Trump attacks core US values at Rushmore. Disagree with him, you’re an enemy of the state.

Ellis Cose, Opinion columnist Published 7:00 a.m. ET July 6, 2020 | Updated 12:15 p.m. ET July 6, 2020

In the wake of statues and monuments being desecrated and taken down, President Trump vows to protect Mount Rushmore from any changes. USA TODAY

Trumpsdishonest characterization and vilification of people whose crime is having inconvenient opinions gets close to the worst of the World War I era.

As he tells it, President Donald Trump is fighting to deliver us from left-wing radicals out to destroy our history. That fewif anysuch figures exist has not deterred him. Nor does it give him pause that destroying history whatever that may mean is not the same as protesting particular monuments. Most disturbing is not the illogic of the quest, but the presumption that anyone who disagrees with Trumps version of the past is an enemy of the state.

Such intolerance in the presidency is much more dangerous, and un-American, than the threat Trump supposedly fights to contain. Also, Trump seems oblivious to the fact that the First Amendment is not designed to protect the president from people who disagree with him but to protect protesters against the repression of the state.

His speech at Mount Rushmore this pastweekend, attacking those out to overthrow the American Revolution, reminds me of the rhetoric of World War I: rhetoric weaponized against tens of thousands of people guilty only of opposing the war and President Woodrow Wilson.

Trumps language, with its reference to government agents assigned to protect us against a sinister campaign of destruction and indoctrination, could have been lifted almost verbatim from the governments anti-dissident playbook of over 100 years ago.

In September 1917, the Justice Department indicted 166 members of the Industrial Workers of the World for interfering with the war effort. The U.S. District Attorney in Chicago, who handled the case, claimed union leaders were promoting the most vicious forms of sabotage, particularly in industries engaged in furnishing war munitions.The government also alleged that the IWW had blown up ammunition factories, tried to foment armed resistance, and torched forests and lumber mills.

None of the ugly allegations was ever proven to be true. Most were never really addressed at trial.

President Donald Trump arrives for Independence Day events at Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Keystone, South Dakota, on July 3, 2020.(Photo: SAUL LOEB, AFP via Getty Images)

Even so, the establishment press blindly supported the government.Asthe marathon trial moved toward a conclusion, theNew York Timespublished a wrap-up that read more like a prosecution brief than a news report. It praised the judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, as one of the most able judicial officers on the Federal Bench. (The Times assessment notwithstanding, in 1921 the Supreme Court tossed out a conviction of and 20-year sentence imposed on anti-war congressman Victor Berger because of bias Landis had exhibited at trial.)

TheTimesportrayed the IWW as a band of dangerous outlaws: American Bolshevikiunder the Soviet boot, and a revolutionary society which has openly declared that its purpose is unceasing warfare to exterminate the wage system and seize the industries of the nation.

Juneteenth irony: Trump's Tulsa rally evokes a tragic 1921 example of the systemic racism he won't confront

In such an agitated atmosphere, impartiality was impossible. The entire IWW group (or what remained of it after various individuals had disappeared or had their cases dismissed) was convicted. Union leader Bill Haywood and his 14 top lieutenants were sentenced to 20 years. Haywood escaped imprisonment by fleeing the country, but numerous IWW members served hard time in federal confinement before President Warren Harding commuted their sentences in 1923.

By then the Red Scarewas over, along with the practice of arresting thousands of people just for speaking out. Also, Americans were beginning to understand thanks in part to the efforts of the recently foundedAmerican Civil Liberties Union that the point of the First Amendment was to protect them against such abuse.

Few people are prepared to defend the notion of a mob tearing down any statue it happens to dislike. But Trumps campaign goes much further than that. Protesters are not demanding absolute allegiance to anything. Nor are they attempting to destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.

Trumpsdishonest characterization and vilification of people whose only crime is having inconvenient opinions takes us uncomfortably close to the rhetoric that justified the worst excesses of the World War I era.

Outrage is warranted:Confederate statues are billboards for racism. Let's take themdown the right way.

After weeks of defending monuments of Confederate war heroes, Trump has decided America needs a so-called statuary park honoring American heroes. Too timid, apparently, to commission new statues of Confederate officers, he proposes featuring such luminaries as Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and the Wright brothers.

Never mind that no one is threatening to pull down statues of Abraham Lincoln and the Wright brothers. Never mind that a few more statues of such people would add nothing to anyones understanding of American history.

In truth, Trump is not out to defend history but to obscure it and to crush those who would bring it to light while replacing reality with his fairy tale version in which he somehow ends up the hero.

Ellis Cose, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is the author of "Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLUs 100-Year Fight for Rights in America," which is publishingTuesdayand from which parts of this column are adapted. His next book,"The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America," will be released Sept. 15. Follow him on Twitter:@EllisCose

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