Trump Is The Heir of Eisenhower

American tradition includes a lot of hate.

Image: People packed into trucks to be deported to Mexico during Eisenhower’s administration.

Is Trump a break with American tradition? Or is he an embodiment of it? That’s the latest iteration of a longstanding debate about the place of racism, injustice, and violence in American history.

The optimistic view is that the US was built on the principles of equality and freedom for all, and that our various failures—like, say, slavery—are mistakes or aberrations as we march (with some detours) towards a more and more perfect union. The less cheerful perspective is that slavery, racism, and colonialism are the core of American history and identity, and the high-minded language about equality and freedom is a hypocritical distraction from the core oppression which defines American hegemony at home and abroad.

Frequently these arguments focus, understandably, on the Founding Fathers, or else they circle around the Republican party of the last 40-50 years which gave birth to Trump. Trump himself has recently suggested another point of comparison though—Eisenhower.

Trump sees Ike as an inspiration and a justification for his horrific immigration policies—and he has a point. Trump has a talent for finding the worst aspects of American history and making them new again. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the US has to be its worst aspects. But it does suggest that American evils are more than just mistakes.

Trump Likes Ike

Trump’s been praising Eisenhower for years, going back at least to Republican presidential debates in 2015. In November of that year, he said approvingly that Eisenhower had moved move than a million “illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them way south.” Trump continues to site Eisenhower as an inspiration for his draconian anti-immigrant plan, which proposes using the military to deport all of the 10.5 million undocumented people in the United States—some of whom came here as children, and two-thirds of whom have lived in the US for more than a decade. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump boasted in a September 2023 speech.

The Eisenhower-era program Trump is referencing is  “Operation Wetback”, a mass deportation program which included an anti-Mexican slur in its name. During the 1940s, the US and Mexico had agreed on a program to allow Mexican men to work legally in agriculture on short-term contracts. The program however excluded women and children, encouraging some families to enter the US without documents to stay together.

The combination of legal and undocumented immigration was greeted in the US with a racist panic.  The New York Times, for example, blared that immigrants were “invad[ing] the U.S. in an unending—and uncontrolled—stream.” Other outlets portrayed Mexicans as criminals, or as bearers of disease. Government escalated deportation programs, culminating in Eisenhower’s vicious, chaotic and racist operation in 1954—headed in part by Border Patrol head Harlon B. Carter, who had been convicted of a racist murder of a Latino when he was a teenager.

Eisenhower claimed that the operation deported 1 million people. That’s probably an exaggeration. Experts say it was more like 250,000—though many more Mexicans in the US were terrorized into fleeing.

Whatever the exact numbers, the suffering, confusion, and cruelty was immense.  People of Mexican heritage—some undocumented, some legal immigrants, and some even citizens—were stuffed into planes, buses, and boats and shipped to random drop locations in Mexico, where they had no family and no support structure. Many died in custody from sunstroke and disease. In one incident, people rioted on an overcrowded boat in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing others to jump overboard. Five people drowned.

Do we like Ike?

Today Eisenhower’s racist, violent deportation scheme is generally seen by historians as…well, racist and violent. A Congressional investigation of the program determined that conditions on boats transporting people to Mexico were similar to those of “eighteenth century slave ships.” Doris Meissner, Commissioner of the U.S Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1993 and 2000, told CNN that Eisenhower’s program was “lawless; it was arbitrary; it was based on a lot of xenophobia, and it resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens.”

But while the ugly operation has been roundly condemned, it’s not very well known to the general public. Certainly, it’s less discussed than FDR’s Japanese internment camps. In part as a result, it hasn’t really damaged Eisenhower’s reputation. He’s generally thought of as a successful president and his reputation is not especially partisan or divisive. To the extent people know who he is, the associations are vaguely positive. That’s why Trump is able to evoke him to justify and validate his own horrific policies.

You could say that Eisenhower’s policies were an ugly blot on his presidency, and that, thanks to progress, we now know that what he did was wrong. Or you could say that Eisenhower’s policies demonstrate that xenophobia and racism are longstanding and central aspects of American immigration policy, and Trump is simply reiterating the core of who we are as a nation.

Another approach might be to argue that the US doesn’t really have any one core, good or evil. Instead, the US has a range of traditions and resources, which can be deployed in various ways by good actors and bad.

Nor are those traditions static. Trump, with unusual care for him, never refers to Eisenhower’s program by its racist name. Sustained advocacy by numerous groups since the 1950s have made people much more broadly aware of the dangers of racist slurs and dehumanization. In addition, liberalization of immigration policies in the last decades has given Latino and Hispanic advocacy groups more purchase on and visibility in public discourse, so slurs targeting Mexicans are much less acceptable than they were 70 years ago.

The term “Operation Wetback” today makes people recoil, and rightly so. That’s a win for antiracism, not least because it makes it easy to instantly identify Eisenhower’s actions as racist; he labelled them as racist himself.

The Ike in all of us

But as Ibrahim Kendi notes in Stamped from the Beginning, it is not just antiracism which has won victories over time. Instead, Kendi argues, you can see both “the antiracist force of equality and the racist force of inequality marching forward, progressing in rhetoric, in tactics, in policies.” For Trump, that means, in this case, avoiding particular racist language, building on racist history to establish legitimacy, and arguing for a massive expansion of past racist policies.

Latino people and Mexican people are much more present, much more integrated, and much more accepted now thanks to years of more enlightened immigration policies and years of public advocacy and antiracism. In that sense, you could say that Trump’s policies are a break with the past.

But the past is multiple, and Eisenhower’s grotesque bigotry has many heirs in public discourse and government policy over the decades. Obama infamously deported 2.5 million people, more than any president up to that time, in a deliberate effort to steal the right’s anti immigrant thunder, and/or because he was influenced by bigotry himself. Biden’s been repositioning to embrace a kinder, gentler, less-bigoted-but-still-pretty-bigoted anti-immigrant approach.

So, is Trump a break with American tradition? The answer is that it’s up to us. American tradition isn’t a Platonic truth hanging somewhere out there outside of history. If we want Trump’s immigration policies, and Eisenhower’s, and for that matter Obama’s, to reflect what America is—well, we can make that happen. And if we don’t want hatred of immigrants to define who we are, we can fight for that too.

We don’t have to like Ike. If we do, though, that will be what America is, because America—for better or worse—is just what Americans do.