Trump Reveals Why He Wants America to Return to 1798 in Ominous Speech
When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he has a specific ideal year in mind: 1798, when slavery was legal and when America carried out mass deportations based on little pretext.
Speaking to a crowd in Greenville, North Carolina, Trump on Monday vowed to “rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered” by jailing and deporting immigrants by utilizing an arcane 200-year old law.
“I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 18– no, of 1798,” said Trump, first mixing up his dates. “Think of that, 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We are not gonna play games.’ “We have to go back to 1798.”
Trump: We have to go back to 1798 pic.twitter.com/o3RWSRLHJk
— Acyn (@Acyn) October 21, 2024
Believe it or not, this is not the first time he has made such a ridiculous claim.
Over the past month, Trump has regularly suggested sending America back more than two centuries in order to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Speaking on October 11 in Aurora, Colorado, he suggested he’d bring back the law to “target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” He also spread misinformation about “migrant crime” in the area and nationwide, and called his plan to target suspected gang members “Operation Aurora.”
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is one part of four laws put in place by President John Adams as part of the “Alien and Sedition Acts” meant to protect against French invasion. These laws allowed the government to increase citizenship requirements, crackdown on disloyalty, and deport noncitizens en masse. The law was meant to protect the United States only during “a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government,” or if a foreign nation had threatened war. Notably, it was used by President Franklin Roosevelt to detain thousands of people of Japanese descent, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps during World War II.
It’s unclear under exactly what pretext Trump would use the law. Would he make the case that MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua gang is a foreign nation? Or would he settle for the GOP’s language of declaring war on Mexico?
As Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told Axios, “the rhetorical framing of migration as an invasion is not only something that turns up the temperature in the political landscape, but it’s also something that is meant to conflate legal and rhetorical concepts.”
Even if he has no real plan to use a 200-year-old law in an authoritarian crackdown, as we’ve seen in Springfield, Ohio, this type of language can result in vigilante violence against everyday people.
