Historian exposes dark Civil War secret behind Trump’s master plan

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he departs for Asia from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 24, 2025. REUTERS Kylie Cooper.jpg

Even though Americans are largely rejecting his election denial conspiracy theories, President Donald Trump does not care because he is not only hoping to steal the 2026 midterms — he plans on turning America into the Confederacy, right down to the white supremacy and lack of democracy, at least according to a prominent historian.

Thom Hartmann, author of books like “The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment” and “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream,” told AlterNet on Thursday that Trump has a multi-faceted plan to destroy American democracy. It includes sending the military to polling places, seizing ballot boxes, taking unprecedented measures to purge voters from the rolls, seizing on smaller cases of voter fraud — like the one recently revealed in New Jersey, which only led to 400 non-citizen votes since 2023, too small to change election results — and using the post office to stop mail-in voters.

According to Hartmann, Trump is drawing directly from the anti-democracy politics used in the South prior to, during and after the Civil War.

“By the 1840s and early 1850s, even white people who spoke out against the oligarchy or who tried to run against it faced lynching, beatings, and social and economic ostracism,” Hartmann told AlterNet. “The polls were rigged. The elections were — you know, many of these systems, the old jellybean system and everything else — many of these systems that are the precedent for what Trump is proposing were just the law.”

People who opposed the economic oligarchy in America “couldn't win an election.” When marginalized people realized they couldn’t win an election, “the people revolt, essentially. The government is then faced with two choices: they can either back off and say, ‘Okay, no more oligarchy, we'll go back to democracy’ — which is what happened after the Civil War [which started when the South rejected Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860] — or, it's what happened in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president [in 1932]. We had basically become an oligarchy in the 1920s. Roosevelt backed down the oligarchs. He said, ‘They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.’ He literally took them on, and they tried to kill him — in fact, they tried to kidnap him and kill him. So, 80 years ago it was Roosevelt. 80 years before that, it was Lincoln. 80 years before that, it was Jefferson and his allies [defeating the Federalists, who they believed were monarchical, in 1800] — in each case taking on oligarchy, and in each case defeating it.”

He concluded, “The big question this time — 80 years later, 80 years after World War II, pretty much to the year — is: will this time, when we have a government that supports the oligarchy, be followed by a government that confronts it? Will the next government, put into power in two and a half years, be willing to take on the oligarchy? And can they beat the oligarchy? Or, as I said, are the oligarchs confronted with two choices? One is to revert back to democracy. The other is to come down with the iron fist.”

While Hartmann could not predict whether anti-Trump forces will be able to defeat Trump, he was clear about what Trump is planning on doing — that is, coming down the iron fist against opponents.

“Clearly, that is what Trump is planning,” Hartmann wrote. “It's why he's building out ICE. It's why he's put together this rapid reaction force within the National Guard. It's why he and Hegseth have been purging the senior levels of the military of anybody who might object to that. I think the question that's going to determine the survival of democracy in the United States — and consequently, perhaps, democracy around the world — is whether this transitional oligarchy we're in right now will end up as tyranny or will revert to democracy.”

AlterNet then asked Hartmann about whether Democrats are doing enough to prevent Trump from doing this. Earlier on Thursday, MS NOW reported that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer convened other Democrats for an emergency meeting on how to counter Trump’s various election theft plans.

“I don't know much about what Schumer was planning — probably another strongly worded letter,” Hartmann wrote. “But what I do know is that after the 2024 election, a friend of mine, Greg Palast, a former BBC and Guardian reporter who broke the story in 2000 about how Jeb Bush purged 90,000 Black people off the rolls just weeks before the 2000 election so his brother could win Florida and become president — Greg Palast, who has a master's degree in statistics in addition to his journalism background, and was a student of Milton Friedman's at the University of Chicago, went to the official government statistics, state by state and federal, on who was allowed to vote and who was purged from the voting rolls leading up to and during the 2024 election. What he found was that about four million people who were legally qualified citizen voters were not allowed to vote.”

He added, “About half of them had been purged in these massive voter purges — Georgia was kind of the epicenter of this; Greg made a movie about it called Vigilantes, Inc. The other half were affected by a variety of techniques: Republican poll workers challenging mail-in ballot signatures, people being given provisional ballots instead of real ballots. With a provisional ballot, in most states you have to show up in person at the Secretary of State's office within a week or two in order for your ballot to be counted — it's called being cured. There's a whole bunch of other things too — cutting the hours the polling places were open, moving them around without notice, phoning in bomb threats. You can't say that was the Republican Party, but that happened a lot in 2024 in very critical swing districts for Democrats.”

Hartmann concluded, “He was able to demonstrate — and he's published this — that had those four million people been able to vote (and we now know who those four million people were), Kamala Harris would have been president, and Democrats would control the House and Senate. So it has already worked for them. And this time, they realize it's going to take more than purging four million people — they're going to have to do six, eight, ten million people.”

Overall, the historian concluded that “the question is, will the Democrats be able to turn out enough people, and will Republican voters be sufficiently disheartened by the failures of the Trump administration that an overwhelming blue wave crashes upon our shores? If it turns out to be a tight election, the voter suppression efforts will probably succeed. So we've got a big job ahead of us.”

Speaking with AlterNet in June, two election experts elaborated on the same concerns that Hartmann broke down in the July interview.

“I think there are two things to consider,” Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund, told AlterNet. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is ... the chilling effect on voters.”

Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I'm just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they're US citizens, but they might decide, "I'm not going to vote." So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.” In addition to that intimidating factor, Chaudhuri argued the gerrymandering and FBI seizure of Fulton County, GA also could keep voters away from the polls.

“We're going to see consequences in terms of voters saying, ‘I don't want the FBI to get my personal ballot in the future,’” Chaudhuri concluded. “So, to sum up, I do agree that putting it all together, it does paint an ominous picture.”

Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, said that Trump’s overall plan is to make sure he cannot lose the midterms.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

He continued, “I think this all adds up to a desire to ensure that his party stays in power and his ability to do what he wants — to attack vulnerable communities — remains intact.”

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