There is one key through-line from America’s worst presidents — straight to Trump

The rising talk of a new “civil war” is a bad sign for the stability of the United States. It’s happening, political scientist Julia Azari argues, in a moment when the country lacks “a national stabilizing force, particularly in the presidency,” and is seeing the naked use of state power.

Speaking to The New York Times, she said an actual war may not be imminent, but Americans are increasingly seeing politics through that lens, particularly after the shooting deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, with one side blaming federal agents and conservatives blaming the Biden administration.

Times opinion editor John Guida cited Azari’s 2025 book, “Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History,” which examines how presidents become lightning rods when Americans disagree on how government power is used.

The common thread, she explained, is how political grievances coalesce around a scapegoat. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump all framed white Americans as victims of racial change. Trump’s wars on immigrants and DEI feed a sense of white victimhood.

Azari has three possibilities for where the U.S. stands now. One is that Trump’s second term simply extends the post‑Obama backlash against challenges to “colorblind” norms and frank talk about race. Another is that "Trumpist" racial politics truly dominate, though public opinion appears to be turning against some core MAGA policies, especially on immigration. The third is a drawn‑out era of intense, partisan racial conflict in which "Democrats may not find it viable politically to back away from attention to real issues of race inequity."

Trump’s allies justify his blowing through guardrails by citing his 2024 popular‑vote win, but Azari said this has always been less about legitimacy than about Trump's raw power. Trump isn't merely ignoring norms, he's also stretching laws and exploiting loopholes.

Presidential historians warn that the power of the office has grown far beyond what the framers envisioned, and it is putting a strain on the system. The executive branch is now both wielding and executing the law, she explained, raising the question of who can realistically stop those who control it.

For Azari, today’s crisis grows out of a long arc from the end of Reconstruction through every failure to confront racial conflict honestly.

The fiercest battles, she says, don’t come at the moment of major change, like ending slavery or electing a Black president, but in the struggle over what “normal” looks like afterward. Each time, what is supposed to be normal becomes less stable. Decades of “law and order” rhetoric on crime, welfare, immigration and affirmative action may sound ordinary, but they are often coded appeals that enable small policy shifts to generate explosive, racially charged politics.

She closed by saying that "the mid-20th century had a stable political majority and an increasingly powerful presidency" but it continued to dodge "civil rights for decades." That may be a pathway out of the "backlash cycle," Azari said. It "give us some sense of the enormousness — and importance — of the task."

Read the full interview here.

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