In the decade before the Civil War, slave-owning men known as “Fire Eaters” started ratcheting up public discourse in stark, divisive, all or nothing terms. They cast their interests not as political differences, but as an existential crisis facing the nation. They used public speeches to vilify people who disagreed with them, spreading hatred in the hearts of men until it grew hot, and war became inevitable.

It’s impossible to read the words of those men without hearing the voices of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller speaking at Charlie Kirk’s memorial.

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Trump and Miller use violent words to elicit violent responses

Mark Hertling writes in his excellent essay, “Beware today’s fire eaters” that the 1861 onset of Civil war can be attributed to political arsonists who portrayed compromise and coexistence as dishonor, promoting national violence as the only resort. Hertling, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, writes that the Civil War agitators “moved beyond grievance into agitation and violence. They … treated any dissent as an existential threat to their way of life. They cultivated a rhetoric that was designed not to persuade opponents but to radicalize their many followers,” ultimately celebrating political violence as necessary.

The tactics of the fire-eaters, Herling notes, reveal the same playbook we are witnessing today as Trump radicalizes his base by demonizing and dehumanizing his political opponents. Fire Eaters of the Civil War, like Trump and Miller, painted their political adversaries as mortal enemies. As Trump has demonstrated repeatedly with Executive Orders that have no basis in law, the Fire Eaters also normalized extralegal responses. They claimed political violence was a patriotic duty, just as Trump exalted J6 rioters to fight like hell or they wouldn’t have a country left, then rewarded even the worst among them with a pardon.

As Trump, Miller, Hegseth and Bondi build the world’s largest and most lethal police state, they are equipping Trump with his own private militia. As Trump teases a third presidential run, it’s not hard to see that, for him, J6 was but a rehearsal.