photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

The election is over. So where are we? The calendar says we’re in 2024. But the history books say 1924, give or take a few years.

Under the Johnson-Reed Act, aka the Immigration Act of 1924, immigrants from Asia were banned. Entry into the U.S. by Jews and Catholics from Poland, Italy and other countries in Southern and Eastern Europe was severely restricted. “White” immigrants from the British Isles and Northern Europe were favored. Overall, legal immigration into the United States plummeted by 80%.

Having retaken the White House, Trump is harking back to those days. During his first term, he said he wanted to restrict Black and Hispanic immigration from “shithole countries.” During the recent campaign, he said Black immigrants from Haiti were eating pets. Now he seeks popular and congressional support in rounding up and deporting undocumented residents, potentially using the U.S. military. Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, warns mass deportations “will rip parents from their children, destroy businesses and livelihoods, and devastate the fabric of our nation and our economy.” There are an estimated 11 million undocumented residents in the U.S., roughly the population of Ohio or Georgia.

A century ago, the nation was recovering from a worldwide pandemic. The Spanish flu killed 675,000 Americans. Resistance to wearing masks popped up around the country. On a single day in November 1918, 1,000 were arrested in San Francisco. In the past five years, COVID-19 has killed 1.2 million in the U.S. Resentment toward public health measures such as mask-wearing and vaccinations boosted the 2024 Trump election campaign especially among evangelical Christians.

In the wake of World War I, America abandoned its allies and refused to join the League of Nations. Former President Woodrow Wilson decried America’s refusal “to bear any responsible part in the administration of peace” and its withdrawal into “sullen and selfish isolation.” One hundred years later, former and future President Trump has threatened to ignore obligations under the 1949 NATO Treaty to defend European allies against aggression and has even encouraged the Russians “to do whatever the hell they want.”

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed by Congress and signed by President Herbert Hoover in 1930, raised tariffs on 20,000 imported goods and sparked retaliatory tariffs from American trading partners. U.S. exports to Europe dropped by two-thirds from 1929 to 1932. Economists including Nobel Prize-winning Milton Friedman assigned partial blame to the “infamous” Smoot-Hawley for the Great Depression. President-elect Trump has vowed to impose a tariff of up to 20% on all imports with a rate of 60% or 100% on goods from China.

Back in 1938, Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede a chunk of its territory to Germany where German-speakers constituted a majority. In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin published an essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” which deemed Ukraine “historically Russian lands.” In both cases, an invasion ensued the next year. President-elect Trump has repeatedly said he could end the war between Ukraine in one day, presumably by allowing Russia to keep the border lands of Ukraine it illegally seized.

On the eve of World War II, Charles Lindbergh, spokesperson for the America First movement, called for isolationism. He attacked “the groups who advocate foreign war” in opposing German aggression in Europe. President-elect Trump has announced plans to nominate Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary in his new administration, calling him “tough, smart and a true believer in America First.” JD Vance, Trump’s choice as vice president, has said: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

Almost all the 20th century stances mentioned above were eventually reversed. The 1965 Immigration Act removed discrimination against potential immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. And the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, supported by the Reagan Administration, established a pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents who’d entered the U.S. before 1982. The Salk and Sabin vaccines ended the polio epidemic that had killed over 3,000 Americans and infected 20,000 in the peak year of 1952. Czechoslovakia regained its land after the defeat of Germany in the Second World War. The isolationism of the America First movement was replaced by bipartisan support of NATO and the United Nations after the war. Free trade flourished after the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade lowered trade barriers and U.S. exports to other countries increased almost 200 times in dollar value between 1950 and 2023.

And yet, Trump argues that to make America great again, we must flip the pages of the calendar back to a time of racism, high tariffs, pandemics and isolationism. The next four years will see whether Congress, the Supreme Court and voters will support such a reversal of the past century of American history.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist for Creators.