Trump Win leads to Civil War

Would Donald Trump follow through on his more extravagant anti-democratic fantasies? His rhetoric certainly suggests so, but with Trump you never know.

If Trump does carry out his threats, we are likely to see something unlike anything America has lived through: an incipient dictatorship that invites massive resistance. What would that look like? Could it restrain Trump? Would it lead to mass arrests? What would blue-state governors and mayors do? And how should citizens be preparing?

To take just one example, Stephen Miller, Trump’s czar on immigration policy, has called for rounding up some ten million undocumented residents and putting them in concentration camps until they can be deported. He plans to use federalized National Guard troops to do the job, including sending troops from red states into blue ones.

“If President Trump gets re-elected,” Miller said on a February 5 podcast interview with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, “the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”

More from Robert Kuttner

Many undocumented immigrants have been here for decades, are married to citizens or to permanent legal residents, have children who are citizens, and have unblemished records. Many are valued employees of corporations that are short of workers.

So imagine the scene in L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, or New York, all cities with large immigrant communities, strong unions, and mostly progressive mayors and governors. (Give New York an asterisk here.) Federalized National Guardsmen from, say, Alabama and Florida are arriving by the planeload with instructions to work with the Department of Homeland Security to identify and arrest undocumented residents. The DHS already knows the identity of some seven million of them, according to The Washington Post.

Another example of likely Trump actions is in the area of reproductive rights. Texas has asserted jurisdiction to arrest and punish women who travel to states where abortion is legal and has even deputized private citizens to track down offenders. Many blue states, in turn, have passed laws to protect both providers and women seeking treatment.

Trump might well try to use federal power to support extraterritorial red-state efforts to track down women who cross state lines seeking abortions. Here again, leaders and citizens of states where abortion is legal would likely provide sanctuary, actions that Trump could point to as acts of civil disobedience.

It’s not too soon to take stock of a potential resistance movement’s strengths and weaknesses.

What would massive resistance look like? It would not look like, say, the campus demonstrations against Israel’s Gaza slaughter, or even like the mass anti-war protests of the 1960s, where gestures to shut down the Pentagon were symbolic and not literal. The Occupy Wall Street sit-ins were metaphoric, not an actual occupation.

In this case, the effort to shut down a government action would be massive and real. It might involve millions of American citizens sitting down in front of buses and overwhelming the state’s capacity to fill prisons.

With respect to immigration, a key question is what city and state governments would do. For instance, should local police be directed to help DHS and federalized National Guard troops arrest sit-down resisters, or should they join the effort to block out-of-state troops? What if Trump got injunctions to order blue-state officials to cooperate, and arrest them if they refused?

This is completely uncharted territory. If Democratic governors, National Guard forces, and police in blue states were to resist rather than comply with Trump’s orders, it starts literally feeling like the onset of civil war. At Fort Sumter in 1860-1861, Union and Confederate troops were in a close-range armed standoff for six months before the overwhelmed federal garrison surrendered without a shot being fired. The carnage came later.

The premise of this scale of massive resistance is that the state can’t arrest everyone. It also evokes guerrilla warfare, where the invaders find themselves trying to operate in hostile territory, and perhaps back off.