Can a fractured US survive the myths surrounding Donald Trump’s election loss?
- Trump allies and the Republican Party must help tamp down the nation’s growing tension and distrust, experts say
- Warnings that if the embers of disinformation are not stamped out now, they could roar back later with great power
But historians say the appearance of that flag – the emblem of a losing side in a civil war, more than a century and a half after it ended – is also a good reminder of something else: that Trump’s nascent legacy, even after four years as president, still has the potential to take on a powerful new life of its own in the years to come, long after he is gone.
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“It is very dangerous because it can be used by demagogues and it has been used,” said the historian Margaret MacMillan, who has written extensively on World War I, in which Germany was defeated and surrendered, only to come surging back as a bitterly aggrieved nation under the Nazi flag.
“The myth of the ‘stab in the back’ was quite a powerful one,” she said. “It was used by right-wing forces, including of course the Nazis, and these myths can have a great deal of mobilising power. But it takes people from the elite to actually support them as well.”