As promised, the second Trump administration has quickly rolled out a slew of policies and executive orders that the president says are all aimed at “Making America Great Again.” This takes on different forms, including Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency quickly laying off thousands of workers at various federal agencies, and President Donald Trump pausing all funding for Ukraine. Trump says that, among others, there are three groups that are making America not-great: immigrants, people with disabilities, and people who are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

These administration efforts began at a time when many Americans expressed an overall rising sense of dissatisfaction with the state of the country and politics. Just 19 per centof Americans said in December 2024 that they think the country is heading in the right direction. This perspective is striking not only because it is so dark, but because it strongly resembles how Americans felt during a pivotal decade 100 years ago, when people’s dissatisfaction with the state of the country led to a series of discriminatory, hateful policies by the federal government.

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It’s a period of American history that I think offers something of a mirror of the current political situation in the U.S. In the 1920s, the economy was good, the U.S. had won World War I, and a terrible pandemic ended. But many Americans did not see it that way. They entered the 1920s with a growing sense of paranoia and a feeling that they had been robbed of something. Winning World War I had come at a terrible cost. More than 116,000 American soldiers died and twice that number came home wounded.

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As the war came to a close, the U.S. – and the world – was in the throes of the flu pandemic that ultimately claimed tens of millions of lives, including about 675,000 in the U.S. Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hatebased policies at the federal and state level that targeted non-white immigrants and disabled people.

Among the most........

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