Donald Trump gestures at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest in Phoenix, Arizona, U.S., December 22, 2024. REUTERS/Cheney Orr/File Photo
While the idea might once have seemed "far-fetched," the U.S. may now be descending into a second civil war due to Donald Trump's embrace of "anarchy," according to a new analysis from The i Paper.
In a piece published on Thursday, veteran BBC News foreign correspondent Paul Wood wrote that the scenes of "mayhem on the streets of Minneapolis" have experts seriously questioning whether or not the U.S. is on track for a civil war. The idea has been floated for years now, typically by members of the party in opposition to the current president, but in light of Trump's aggression towards blue states and his flouting of the constitutional order, the suggestion has taken on a dire urgency.
Wood related the story of a 2024 exercise conducted by the University of Pennsylvania to "game out how a conflict within the US might begin," with the involvement of former government officials and military officers. The results, Wood argued, strikingly similar to the events now unfolding in Minneapolis.
"In the exercise, a violent confrontation develops between state and federal forces in Philadelphia," Wood explained. "It begins when the president of the day orders a controversial operation to detain undocumented migrants, despite opposition from the mayor and the governor. He attempts to federalise Pennsylvania’s National Guard but the governor resists. The Guard stays loyal to the state and the president then sends in the regular army. The result is an armed conflict between state and federal forces: civil war."
Professor Claire Finkelstein, who led the exercise, told Wood that it was becoming increasingly likely that Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act in response to pushback against his deportation agenda. This would allow him to deploy the military within U.S. borders, setting the stage for the outcome reached by her 2024 exercise.
Finkelstein compared the prospect to Dwight Eisenhower invoking the act to enforce the desegregation of schools, after the governor of Arkansas had called in the state's national guard to block nine black children from attending an all-white school. In that instance, the president had the backing of a Supreme Court ruling, whereas Trump has "no judicial backing" for his deportation agenda's "hardline tactics."
Recently, former GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch Trump ally turned critic, warned that the American people were being "incited into civil war" after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis.
“Both sides need to take off their political blinders,” Greene said. “You are all being incited into civil war, yet none of it solves any of the real problems that we all face, and tragically people are dying.”