Minutes into his January inaugural address inside the U.S. Capitol dome, standing before the leaders of both parties and the world’s wealthiest tech oligarchs, Donald Trump declared a national emergency. America was confronting “threats and invasions” from across the U.S.-Mexico border, the new president explained, and extraordinary steps would be necessary “to defend our country” from migrants. “Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored,” he promised. With this rhetoric, Trump opened his second presidency by establishing a state of exception — to borrow a term from the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt — using the mendacious account of a border invasion as justification for suspending the rule of law.

From one point of view, Trump’s invocation of a specious foreign threat to legitimize a wide-ranging assault on civil liberties links his regime to the national security paradigm established at the beginning of the Cold War and further developed during the War on Terror. Trump, in fact, announced in his inaugural address that he would be designating Mexican cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.” In a recent essay in Jacobin, Daniel Bessner argues that Trump’s authoritarian ruling style owes much to the theory of the unitary executive — which elevates the president to the status of a sovereign who can operate independently from the scrutiny of Congress — pioneered in the Reagan administration and defended by Republican legal functionaries ever since. John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer under George W. Bush, infamously appealed to this theory to justify holding “enemy combatants” indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay and violating the anti-torture provisions of the Geneva Conventions. Yoo himself has pointed out the continuities between Trump and his more conventional predecessors; he praised Trump as a “constitutional conservative” in his 2020 hagiography, Defender-in-Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power.

But many of Yoo’s fellow Bush administration alums see Trump as a threat to the values they imagine to have animated the War on Terror and the Cold War before it, as do other members of the bipartisan Washington foreign policy “Blob.” To hear them tell it, by cozying up to dictators, undermining alliances like NATO, and dismantling “soft power” institutions like USAID, Trump has abandoned America’s obligation to serve as the leader of the “free world.” The president’s insistence that the United States is actively under attack has gone hand in hand with his skepticism of the projects of alliance-building and global governance that typically accompanied such warnings in the era after World War II.

The Cold War establishment long envisioned a world governed by universal liberal norms — the much-vaunted “rules-based international order” — but also granted the American sovereign the ability to “decide on the exception,” as Schmitt put it, suspending those rules in cases of emergency. In his second term, Trump has embraced the model of the Schmittian exception, but he has also made clear his lack of interest in ever returning to normalcy. Instead, he is rapidly and recklessly dismantling the very order the U.S. is supposed to return to once the exception has ended. If Cold Warriors and their post-9/11 successors envisioned the imperial president as Cincinnatus, who assumed the Roman dictatorship in moments of crisis and then relinquished that power when the crises abated, Trump instead sees himself more in the vein of Julius Caesar: dictator for life.

Even before the start of the Cold War, the American establishment had plenty of practice suspending civil liberties in response to emergencies — from the first Red Scare after World War I to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to cite the most obvious twentieth-century examples. Arguably the most sweeping and longest lasting state of exception in American history, however, was the second Red Scare, commonly known as McCarthyism, which began at the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s and persisted for roughly a decade, surviving even the political demise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. Much of Trump’s present assault on higher education and the federal civil service has precedent in this era, in which the supposed emergency of communist infiltration of the U.S. (not wholly imagined, but certainly exaggerated) was met with witch hunts that encompassed practically every intellectually oriented profession, suppressing at least a generation of left-wing activism. Where Trump’s assault differs is that it has taken the form of a wholesale war on the administrative state, whereas in the McCarthy era the administrative state was rapidly expanding even as alleged subversive elements were purged.

The McCarthy era can’t be reduced to the authoritarian impulses of a single president. McCarthy’s notorious persecution campaigns and the show trials hosted by the House Un-American Activities Committee were just the most conspicuous manifestations of a wider abrogation of Americans’ constitutional rights in the postwar years. Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the two presidents under whose administrations McCarthyism unfolded, did less to drive it than did J. Edgar Hoover, his FBI minions, and of course the demagogic McCarthy himself — and all of these figures, at one time or another, had the support of vast swaths of the wider elite who shared their panic over communism. Even Cold War liberals, who often disapproved of McCarthy and his tactics, ultimately sided with the consensus that the global spread of communism represented a unique emergency demanding a unique response. And while the McCarthyist terror eventually abated, the national security state that fostered its rise and that was justified by the same logic would endure for decades, even beyond the end of the Cold War itself in 1989.

A year into the American fiasco in Iraq, the legal scholar Kim Lane Scheppele argued that the idea of the state of exception illuminates the connection between the Cold War national security apparatus and its expansion after September 11, 2001. “Confronted with a new enemy after 9/11,” Scheppele wrote, “the Bush administration fell back into Cold War habits.” Vice President Dick Cheney first articulated his “one percent doctrine,” which asserted the need to treat the lowest probability threats as though they were certain to occur, in November 2001, and it guided the administration’s response. After seeing America humiliated by Al Qaeda on their watch, Bush and Cheney panicked, wildly overreacted, and committed themselves to acting recklessly in the name of preventing future attacks.

The most reckless thing they did, of course, was topple Saddam Hussein’s regime by launching the largest U.S. invasion and occupation of another country in the past half-century. While Bush is ultimately responsible for the Iraq War and for the dishonest way it was marketed to the public, it’s important to note how much support he had for this decision: at the time of the invasion in March 2003, more than 70 percent of Americans backed it. Around 40 percent of House Democrats and 29 out of 50 Senate Democrats — including Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and Chuck Schumer — voted to authorize the invasion, alongside most Republicans. Many prominent liberal commentators, including current Atlantic editor-in-chief and inadvertent group chat participant Jeffrey Goldberg, endorsed it. There was a widespread desire in the aftermath of 9/11, articulated eloquently by Thomas Friedman two months into the war, to tell the Arab world to “suck on this!”

This posture defined the Bush presidency from September 2001 until about November 2006, when midterm defeats compelled Bush to sideline Cheney and force Donald Rumsfeld to resign. This marked the end of a roughly five-year-long state of exception with extremely wide buy-in. In the immediate wake of the attacks, a terrified public and its particularly terrified New York- and Washington-based elites handed over unprecedented power to a sovereign, Bush, who had run for president less than one year prior promising a “humble” foreign policy and criticizing nation-building and military overextension. Although the acute panic after the attacks gradually wound down, many aspects of the state of exception were long-lasting. While Bush spent his final years in office as a weak president cleaning up after his costly disasters, much of the legal and infrastructural legacy of the post-9/11 moment became so entrenched that it could continue its operations seamlessly under Barack Obama, and it remains intact more than two decades after the attacks.

It is the weak, post-exceptional Bush who has repeatedly declined to endorse Trump for president and who appears much friendlier with former Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Obama. The many vocal Trump critics who were once prominently associated with Bush’s administration — including Dick and Liz Cheney, John Bolton, Bill Kristol, and David Frum — rarely if ever acknowledge the continuities between the style of governance they championed after 9/11 and that of the new Trump administration, likely because they see that period as a justifiable state of exception. They seem to believe that the decisions they made after 9/11 were a response to a real, widely acknowledged, and theoretically time-limited crisis that required a different kind of governance than they would otherwise have counseled.

Many of Trump’s abuses are novel — no president has ever asserted such broad powers with so little legal or circumstantial justification, not to mention so little buy-in from the public and, especially, from the establishment. But Trump perceives, perhaps more clearly than Bush and his supporters ever did, that the post-9/11 state of exception never definitively ended. With its black sites, warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions, and extrajudicial assassinations, the War on Terror under Bush, Obama, and Biden provided a template for a more authoritarian approach to American governance that has never been properly dismantled — and that now, under Trump, is being fully exploited.