There are lessons to be learned regarding how history is reproduced in the present. First, there is the Trump administration’s caging of children on the southern border. Second, there is Trump’s threat to use “dominating force” and unleash the National Guard and police upon demonstrators peacefully resisting police violence against people of color. Third, as Jason Stanley points out, there is Trump’s relentless language of violence designed both to embolden second amendment gun rights activists toward committing violence and to dehumanize certain populations while attempting “to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central themes of fascist ideology — authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle.”

Trump’s authoritarian impulses and fascist politics took a dangerous turn when he authorized the use of unmarked, military-clad federal law enforcement shock troops to round up and detain protesters in Portland, Oregon. The troops offered no proof of identification, drove around in unmarked cars, pulled people off the streets with no probable cause, provided no sense of whose directives they were acting under, or who was to be held accountable for their actions. Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland, called such actions “an attack on our democracy.” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeted in reference to Portland that, “Trump and his storm troopers must be stopped.”

We have seen this before under Hitler, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and in other dictatorships. When such actions appeared in the past, dissidents, demonstrators and intellectuals disappeared, were beaten, tortured and interrogated in undisclosed sites, and in the worse scenarios, were murdered. What has happened in Portland suggests that the “war on terror” has shifted from abroad to the homeland. Outraged by such actions, Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, suggests that this may be a trial run for an authoritarian state: