In times of political turmoil, it’s comforting to seek historical comparisons with current events as a way of assuring ourselves that we have been here before and come through it.

The casual way in which Donald Trump has overturned decades of political orthodoxy, domestically and internationally, in the past month has had commentators reaching for the history books.

Historian Adam Hochschild draws parallels between today’s political climate and the “red scare” period of 1917-1921, highlighting anti-immigrant sentiment, mass deportations, and suppression of dissenting voices under then US President Woodrow Wilson.

Writing in Vanity Fair, Molly Jong-Fast has compared Trump’s America with a period in the 1950s when the country was in the grip of anti-Communist paranoia fuelled by the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, chaired by Senator Joe McCarthy.

Her grandfather, Howard Fast, spent three months in jail, during which he began writing the screenplay for the slave epic Spartacus, which he was forced to self-publish after being blacklisted.

In Europe, it’s tempting to compare Trump’s isolationism and support for Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine with the appeasement of Hitler by European leaders, including the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in the 1930s.

Read more by Carlos Alba

When events move as quickly as they have done – within days Trump appears to have single-handedly dismantled global security arrangements that have existed since the end of the Second World War – it’s reasonable to fear the onset of something catastrophic.

When the world’s most powerful democracy appears to show such scant regard for the rules-based order, and the network of........

© Herald Scotland