Revealed: Europeans are worried about 'an armed uprising' brewing in the US

Correspondent Andrew Buncombe tells the I Paper that our neighbors across the ocean are half-expecting a second Civil War to break out in the U.S. if tempers continue to flare.

The assassination of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk prompted many to demand an end to political violence and the rhetoric that led to it. But President Donald Trump blamed the “radical left,” for the majority of political violence: “[Kirk] did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them, I’m sorry.”

Buncombe says British readers were already aware of violence escalating in the U.S., including an attack on Minnesota legislators and an April arson incident at the home of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro. Then Trump seized on Kirk’s killing to justify sending troops into cities such as Chicago, Portland and threatens to invade New York.

His invasion has spurred local outcry from state governors like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who accused Trump of following a playbook to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them … to create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”

The Insurrection Act allows Trump to call up federal troops to put down domestic rebellion or insurrection, and U.S. courts could allow Trump to paint anything he wants as an “insurrection.”

“An armed uprising,” reports Buncombe, “is entirely possible.”

Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, tells The i Paper that the definition for a civil war used by modern scholars is a conflict in which at least 1,000 people are killed. But what’s more likely is “something similar to the 1791 armed uprising known as the Whiskey Rebellion,” which lasted two years with hundreds of rebels taking up arms, with casualties.

Jensen said the rebellion could take the form of “sporadic acts of violence that will not be neatly defined by right or left but that stop short of becoming formal, organized parties locked in civil conflict.”

When asked to name a circumstances in which a violent conflict might take place, Coventry University political sociology professor Joel Busher proffered Republicans refusing to step down after losing “the next election.”

“Would they accept the result and support the process of democratic transition?” asked Busher. “I hope so, but if they did not, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that decentralized networks of armed actors would seek to mete out violence against their political enemies – Democratic lawmakers, minorities identified as being somehow less ‘American’.”

“If such violence were not condemned by senior Republicans, we would be looking at a potential civil war scenario,” Busher said.

Read the i-Paper report at this link.