Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is accusing President Trump of seeking to start a civil war.
The California Democrat, a long-time adversary of Trump, said the early flood of presidential policies — the disruptive tariffs, mass firings of federal employees and empowerment of Elon Musk to gut the government and the services it provides — may appear haphazard on their surface. But there’s a unifying theory behind them, she said: Trump wants to incite violence.
“This president is putting us in a position where hungry people are going to be on the street. Where nonprofits, who were waiting for their checks, are not gonna get them. Where seniors waiting for their Social Security check, will not get it. Where poor families with children will not get what they believe the government has agreed to do,” Waters told reporters during the Democrats’ annual issues retreat in Northern Virginia.
“And so when that happens, what does Trump expect? Oh, I believe he expects violence. I believe he expects confrontation. I believe he’s working towards a civil war.”
Waters went on to say that Trump’s effort will fail. Democrats will speak out, organize and take to the streets in protest, she said. But the party — and especially those in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), where she’s a senior member — will not take the bait and be provoked into violence.
“It places the responsibility on us to live and do like Dr. Martin Luther King told us to do. He taught us to organize and to protest, but he taught us nonviolence,” she said.
“He’s going to get closer and closer in our face, and we’re going to have to be real responsible — we’re going to have to pray, we’re going to have to ask god to help us remember what Martin Luther King told us: Don’t ever let them goad you into violence,” she continued. “Because we don’t know what’s waiting in the background for us if we’re silly enough to do something like that.”
Trump has long flirted with the notion that a civil war is brewing in America. During his first impeachment in his first term, he promoted comments from a conservative pastor that booting him from office would spark a “civil war-like fracture.” In 2001, he encouraged thousands of his supporters to march to the Capitol to protest Congress’s certification of his 2020 election defeat — a protest that became a riot when hundreds of those people attacked law enforcers and stormed into the building.
More recently, after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies last year related to hush money payments to a porn star, he shared another post on social media predicting a return to 1776 — “except this time the fight is not against the British, it’s against communist Americans.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), the chair of the Black Caucus, emphasized that Waters was speaking for herself, not the entire Democratic Party. Still, Clarke didn’t rule out the possibility of violent conflict as a result of Trump’s confrontational policies.
“It is very clear that what Donald Trump is doing right now is violently impacting the communities that we represent,” Clarke told reporters at the Leesburg, Va., retreat.
“Whether that ultimately ends in a civil war remains to be seen.”
