Experts are warning that the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown in Minnesota could quickly get out of hand and could even result in a second US civil war.
Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.
“In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s National Guard,” Finkelstein explained. “When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces.”
About a hundred years.
I’m sorry, but I know a little history and politics. We’re about a century from an actual internal civil war because a LOT of things would need to fall into place and be normalized before we had two opposing armies actually going at it on a large scale. I don’t care what grifters trying to sell substack subs say, words have meaning and we’re nowhere close to an actual “civil war” because that term has a LOT of meaning behind it, and a LOT of consequence.
Right now we have civil unrest, it could turn into armed unrest, it could turn into destabilization or an insurrection or coup at the most in the current state, but for there to be a civil war proper, we would need a coalition of states raising their own military and openly going against federal mandate and we’re so far from that happening in this current environment that it’s pure fantasy.
I’m not saying it can’t happen, only that it’s much further away than the headlines are making it out, because they know that a lot of people really, deeply want some kind of populist justice, so it sells clicks and views.
If we want to fix this, we need to lean in a LOT harder on community and organization. It’s not fun, but I promise a real civil war would be even worse and there wouldn’t be a winner.