As promised, the second Trump administration quickly deployed numerous policies and executive orders that the president said were all about “making America great again.” This can be in a variety of forms, including the rapid firing of thousands of workers from various federal agencies, such as Elon Musk’s government efficiency.
According to Trump, there are three groups that make America great, including immigrants, people with disabilities, and those who are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
These administrations’ efforts began when many Americans expressed an overall sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country and politics. Only 19% of Americans said in December 2024 that they thought the country was heading in the right direction.
This perspective is not only because it is so dark, but also because it is strongly similar to how Americans felt in the pivotal decade 100 years ago.
It is the era of American history that I think it offers something like a mirror of the current political situation in America.
Associated Press
Roaring ’20s?
In the 1920s, the economy was good, the US won World War I, and a terrible pandemic ended.
But many Americans didn’t see it that way.
They entered the 1920s with a sense of delusion and a sense of robbery of something. Winning World War I came at a terrible cost. More than 116,000 American soldiers were killed, twice as many as they were injured.
As the war approached its end, the United States and the world were in the midst of the flu pandemic, ultimately claiming tens of millions of lives in the United States, including around 675,000.
Other Americans were concerned about the possibility of rising communism in the United States and the arrival of many immigrants. This has led extremists to implement and implement hate-based policies at the federal and state levels targeting non-white immigrants and people with disabilities.
Among the most important consequences of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson Reed Act. This is a restrictive immigration policy that bans immigration from Asia, among other changes.
Another pivotal movement was the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision of the Supreme Court. This confirmed that Virginia has the right to sterilize people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Discrimination against marginalized groups
The Johnson Reed Act pioneered a major change in American immigration policy based on fear of something former President Theodore Roosevelt and others called “racial suicide.”
The law introduced strict restrictions protecting countries outside of Northern and Western Europe. The immigration allocation that it established will continue to be enforced in the 1960s.
The American politicians who lobbyed for the law succeeded because they supported their efforts by presenting evidence that almost every person in the world is biologically inferior to the group called the Northern Europeans.
By limiting immigration from all other groups, these lawmakers believed that war and the pandemic were catarrifying an overwhelming period in which they killed what they saw as the nation’s best people.
Various groups preyed on American grief about the war and the pandemic, and directed it towards minority groups.
bettmann/intubributor
From Maine to California, the revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers, believing that white people were better than everyone else and blacks remained enslaved. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found great success in persuading the public that there is a scientific reason for the need to incorporate hatred and discrimination into the US government.
Their evidence was what is called eugenics, a pseudo-science that humans must use advanced technology and medicine to stop people with good traits from stopping the opportunity for people with bad traits to do so.
Harry Loughlin, a lab-based eugenicist based in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of the movement’s most vocal representatives.
Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research institutes, which helped him succeed in creating propaganda to support eugenics that influenced public policy. He then won a spot in the early 1920s as a professional eugenics advisor to Congress. In his position, Loughlin later provided pseudo-science data that gave the necessary claims to justify passing the measure to Johnson supporters.
University of Albany Grenander Special Collection and Archives
Promoting sterilization
In Laughlin’s influential 1922 book, Eugenic Sterilization in the United States, he detailed the roadmap for passing laws that allow governments to sterilize disabled people.
After so many deaths during World War I and the flu pandemic, Laughlin has found the fertile ground that the US needs to need to stop people who could be considered “bearish” from passing on inferior traits.
In the mid-1920s, Laughlin and his allies filed a lawsuit against a teenage woman who was deemed to be absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd This woman, Carrie Buck, was imprisoned after giving birth to a child in 1924, when she was pregnant as a result of rape. If Buck, who was then 18 years old, wanted to be released, the officials who ran the facility requested that she be sterilized first.
All over the country, states had begun legalizing forced sterilization. Well, back v. Bell’s case advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1927, Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued a court decision. In it, he wrote, “Three generations of idiots are enough,” expanding the scope of previous rulings that allowed the government to force people to be vaccinated to include forced sterilization of people with disabilities.
Buck was forced sterilized in October 1927 shortly after the court’s decision.
There is no doubt that sterilization and other discriminatory policies discovered a common cause for Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi movement, which used eugenic ideas of sterilization and mass extinction, but they were little challenging here in the US.
Some people, including myself, argue that the spirit of these discriminatory policies still exists in the United States today.
A familiar story
After the deadlock in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the US economy is growing.
However, feeling a significant decline, some white Americans turned their eyesight to people with disabilities, immigrants, transgender, non-binary people, and people of color as the cause of their problems.
Trump regularly encourages this kind of thinking. In January 2025, he condemned an air collision that occurred on the Potomac River, implying that he killed 67 disabled Federal Aviation Administration employees and had no information to do the job.
Trump mistakenly said on January 1, 2025 that the New Orleans terrorist attacks were caused by illegal immigration.
At the policy level, Trump’s administration made major changes to the immigration system, including taking steps to remove legal protections for the 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States, and he launched an unprecedented challenge to birthright citizenship.
There are limitations to what history can say about the current situation. However, these similarities with the early 1920s suggest that the country has been here before, contrary to many claims about the unprecedented nature of the present era.
