Trump, Trumpism and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 “It ends with me.” Contemplating generations of family dysfunction that damaged him as a child and haunted his adulthood, a friend once vowed he would not pass “it” on to his children. America has yet to make that commitment and keep it. Donald Trump was formally charged in Washington, D.C. on Thursday with four federal crimes stemming from his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Those efforts did not culminate with the violent insurrection he inspired at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Trump and his co-conspirators worked to subvert democracy that evening, even as police cleared the complex of rioters, and as hospitals treated the hundreds injured and processed the dead. The last of the charges special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment levied against Trump dates from the Reconstruction era. Will Bunch reminds Philadelphia Inquirer readers that President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 in response to a similar post-election riot in South Carolina the year before. The law is the third of the Enforcement Acts passed to address white blowback to post-Civil War enfranchisement of former slaves (the males, anyway). The Washington Post recounted what prompted the act’s drafting: “We have just passed through an Election which, for rancour and virulence on the part of the opposition, has never been excelled in any civilized community,” South Carolina’s Republican governor, Robert K. Scott, wrote to Grant in fall 1870. “Colored men…