American Retro

ART IMITATES LIFE. The reverse is equally true. The miniseries American Primeval, which dropped on Netflix in January 2025, is set during the Utah War of 1857. It could easily be set in Donald Trump’s dystopian America of 2025.

In American Primeval, Utah was a racist wasteland in the newly formed United States. Four groups fought one another for territory and dominance.

The first was a Mormon militia steeped in the strict Mormon faith, dispensing cruel punishment to its enemies.

The second was the proud Shoshone tribe of Native Americans, pushed off their ancestral land by invading Europeans.

The third was a ruthless band of European colonist-settlers who regarded any territory they settled on as theirs for good on the principle of finders-keepers.

The fourth group was the US cavalry, a patchwork army of colonial buccaneers playing the role of law enforcers between the competing interests of the other three groups.

Within four years, in 1861, the US would descend into Civil War fought ostensibly to decide whether African slaves shipped to North America by European slave traders should be freed or remain enslaved.

Northern Unionists won the war against Southern Confederates determined to keep slaves working on their vast cotton plantations. The Civil War ended in 1865. Were slaves freed?

Technically yes, but legally no. The southern states kept their slaves in shackles. Those who escaped the cotton plantations in the south fled from Mississippi and Tennessee to the north to Boston and New York where they would not be killed for being Black.

But even in liberal Boston and New York, most African-Americans were not permitted to vote. The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1868 had given African-Americans the right of citizenship. But at voting booths, Blacks were routinely denied the right to vote. In 1870, the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution gave American citizens of all races the right to vote.

It wasn’t enough. An inherently racist American political system mandated literacy tests and invoked the infamous “grandfather clause” which overrode the new reformist voting law.

It took institutionally racist America nearly a century to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that secured legal voting rights for all races. This was a full two years after the tragic end in 1963 of John F Kennedy’s liberal presidency.

Cut to the present. President Trump often compares himself to President William McKinley who served from 1897 to 1901. McKinley was assassinated in September 1901. But that isn’t why Trump likes to compare himself with McKinley.

McKinley’s was an imperial presidency, much like Trump’s. McKinley waged war on Spain and colonised the Spanish-held territory of the Philippines and annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa. From being a country founded on the principle of anti-imperialism, McKinley presided over America’s first colonial empire.

Trump’s bid to annex Canada and Greenland are straight out of McKinley’s playbook. McKinley was also a diehard protectionist. In 1890, he developed the McKinley Tariff. McKinley kept America on the gold standard and imposed high tariffs to protect US manufacturing. Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, currently on pause, are a contemporary version of McKinley’s protectionist tariffs.

Riding a crest of popularity, McKinley was elected to a second presidential term. Nine months later, he was assassinated. The Netflix series American Primeval focuses on the Utah War of 1857 between colonist-settlers, Mormon militias and Native Americans driven off their land as the ragtag US army looks on. Oddly but not surprisingly, Blacks are missing from the Utah Wars. In 1857, they were treated little better than the cattle European colonist-settlers reared, often worse. Whipping and branding of African slaves with hot irons was commonplace.

It was in the McKinley era, a decade before he became president, that Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump, then aged 16, emigrated to the US in 1885. Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod, emigrated to the US from Scotland in 1930, aged 18. Ironically, for a fiercely anti-immigrant president, Trump and his family have strong immigrant roots.

President Trump is a transactional ideologue like European colonist-settlers in American Primeval were in 1857. If there was money to be made, the colour of your skin could be—temporarily—set aside.

The white supremacist origins of MAGA and America First were fused in the primeval cauldron of 19th-century America.

Donald TrumpgeopoliticalMcKinleyUS politicsUS-Canada