https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/in-america-talk-turns-to-something-unspoken-for-150-years-civil-war/2019/02/28/b3733af8-3ae4-11e9-a2cd-307b06d0257b_story.html Article written March 2nd, 2019. At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred recently on one point that was once nearly unthinkable: The country is on the verge of “civil war.” First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump’s. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.” The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of di­Genova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him — although she placed the blame squarely on the president. Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.” Then there’s the persistent worry by some about the 2020 election. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, that there will never be a peaceful transition of power,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, told a congressional committee Wednesday. Some historians have sounded a similar alarm. “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?” Victor Davis Hanson, a historian with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, asked last summer in an essay in National Review. Hanson said the United States “was nearing a point comparable to 1860,” about a year before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, S.C. Around the same time Hanson was writing, Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor who is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, imagined his own new American civil war, in which demands for Trump’s impeachment lead to calls from Fox News commentators for “every honest patriot to take to the streets.” Reich got some unlikely support recently from Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. “I think that 2019 is going to be the most vitriolic year in American politics since the Civil War, and I include Vietnam in that,” Bannon said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Barbara Walter, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, said her first instinct was to dismiss any talk of civil war in the United States. “But the U.S. is starting to show that it is moving in that direction,” she said. “Countries with bad governance are the ones that experience these wars.” James Fearon, a Stanford University political scientist who researches political violence .... “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he added, “but I guess it’s not entirely out of the question.”