- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Right now in WEDU, it's a new era of politics at the national and state levels, with Republicans having control in both Tallahassee and Washington DC.

Incoming President Trump is promising to launch the most massive deportations of immigrants in US history.

Far-right groups are getting more active.

Has the country changed forever?

We'll put that question to several local historians next on a special edition of "Florida This Week".

(bright music) Welcome back.

We're in a political time like never before.

A former President who is facing criminal investigations for his handling of top secret documents, election tampering, and interfering with the peaceful transfer of power, has just won his bid for a second term.

Voters re-elected him by 1.7%, one of the closest elections in the last 60 years.

Donald Trump is a new kind of politician for the modern era.

He openly calls members of the Democratic Party the enemy.

- And it is the enemy from within, and they're very dangerous.

They're Marxists and Communists and fascists, and they're sick.

- [Rob] And he says the US military should be used against those enemies.

- We have some sick people, radical left lunatics, and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.

- [Rob] He's promising to use the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants when he takes office.

- When I win on November 5th, the migrant invasion ends, and the restoration of our country begins.

- [Rob] According to the Florida Policy Institute, there are an estimated 772,000 undocumented immigrants currently living in Florida.

They work in all of the state's major industries, agriculture, tourism, and construction.

Nearly half of Florida's farm workers are undocumented.

Trump's selection for Border Czar says he will deport US citizens when the roundups begin.

This is what he told "60 Minutes".

- Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?

- Of course there is.

Families can be deported together.

- Why should a child who is an American citizen have to pack up and move to a country that they don't know?

- Because their parent absolutely entered the country legally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally.

So he created that crisis.

- [Rob] If deporting US citizens becomes reality, the numbers are huge.

4.4 million US citizen minor children under age 18 live with at least one undocumented parent according to the American Immigration Council.

It's part of a theme advanced by the incoming administration, something that hearkens back to the 1920s when immigrants from other countries also faced persecution.

- America is for Americans and Americans only.

- In the 1920s, the Klu Klux Klan reemerged, marching in DC, pressuring Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924.

That act limited immigration from Eastern and southern Europe, especially affecting people of the Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim faiths.

And today, right-wing militias, Nazi groups, and American white nationalists have emerged domestically in Columbus, Ohio, Nashville, Tennessee, Charlottesville, Virginia, Portland, Oregon, and even Orlando, Florida.

Join us now on the panel, Gary Mormino is an author, historian, and Professor of History Emeritus at USF St. Petersburg.

David Ponton is an author, historian, associate professor, and the Director of the Institute on Black Life at USF in Tampa.

And Ray Arsenault is an author, historian, and the John Hope Franklin Professor of History Emeritus at USF St. Petersburg.

What a great panel.

Great to see you all.

Ray, is there any era in US politics that's comparable to this era?

- I don't think so.

I mean, all the themes have been around since early American history, anti-immigrant feelings, xenophobia, racism, misogyny, all of that.

But this is the first time we've had a national leader I think who frankly suffers from several severe personality disorders, frankly.

He's a pathological narcissist, a pathological liar.

And we've had regional statewide figures before.

Of course, I spent much of my career studying so-called Southern demagogues, and they used many of the same themes that Donald Trump has used.

A sense of persecution, trying to get the electorate to identify with his problems, his grievances, and that he would represent them.

But none of those demagogues that I wrote about really approached Trump in the level of the rhetoric and the fact that there doesn't seem to be any consistent moral or ethical principle guiding him.

It's really, it's anything that serves his own purposes.

And so he sometimes talks about being aligned with conservatives, but I don't think there's anything conservative about Trumpism.

I mean, in effect, he's trying to destroy many old and really important American traditions.

You look at the early appointments that he's made, some people are referring to it as the clown car of appointments.

That these are people who have no stake really in preserving these institutions, but rather would wanna destroy them.

We never had this on a national level before.

- David, how about you?

Do you think there's any comparable era in American politics?

- I do, and this is what I love about talking with other historians, is we get this kind of range of perspectives on American history.

Outside of the cult of personality that is Donald Trump, which I think you're right about, my focus has really been on the Democratic party and what it has done during this time period.

And the parallel that I have seen is really with the late 1960s into the 1970s.

So back in January '24, I'd predicted in a Nostradamus kind of way I guess on Twitter that at the time, Joe Biden was gonna lose the election.

And it was because I saw this parallel between what Biden was doing with the elephant in the room, which is Gaza, and what, at the time, LBJ was doing with Vietnam.

And there was so much loud noise from this liberal consensus that was worried about worker's rights, worried about economic insecurity, worried about these domestic issues, and at the same time really had kind of a moral opposition to what was happening in Vietnam in the same ways that people were saying there's something terrible happening in Gaza that we don't want America to be invested in.

- Do you think the numbers were there?

I mean, the people that were upset with what's happening in Gaza, were those numbers big numbers this election?

- I don't think that we'll know until we get the quantitative data, but what I think is it was hard for Democrats to send a message that said, "We are going to be the defenders of democracy.

In fact, democracy is at risk if you don't vote for us," when at the same time they were standing up for something that was unprincipled.

- Gary, how about you?

Similar era going back in American history?

- I'm torn between the 1920s and the 1930s.

1930s launched a an era of dictators, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco in Spain, et cetera.

But the 1920s probably I think is better suited, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigration, massive immigration restriction for the first time in American history.

- Yeah, and in the setup piece, I said the Anti-Immigration Act or the Immigration Act of 1924.

Pretty tough stuff.

I mean, the politicians of the time were saying that the best people who should be staying in the country are Anglo-Saxons, and the ones who should be rejected are everybody else.

Gary, you're an expert on the immigration to Tampa of Cubans, Latinos, Italians, Jewish people, some German immigrants.

In the late 1800s, early 1900s, these were foreigners to the people that were living in Tampa.

They went to Ybor City to work in the cigar industry in West Tampa.

How were they accepted in the late 1800s, early 1900s by the majority population?

- Well one easy explanation would be the worst lynching in modern Tampa occurred in 1910 when two Sicilian immigrants were lynched, and postcards were flourishing the next day of showing the lynching there.

Ybor City was created in 1886, massive numbers of Cubans, white and black, by the way, Italians, and Spaniards came to create an extraordinary industry, a thriving industry of handmade cigars.

Ybor City was originally a separate city in 1886, but Tampa realized it was a gold mine and incorporated it.

But there was intense nativism.

- Were they accepted by the downtown establishment in Tampa?

- No, well, as long as they were passive.

They tended to strike a lot.

And many of them were radicals, bringing their ideologies from the old world infecting the new world.

So there was a great deal of opposition, and that really lasted until World War II.

- Ray, what do you think, go ahead, what would you add?

- Well, I just wanna say that I think the difference between today and these earlier eras is that now we have a presidential figure who's at the center of this, who's promoting this.

It's akin to what happened obviously in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain.

But it's never happened in the United States before.

I mean, the lunatic fringe as we used to term it, neo-Nazis and Klansmen, you can see them throughout the last century and a half of American history.

But it's never been in the White House before.

Calvin Coolidge and Warren G. Harding did not openly promote the kinds of ideas that were associated with the Klan or with the most extreme versions of anti-immigrant feeling, the Johnson Act of 1924, for example.

It wasn't centered in a kind of personality, which was setting out to create, again, a kind of cult that just hasn't happened before.

It has happened in individual states.

We had Pitchfork Van Tillman in South Carolina and Sydney Katz in Florida, and almost every state had a demagogue like this, but it's never been at the center of American politics.

- One of those demagogues that emerged at that time in the '60s, late '60s, was George Wallace, former governor of Alabama.

But he never caught on nationally.

- Well he did get support in the Midwest, in Wisconsin and Michigan.

Of course, he was shot and never recovered after 1972.

But even Wallace, Wallace began, so I suppose in some ways, he was a parallel to Trump in the sense that Wallace was a liberal figure early on in Alabama politics and a disciple of Kissin' Jim Folsom, who was the most liberal governor probably in the 20th century in Alabama.

But then he saw the way the political wind was blowing and he decided to grab it and run with it.

And as he said "I'll never be out-segged again" when he lost the first race for the governorship.

- He regretted that position later in life.

- He did, he really did.

I mean, I think part of it was, we'll never know what was really in his heart, but he definitely changed his tune.

I mean, he was not really a full scale bigot, he was a demagogue.

He was using it.

He knew that his voters were susceptible to this kind of thing, that he could master it and dominate it.

But I don't think he ever lost his sense of decency, frankly.

I know a lot of people who knew him well, and so he was just a different breed of cat than Donald Trump.

- He later apologized to Jesse Jackson.

- He sure did.

- David, what do you think the objective conditions are that lead to a politician like Trump calling Democrats the enemy, saying, "Look, we may want to arrest them, we wanna arrest generals that we don't like.

We want to put people who are in the FBI or the Attorney General's office on trial, fire a whole lot of federal workers."

What are the economic or the real conditions that might lead to that kind of thinking?

- Yeah, so we're historians, there are political scientists out there who do different kind of work than we do.

And part of what they found is first, when we look at how people feel about the nation, what are they afraid of?

And there's considerable amount of fear, not just among Democratic voters, but also among Republican voters against each other, against their ideas about what the nation should look like, about how they value hard work or don't value hard work, and those kinds of things sort of ideological, not the kind of objective on the meat and bread kind of things you're talking about do play a sign significant part here.

I mean, when we think about the economic circumstances, right?

Inflation is high, wages are flat or falling, and although inflation has fallen, prices have not.

And so people have been concerned quite loudly about their economic situation.

And at the same time, these great political scientists are also looking at what is driving people's votes.

And they've looked at a whole host of factors.

So people's income, their economic situation under the previous administration, their perspectives on ideological things like abortion or trans rights or gay rights.

And what they found is that none of those things are really predictive of how people ended up voting for Donald Trump.

There were two things that were most predictive.

One of them were people's attitudes about sex and gender.

Do they believe that women have a right or have a purpose in leading?

And there was a pretty strong correlation there, but the strongest correlation is related to the conversation we just had about immigration, which is their views on race and racial hostility.

So when people measured very high on racial hostility, they were more likely to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

It was highly predictive.

But the same was also true for Democratic voters in the 2020 primary, they were more likely to vote for Joe Biden against the candidates of color in that race.

And so I think these objective economic factors matter, but they're always interpreted through these other social and cultural lenses.

- So it's not as simple as saying that people were upset about the state of the economy?

- No.

It can't be, it never is.

- I mean, Trump really was able to ride this whole deepening of the culture war, which dates back to the late '60s.

And a lot of politicians have developed this as a kind of the theme of their careers.

But Trump has taken it to another whole order, and for him, I think it's a fairly easy game to play.

If you demonize the people on the border, and you make up all these lies about that they're all criminals and that they're all just despicable people you would not want to have in your society, there's enough ignorance out there for people to believe it.

And if you have enough people saying this and saying it over and over again, I think it has powerful political influence.

- Gary, what do you think the message of the election was for Florida?

- It is the culmination of an extraordinary quarter century of success.

I mean, consider in 1942, Florida's Democratic party numbered 604,000 registered voters.

The Republican party had 32,000.

If you're a 24-year-old in Florida today, you've never known a Democratic governor.

It is astounding.

I don't know if anyone saw this coming, but Republicans have worked harder, they've embraced these issues with more fervor, they have more money, it is an absolute rout.

I mean, I can't imagine anyone would've predicted this in 2000, the sheer success.

The good news for Tampa may be Tampa may get a new Trump University replacing USF and a Trump Tower.

- I wanna go back to something we talked about earlier, and that is the rise of... You're an expert among other things on Italian immigrants.

So when I see names of current Neo-Nazis or current Ku Klux Klan members who come from Italian backgrounds, I wonder what they're thinking, what leads them today to kind of ignore what happened to their ancestors a hundred years ago?

- I see this in the classrooms.

Students who will often say the problem with today's immigrants is they did it illegally that my grandparents from Sicily or Poland did it the right way.

All you had to do before 1920 was show up.

And if you didn't have an arrest record, you weren't an anarchist, you were in.

And often you became a citizen and you didn't even realize it.

Now, it's legitimate if there are illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, I think most people would say that's a special case.

But this is insanity, the sheer overreach going into this.

So there's almost no comparison of... - And of course the crime rate among undocumented immigrants is much lower than the population at large.

The whole thing that's been sold is that these are particularly criminalized people.

That's just not true.

- And oftentimes they're afraid to commit crimes because they don't wanna be sent back to their home country.

- They've got a good reason to keep their noses clean.

- Ray, what about the use of military to send immigrants back to their home countries?

Is there a precedent for that in our history?

Have we used the military domestically in a way that would enforce- - I'm not sure.

There was operation Wetback as it was called in the mid 1950s.

And there may have been some military involvement, but not to the extent that Trump has contemplating.

There's always been a kind of a sacrosanct division between civilian and military authorities that you just don't use the military against other Americans, citizens or non-citizens.

So it's an incredibly important change if it does happen, and I'm not sure where it's going to lead.

- Gary, would you add- - This would be a catastrophe.

It reminds me almost of a scene from "Gladiator."

No Roman general has ever entered the city of Rome.

But it'd be fascinating to come back a year from now and inspect the damage, but it's shocking, the overreach.

No one has ever seen this before.

This is unprecedented in American history.

Now the one exception of this is, again, Operation Wetback.

- [Rob] Was that in the 1940s?

- '50s.

- 1950s?

- And the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II.

Although the difference was most of them were citizens, I mean, we were deporting citizens, which we may also be doing again.

- Of course, the Japanese were not deported.

They were just incarcerated for a while, which is terrible.

- David, is there a possibility that this is just rhetoric being used by President Trump and his supporters to scare people or to fire up his base to win the election, that he doesn't have any intention to carry out the use of the military, the rounding up of immigrants, the arrests of political opponents, or going after people in the so-called Deep State that work for the FBI or the Justice Department.

Is it possible that this is just rhetoric?

- Anything is possible, and it's totally possible, I think especially with someone as unstable in terms of his implementation of the things that he promises as Donald Trump is.

And at the same time, he's building out this cabinet of folks who have a vested interest in seeing these policies manifested.

And he has the power of bureaucracy at his hands.

And what that means is he can say a thing and require a thing.

And the reality is that there are people who need to hold onto their jobs who will carry the thing out.

We see it happening here in the state of Florida with higher education, this Senate Bill 266, which is requiring a great deal of changes in how we are allowed to educate students in public universities.

And it's not so much that the Governor and the legislature were particularly smart in devising this law.

Their general counsel helped them.

But really the implementation is happening at the level of the university of people who just like need their jobs and don't have power.

And ultimately, I think that will be what carries it forward, is if they want it to happen, it won't be because Trump's hands are necessarily adept at making it happen.

- I wanna say that this is a great panel, but we invited additional history professors, but it turns out that some of them have left the state and moved on to other jobs.

Are we seeing a brain drain from Florida of academics for instance or others who are leaving the state because of what's going on inside the state?

- Anecdotally, we've seen it at every state university school that I have been in conversation with, USF, FSU, University of Florida, there have been faculty who have left.

It's also been very difficult to attract people into our jobs now.

We can put out a sort of broad call for an Americanist in history or an Americanist in political science.

And years ago we would've gotten 300, 400 applicants.

And now we're getting 10% of that.

I think we're seeing a brain drain.

We're also seeing kind of people saying, "I just don't wanna be here."

- Florida has become something of a laughingstock around the country.

It used to be people in Florida would might say we're bad, but we're not as bad as Alabama or Mississippi.

Now there are people in Alabama and Mississippi who are saying we're bad, but we're not as bad as Florida.

- And of course there was the Johns Committee in the 1960s, a fear of homosexuals and communism.

A potent mix.

- And African-Americans.

- And there were investigations and people were fired because of the investigation.

- Hundreds were fired.

- Last question, we only have about two and a half minutes, but I wonder, from everybody here, and David, could I start with you, is democracy in trouble?

Do you think that that we can bounce back?

Because I think even some of the Republicans think that Trump on some of these issues going too far.

Is democracy, small d democracy in trouble?

- I think so.

I think democracy is in trouble.

And that might sound like a cynical answer, but I think it's a positive one.

I think many times in throughout American history, we've had to reach a point of crisis in order to see where we can grow and who we can become.

And I think that is happening right now.

What it means, we can't know.

But ultimately the answer to the question is yes.

And I hope that the aftermath of it all is building a different kind of vision for how we relate to each other as citizens and as people on this planet together.

- Gary, let me go to you on that same question.

- I'm gonna answer the question with a story.

So in 1980, I interviewed Nina Taliarina Ferlita and asked her about her immigration experience.

And she replied, "Imagine a 14-year-old girl disrobing in front of adults.

They threw on us all kinds of disinfectant.

I still smell it today.

But the minute I saw the Statue of Liberty, I left everything behind.

It was like stepping on ice.

And by the time you're on the other side, it's melted."

That is the immigration experience in a story.

And we should think about the sacrifices of the immigrants and put things in perspective today.

- Ray, we have a minute.

Is democracy in trouble?

- I think it is, and I hope I'm wrong, of course, I keep trying to be optimistic, but I think it has to do with this attack on constitutional law and the Constitution.

I mean, I think that the mental aspect of Trumpism is that the end justifies the means, that the reason we have constitutional law is that we don't want to be enticed into taking shortcuts, moral shortcuts, ethical shortcuts.

We have to abide by these time-worn principles.

And I think if Trump is able to get away with a lot of this, sort of whittling down the constitutional basis of American society, I think it's gonna be very difficult to get it back.

Nothing's permanent.

That's something history teaches us.

But it's gonna be extremely difficult because people are kind of, these days, they're kind of result-oriented, kinda the bottom line.

They don't really often care as much about the process, due process.

And I think once we lose due process, we're in very deep trouble.

- Thank you all for taking part.

Thanks to our guest, Gary Mormino, David Ponton, and Ray Arsenault.

If you have comments about this program, send them to ftw@wedu.org.

Our show is available as a podcast.

From all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend and a great Thanksgiving holiday.

(bright music)