At 250 years, America’s (fault) lines are showing. Partisan and regional divisions now rival the most intense internal conflicts apart from the Civil War.

The escalating tension between the red and blue political coalitions is permeating almost every aspect of American life, particularly under the pile-driver pressure of Donald Trump’s polarizing and norm-breaking presidency. Even the commemoration of this momentous anniversary has split the country into the familiar antagonistic camps.

Conflict within a nation is a difficult concept to quantify, but many measures — the widening policy differences among the states; Trump’s relentless confrontations with Democratic political leaders; the virtual disappearance of bipartisan cooperation in Congress; an uptick in political violence — suggest the US is operating at the high end of the scale. The US has faced periods of heightened friction before and — except for the Civil War — has always found ways to manage, if not necessarily resolve, its differences.

But several unique aspects now point toward intensifying and unpredictable division. Key among those is the role of Trump, who, perhaps more than any of his predecessors, has considered it in his interest to inflame the nation’s underlying disagreements. “What’s different this time is that not only are there fundamental divisions, but divisions that are being driven deliberately by the nation’s leader,” said Donald Kettl, former dean of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

One rare point of unity in this deeply divided country is that most Americans in both parties expect our divisions only to widen in the years ahead. The US has seen periods of intense internal friction before There is no golden age of American unity, with the nearest exception probably the decade of dominance by the Democratic-Republican party after the War of 1812 that contemporaries called, with some exaggeration, “the era of good feelings.” Regional, racial and economic differences have been woven into the American flag from the outset.

But those differences have proved much more difficult to contain at some points than others. Nothing, of course, compares to the years around the Civil War.

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the country careened through successive crises that progressively unraveled the threads binding North and South. Virtually no institution or issue in American life could transcend the widening sectional hostility: The conflict over slavery sundered religious denominations (the Southern Baptist Convention was formed during this period) and realigned political parties (with the Republican Party emerging as the voice of Northern Protestants opposed to slavery’s expansion).

This decoupling culminated in the massive bloodshed of the Civil War. It then persisted in continued struggle between the federal government and recalcitrant Southern Whites who undertook a campaign of systemic violence to prevent freed slaves from obtaining political and social rights.

This long confrontation ended only when the North abandoned its commitment to Reconstruction and allowed Southern states to impose Jim Crow segregation. University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, author of “The Rise and Fall of The Second American Republic,” a history of Reconstruction, noted that the centennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 1876 occurred even as the North acquiesced to the South re-subjugating its Black population. “It was supposed to be a moment of reconciliation between North and South, but it was not a very just peace,” she said in an interview. “The celebration (took) place on the backs of Black people in the South who would steadily lose their rights… not to mention experience terrible racist violence.” Many historians would point to two other periods that, apart from the Civil War era, generated the nation’s greatest internal tensions until now.

One came at the very outset of the new nation, in the years around 1800. While the founders largely did not anticipate the emergence of political parties, intense partisan conflict erupted immediately after George Washington’s two terms as America’s first president.

One combatant was the Federalist Party based in the Northeast, led by John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and sympathetic to England in its ongoing global struggle with Revolutionary-Era France. On the other side was the Southern-based Democratic-Republican Party led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which sympathized with France.

So heated were their conflicts over issues such as tariff rates that Jefferson later wrote, “Men who have been intimate all their lives, cross the streets to avoid meeting.” But the conflict escalated to a truly dangerous level when the Federalists, fearing that the Democratic-Republicans were plotting with France, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 during Adams’ presidency — and then used them to prosecute newspaper editors and even a US representative aligned with Jefferson’s proto-party for criticizing the administration. “Together, the acts divided the citizenry between the loyal citizens respectful of the president and the disloyal opposition,” wrote Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown University, in his book “The Presidents and The People.” Those tensions subsided when the acts expired after Jefferson won the presidency in 1800. But the struggle between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans flared to a dangerous level again during the War of 1812.

Federalists so opposed the war with England that three Northeastern governors from the party refused to provide troops, and activists even gathered for an 1814 convention that hinted at secession — a miscalculation that hastened the party’s collapse. Historians often cite the 1960s as the other most intense period of extended internal conflict.

In those years, America was shaken and challenged by mass movements supporting Civil Rights and opposing the Vietnam War; tectonic cultural changes in gender relations and sexual mores; a searing generation gap; a drumbeat of bombings and other violence from far-left groups such as the Weathermen; the growth of far-right movements like the John Birch Society; racial riots in major cities; a “police riot” at the 1968 Democratic Convention; and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F.

Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The 1960s’ pitched battles spilled into the 1970s through President Richard Nixon’s secret efforts to suppress his critics and ensure his reelection — a process that culminated in the Watergate scandal.

Just as the nation’s centennial celebration was framed as an opportunity to reunite after the Civil War, the bicentennial in 1976 echoed with themes of reconciliation following the bitter conflicts over civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate. By contrast, national reconciliation seems so distant now that few leaders this weekend have even given it lip service.

Will Trump-era divisions endure? Historians differ on how the underlying sources of disagreement between red and blue America today compare to the substantive disputes of the early 1800s and 1960s. “In my view we are not nearly as divided today as we were in the Adams/Jefferson years or even in the late 1960s,” said Yuval Levin, director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “We have been living in a 50/50 period for so long that neither party is really in a position to advance much of an agenda when it wins elections.” Others see bigger stakes in the cumulative distance between the visions of American identity that Democrats and Trump-era Republicans are advancing.

Their contrasting visions of rights, liberties and who qualifies as a legitimate American have fueled fierce fights on immigration, LGBTQ rights, classroom censorship, book bans, diversity in education and the workplace, and access to abortion. Though economic battles have not generated as much emotional intensity, the two coalitions have offered inimical approaches to the federal role in providing healthcare, protecting the environment, taxing the wealthy, and spending on military vs. domestic needs.

These fights have unfolded not only in national politics, but in a widening divergence between social and economic policies in blue and red states unmatched since at least the era of Jim Crow segregation. “These forces (dividing the states) have been at work … since before Trump and are now bearing fruit — or bearing poison, depending on which way you look at it,” Kettl says . As Kettl notes, the distance between these two coalitions was already widening before Trump emerged as the fulcrum of American politics in 2016.

But he has greatly intensified the force pulling them apart. Especially in his second term, Trump has governed more as the field marshal of a faction than as the leader of a unified nation.

He has sought to mobilize federal power in unprecedented ways against the states and cities that voted against him. Trump deployed the National Guard into Los Angeles and other blue cities until the Supreme Court stopped him. (They remain deployed in Washington, DC, where Trump has acted under separate authority.) His administration has launched criminal investigations of multiple Democratic local and state officials, and targeted blue-state social welfare programs with fraud investigations and aid suspensions.

He’s denied disaster aid to blue states at a much higher rate than red states and imposed massive reductions on federal scientific research spending that disproportionately hurts blue metropolitan areas. His administration has sought to cut off funding for blue states and cities for virtually every significant domestic purpose —public health, housing, disaster preparedness — unless they adopt red-state policies on immigration, diversity and other issues. (Courts, however, have blocked almost all these efforts.) Trump and aides such as Stephen Miller regularly portray Democratic officials as disloyal “traitors” engaged in “insurrection” and “seditious behavior, punishable by death.” Historian Douglas Brinkley said he considers these moves against the places that voted against Trump the “most egregious” ways the president has threatened the nation’s democratic principles. “The idea that a president is punishing states because they didn’t vote for him, it’s ghastly,” Brinkley said. “That is authoritarian at its definition.” In an interview, Brettschneider described Trump as an amalgam of other presidents who he believes most threatened democracy.

Like John Adams, Brettschneider said, Trump disparages his political opposition as inherently un-American. Like Woodrow Wilson, Trump openly stokes racist and nativist resentments.

And like Richard Nixon, who famously compiled an “enemies list,” Trump wants to use the vast machinery of the federal government to punish his adversaries. “Each of these (previous presidents) has their own way of doing it; it’s not all the same,” Brettschneider said. “But what’s not new is the idea that America has internal enemies who need to lose their liberty.” Sinha similarly sees the greatest risk in Trump’s efforts to brand broad swaths of Americans, such as immigrants and their children and protesters against his policies, as fundamentally un-American, or “the enemy from within,” as he has said. “It is a big sign of undemocratic, authoritarian rule when you question the legitimacy of your opponents to even exist, and you question the legitimacy of the citizenship of the people you don’t like,” Sinha said. Levin is also highly critical of Trump, whom he says “has been aggressively and intentionally interested in being divisive.” But Levin sees the inability of either party to establish a lasting advantage over the other as the principal engine of today’s divisions. “We have in effect had two minority parties in American politics since the 2000 election,” said Levin, author of the book “American Covenant.” “(That) means everything is always up for grabs, and neither party has an incentive to participate in the kind of negotiation and coalition-building that is the essence of the practice of American constitutionalism,” Levin said.

One big question as the nation begins its second 250 years is whether Trump’s open hostility toward the people and places outside his coalition will set the mold for future presidents. Likely 2028 Democratic presidential contenders are talking tougher about confronting the MAGA movement, but many observers remain dubious they would seek to systematically punish red states and constituencies in the same manner.

Future GOP presidential aspirants hoping to retain Trump’s support will likely feel more pressure to sustain his confrontational style and strategy, as Vice President JD Vance often demonstrates. Brinkley says the unifying principle of Trump’s approach is that “he wants to make people that aren’t with him feel like lesser Americans.” If voters repudiate that vision by rejecting Trump allies in the 2026 and 2028 elections, Brinkley said, it may cause history to view Trump as an intense but passing phenomenon.

But if enough voters ratify his approach in coming elections, Brinkley added, “it means Trump won and is a major figure in US history — not just a defining figure of an era, which he already is.” Either way, the jagged divisions Trump has deepened are likely to persist long after his presidency.