued for an end to slavery (and its free labor competition).

In the old South — like in American cities today occupied by ICE — opposing the oligarchs and their one-party segregationist regime was treated as a threat. If you spoke up for labor rights, racial justice, or democratic reforms, your name was put on informal but very real blacklists that circulated among police, employers, banks, and political bosses.

Enforced by White Citizens Councils and the masked, deputized agents of the Klan — that era’s version of ICE — that meant you’d experience harassment, bogus arrests, firings, evictions, and sometimes even execution. Dissent wasn’t just frowned on in the Confederate South: it was systematically tracked and punished.

This wasn’t some kind of random bigotry. It was a coordinated public-private system of control where business elites, politicians, and law enforcement worked hand-in-glove to intimidate anybody who dared challenge their power.

Police routinely stopped “known troublemakers,” arrested activists on phony charges, and looked the other way when intimidation or violence against the activists erupted.

Terror and even death were always waiting in the wings if someone didn’t get the message.

The result was a regional police state in all but name: one-party rule, oligarchic power, racial caste enforcement, political surveillance, and intimidation as daily governance.

Even after the Civil War, in the Jim Crow South, challenging this racialized fascist system didn’t just make you unpopular; it put you on a list. And once you were on it, the machinery of repression could crush you anytime they chose.

From Stephen Miller’s rhetoric to Pete Hegseth’s purge of dark-skinned officers to Kristi Noem strutting for the camera in front of El Salvadoran prisoners, the racism and naked authoritarianism of the Trump regime is the cornerstone of their support by their racist, white supremacist MAGA base.

To his base’s delight, Trump is deleting the stories of Black heroes from our museums and cemeteries, restoring the names of slave-owning Confederate generals to our military bases, and bringing back their statues. Outside of a few tokens, his administration is almost entirely all-white with 13 white billionaires in his cabinet.

Today’s Republican Party — something Dwight Eisenhower would recognize as what he fought against in Europe — is based on and sustained by racism, male supremacy, cheap labor, corporate cronyism, propaganda, a devotion to a mythic white past, immunity for powerful white men, a race-based form of religious fundamentalism, dynastic families, the censorship of schools and libraries, isolationism, violent policing of people of color, and the embrace of foreign dictatorships.

In every one of those, it’s a virtual clone of the Confederacy with the exception of explicit chattel slavery, although legal slavery is enthusiastically practiced in the prisons of most Red states under the rubric of the 13th Amendment, which legalizes slavery against a person convicted of a crime.

As we see red states eagerly embracing gerrymandering and voter suppression, the danger is not simply that Trump may rig an election, or that Republicans may pass bad laws.

The real danger is that this model of governance, rooted in the Confederacy and funded and refined by generations of American oligarchs (particularly since the Brown v Board SCOTUS decision roused Fred Koch to fund the John Birch Society and their “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards), is becoming normalized across Republican-controlled states and increasingly in the federal government.

All of these threads tie together into a single tapestry. As Barry Goldwater or John McCain would have been the first to tell you, what Trump and the GOP are selling today is not new and not even remotely conservative in any meaningful sense.

It’s the Confederate model updated for the 21st century: a system of oligarchy, racism, patriarchy, cheap labor, monopoly, propaganda, religious control, violence, censorship, judicial capture, and economic extortion. Trump, Vance, Miller, Johnson, and their billionaire and GOP cronies aren’t looking forward to a better or freer future but backward to a mythic past where a narrow wealthy white male elite could rule unchecked, enjoying Cognac and a cigar (and the occasional underage girl) in an exclusive men’s-only club.

Under Trump, today’s Republican Party has become feudalistic, pseudo-royalist, and anti-democratic, and proclaims that they always will be.

America fought both a Civil War and a World War to defeat this system of government, and now we’re confronting it — again — here at home as the GOP slides deeper and deeper into autocratic capture.

Hopefully, these rightwingers won’t force us into a second civil war, won’t start a foreign war, and their motion toward full-on fascism can be stopped this fall at the ballot box. If not, America is in for a world of hurt.

Double-check your voter registration, wake up your friends and neighbors, and show up on March 28th for the next No Kings Day. See you there!

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.