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Tanks will roll down Constitution Avenue in Washington this weekend to celebrate the Army’s 250th birthday. Demonstrations are being staged in all 50 states to protest immigration raids and President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles. And war has widened in the Middle East after Israel’s lethal attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and its leaders.
The nation is a cauldron of anxiety and anger as it enters the weekend at a moment recalling some of the darkest periods of its history.
This country has faced — and survived — spasms of tension and disruption before. Debate and disagreement, as well as military and even domestic conflict, are knitted into its history and DNA, from the Civil War to the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s (not to mention two World Wars, the assassinations of four presidents and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks).
But two things, many historians suggest, distinguish this moment from other troubled times in our past. The first is the sheer number of conflagrations taking place at once — not only in the United States but also around the world. In Los Angeles, a U.S. senator, Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat, was pushed to the ground and handcuffed Thursday after trying to confront Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, about the immigration raids. Hours later, Israel launched its first airstrikes on Iran, and Iran retaliated Friday, launching scores of missiles, some of which broke through air defenses in and around Tel Aviv.
“We live in highly disruptive times,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Even before this week, Naftali argued, the world order was destabilized as Trump tore up trade deals and foreign alliances, and the United States, Russia and China moved to “take advantage of worldwide changes for their own interests, adding to the velocity of disruption.”
The second thing is Trump himself. At fraught moments like this, it normally falls to the president to step up as the reassuring figure, whether it was George W. Bush heading to downtown Manhattan after the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, or Bill Clinton going to Oklahoma City after a truck bomb destroyed a nine-story federal building and killed 168 people in 1995.
