Donald Trump's call for a ban on Muslims from entering the U.S. drew widespread condemnation this week.

The also drew comparisons to the World War II era policy of the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. After first telling TIME that he couldn't say for certain whether he would have supported the internment camps at the time, Trump eventually told morning news shows on Tuesday the

with the internment of Japanese Americans.

The Republican candidate's remarks were just the latest of several disparaging comments he's made about immigrants and Muslims. But it's not the first time that a perceived threat from a so-called "other" has shaped American politics.

Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, joined Take Two for a discussion about the role of fear in American political history.

While Donald Trump said that he didn't agree with the internment of Japanese Americans, he also told Good Morning America, "What I'm doing is no different than FDR," citing actions that President Franklin D. Roosevelt took to limit the rights of Japanese, Italian and German nationals living in the U.S. Is Trump correct in comparing his proposal to actions taken by FDR?

Well the comparison might be fair, but it's not necessarily the one he wants to make. The internment of Japanese Americans for sure, and even many bans on immigration that we saw then, or acts against immigrants in World War I, have not been looked at by future historians as one of the better moments of those periods. And certainly the internment is not cherished and praised by historians who otherwise think very well of FDR. So there is a similarity, but it's not the kind we want to see replicated.

Is he just remembering this in a different way than everyone else?

Yeah I think he is, and I think he's looking for moments when, during times of war [or] national crisis, the government often took sweeping action, very often violating civil liberties, or taking action against people who were not directly in any way connected to the wartime effort, and he's praising them. So it's not surprising he's doing this, that's basically what he's talking about right now, and he wants to defend an aggressive, muscular and very expansive view of what the government should do to fight threats.

What other cases in our history have their been where specific groups have been targeted?

During World War I, many immigrants and Americans of immigrant origin were targeted here. Not just by the government, but by citizen groups who argued that German Americans, for example, somehow were a threat to national security. There was a case in Illinois of one German American, Robert Prager, who was lynched by a mob and then no one in the mob was forced to do any time for that. 

In the McCarthy era, that's most famously in the late -40s and early -50s as the Cold War was heating up, many politicians in both parties, but Joe McCarthy, the Republican from Wisconsin leading the charge, went after all sorts of Americans, claiming that they had connections to an international communist movement. So this is a familiar part of our national security debates.

What do we understand about fear as a motivator in political campaigns?

Well, it works. I think the reason they do it is it's very easy to play to the fears of an electorate when there are real threats out there. The electorate is scared, in this case, unlike the Cold War for example, the threat isn't totally clear. So we're not talking about a superpower with nuclear bombs and the need to stop them from using it, we're talking about a much more amorphous threat, even a threat of lone wolf actors who just pledge allegiance to a group like ISIS.

And so people are scared and they don't know what to do, and so traditionally there are always politicians who focus on these fears and use it to scare the electorate. That if you don't support them, that threat will become worse, and just as important, if you support the opponent they will make the country less safe. In 2004, Republicans did this very effectively to John Kerry. They argued that his presidency would mean a big step back in our fight against Al Qaeda.

Do politicians use fear simply as a way to win an election or is it something they truly believe in?

That's always a hard one to know what's in the mind of politicians. There are moments like when George Wallace ran for the presidency in '68 and '72 and he played to the racial fears of parts of the electorate, warning about the kind of chaos that was unfolding from the civil rights movement. Part of it was political, he knew this was a great way to rally white Democrats who were not happy with the party, but part of him believed that, genuinely believed that's what was going wrong with the nation.

So I think very often there's a mix. I think with Donald Trump, people are always wondering because of who he is, how much of this is pure stagecraft and how much he is cynically using this politics of fear to his advantage. But I don't know if we'll know that, and in some ways it doesn't matter. In some ways, what we need to pay careful attention to is the actual rhetoric and words being used.