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.”
I think being a “century off from civil war” is a little disingenuous. Things are too tumultuous right now to predict what things will look like in 4 years, let alone 100.
I think we’re currently in a time of dramatic transition that will go one of two ways: full on opposition from a coalition of states against the current regime, or total capitulation that will likely only be broken by foreign intervention. This of course relies on Trump not backing down or anything that would be reasonably expected to de-escalate the situation, but with him and the current Republican party, I am not willing to give them any benefit of any doubt. I’ve been around Republicans my entire life and fit into the disguise of “straight white guy” very well as a kid. I know what they say when they think they’re amongst like minds. I saw it all the way back in 2000.
I don’t know if you would technically define it as civil war, but I believe the systems are in place for such a conflict to occur if the current situation were to “go hot” and states were to decide to mobilize their national guard regiments/reserves and (for lack of a better word) “nationalize” the military assets within their borders. A schism in the military could very well happen at that point with individual units placing their loyalty with either their states or the federal government. The feds may control the country on paper, but thanks to state’s rights, much of the daily workings are purely at the digression of the states. The highway system is federally owned, but it’s the state DoTs that maintain them and the states that patrol them and allow access for trade and commerce between their borders. As easily as we have checkpoints along the borders with Mexico and Canada, states could fashion along the interstate transit corridors and strangle the flow of goods and people between regions.
I do think the most likely scenario though is total capitulation by the state governments in favor of a justice that will never come from the courts, and I expect to see a growing movement of armed militia groups akin to the Black Panthers and leftists drifting further into militant extremism as trust in any sort of rule of law continues to erode under the continuing circumstances. Weapons are too easy to get or to make here for groups to not emerge. The FBI spends 50% of their time putting down white supremacist militias - or at least they did before 2016.
But I don’t believe that we’re “a century off” from civil war because I think the government will break long before then and whatever exists here in 100 years won’t be the same as the US as we think of it today. It will be a Roman Empire vs Holy Roman Empire kind of thing imo. The same people living in the same dirt, but a government pretending to be a nation that once stood in the same place but has since vanished into the annals of history.