History repeats itself, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib to ICE executions

As we see Trump’s base depressed and fracturing, we shouldn’t forget that MAGA is nothing new. And it won’t disappear.

I finally got a chance to see the documentary released late last year about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, “Cover Up,” directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus. Hersh, who worked independently as well as for periods of time at The New York Times and the New Yorker, produced groundbreaking journalism over the past six decades. And he’s still doing it, at age 89, right here on Substack.

Hersh made some mistakes, including in some unpublished research on a book about JFK and in underestimating the brutality of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the film doesn’t spare a focus on them. But some mistakes are bound to happen in a career spanning more than half a century.

Two groundbreaking, shocking—and all too accurate—stories Hersh uncovered had me thinking about the events of today, and how history repeats itself. They offer us a lesson about Trump and MAGA. There’s a tendency to believe we’d seen nothing like Trump and MAGA before in modern American history, and that’s because it’s partially true: There has never been a president so vulgar, so corrupt, so overtly racist, and so celebratory about his authoritarianism.

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But we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Trump’s style of despotism means we’ve not had leaders who engaged in despotic actions, nor that there wasn’t a movement like MAGA that celebrated brutality and dictatorial actions, a segment of the population that has been an ugly part of the fabric of this country from the beginning.

In 1969, during the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson’s administration, Hersh broke the barbaric story of the My Lai massacre. U.S. troops were ordered to shoot and kill civilians in the village of My Lai. Between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. Army soldiers, including elderly people, children and babies.

MAGA man can’t admit Trump is losing the Iran war. Becomes speechless.

General William C. Westmoreland at the time was demanding higher numbers of casualties among the Viet Cong in order to justify the war. Hersh revealed details about Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. and his execution of civilians in My Lai, but Calley was among others who committed such crimes (a few others were also charged) and, more importantly, was given orders from above. Calley took the fall for his superiors, who never faced any ramifications or even thorough investigation; he was eventually convicted of the murder of 22 civilians.

Not only should the war have ended there, but we should have seen arrests of people going right to the top of the military. Instead, the war ramped up. And the next president, Richard Nixon, and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, would engage in worse atrocities, using napalm in North Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia.

That was allowed to happen because they had the support of the base of the Republican Party—their own MAGA—even as the anti-war movement grew. That movement had risen up around Calley, much like the MAGA movement, with marches and protests and people hanging banners blazing “Free Calley!,” many of them in deep red states. This base within the =GOP was ginned up on brutality and murder and believed it was perfectly okay to kill non-white civilians.

It’s true that many on the left who were part of the antiwar movement saw Calley as a scapegoat and defended him, but this was for far different reasons than those on the right, who supported Republican leaders in excusing, even promoting brutality.

Calley was sentenced to life in prison, but Nixon—prior to Trump, considered the most corrupt president in history—released Calley under house arrest after three days. Military authorities reduced his sentence to 20 years, then 10 years. Eventually he was released after only three years of house arrest. The GOP had shifted public opinion in favor of Calley, using racism and calls to patriotis and it was enough to keep Republicans in power, as the war continued. Nixon was reelected in 1972—the US didn’t pull out of the war until 1973—and Nixon wasn’t brought down until the Watergate scandal.

The other story that Hersh exposed and which connects to Trump and MAGA was that of the brutality and torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which he revealed in April of 2004. It was little over a year into George W. Bush’s senseless war based on lies that cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Hersh uncovered graphic evidence of widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners—after learning as well that CBS first had the images and “60 Minutes” was refusing to air them, urged by the Bush administration to cover them up as a “national security” matter.

I know many of you will remember the horror of those photographs and their release, which you can see here, and how they jolted the entire globe, just as the My Lai massacre did, sending shock waves around the planet. Support for the war among the American people had begun to slowly wane after Bush’s empty “Mission Accomplished” photo-op within weeks of the war, claiming victory just as Trump did with the war in Iran, while many hundreds of American soldiers continued to die over coming months.

Linsdey Graham debased himself for power. And then he died.

But the majority still supported the war until the the Abu Ghraib photos caused support for the war to diminish further.

And yet, just as with Nixon and the GOP amid the aftermath of My Lai, the Republican base stuck with Bush, including those who rabidly defended Abu Ghraib. Some GOP lawmakers called the prisoners “terrorists” and thus somehow deserving of the torture.

Again, that event should have been the end of the war. But it would go on for years, backed by the GOP. Enough agreed with that sentiment about torture and brutality, and treating Muslims with brutality. Just eight months later, Bush was re-elected president in 2024 by a slim margin, like Trump, getting Republicans and just enough independents to put him over the line.

Both these events, happening decades apart, had the entire world gripped, as people saw the U.S. as a brutal, authoritarian place that had sunk to a terrible low—just like today. One might say that the fact that we came back from those events and gained much trust around was a good thing.

But now the world is watching the U.S. lead another illegal, unjust war and threatening to seize countries like Greenland while executing American citizens and immigrants in the streets, from Alex Pretti and Rene Good to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Guerrero—and many others, killed by ICE agents or dying in concentration camps.

You have to wonder how many passes the U.S. will get, and who could blame the world? The ICE executions are yet another manifestation of the brutality of the GOP and, more importantly, a part of the base that likes seeing them happen.

Democrats will beat back MAGA in the midterms, and, if people work hard enough, MAGA will be defeated in 2028—because, as always, there are more of us than them. But past events like My Lai and Abu Ghraib, as well as January 6th, should make us realize that—even if there is justice, and people at the top are sent to prison, which didn’t happen after those events, including afterJanuary 6th—that isn’t enough when it comes to the hate that has been part of this country from its inception.

The real lesson is that can we never be complacent and think we’ve beaten back MAGA—or whatever name or manifestation it may take in the future—because it will never simply go away.