1). “If You Steal Our Elections, You Don't Get Our Money: Here's how we make this real”, Dec 8, 2025, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
2). “Full Blown Secession?”, Dec 6, 2025, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
3). “Stop Waiting for Trump to Die: US Fascism doesn't end with him”, Dec 6, 2025, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
~~ recommended by desmond morista ~~
Introduction: The recent election results were heartening and Republicans were penalized, some surprising wins were won against the Trumpistas. But we must forge ahead with a powerful movement that uses our strengths and avoids our weaknesses. Christopher Armitage continues to discuss and to develop the important ideas he has presented in the recent past. The most important issue he has discussed are ways to cut the flow of Federal Tax monies to Washington D.C. and to impound those funds and hold them in Escrow (a tactic used successfully during the great rent strikes of the late 1960s and 1970s). In Item 1)., “If You Steal Our Elections, ….” he furthers his ideas to include having the state legislatures of the Blue States pass “trigger laws”, that would automatically begin impounding Federal Tax funds if any of a variety of Illegal Federal Operations are directed at that state. He points out that the regular operations of the Federal Government are no longer functioning:
“The DOJ took over two and a half years to indict Trump for January 6.¹⁴ The Supreme Court then delayed his trial past the election by granting broad presidential immunity.¹⁵ He won, and the case was dropped.¹⁶ Now he is ignoring court orders in real time and facing zero accountability for doing so. If we are waiting for the legal system to save us, we will be waiting while the 2026 election is dismantled in front of us. (Emphasis added)
“We need to be honest about what we are looking at. The Trump administration faces no criminal accountability for any of this. The courts move slowly when they move at all, and in the case of the Supreme Court, they are complicit. Many say that the only remaining check is electoral: vote them out. But if the only consequence they face is electoral, the rational move is to make sure elections stop working. Why wouldn’t they? Well, they are already doing it. That’s our starting point.” (Emphasis added)
In Item 2)., “Full Blown Secession?”, Armitage looks at the fact that, in reality, we already in effect have two separate societies (with the main connection now being the flow of Federal Tax monies from the Blue States to the Dark Ages Red States. He notes that:
“The crucial difference is what happens when policies fail. Blue America retains functioning democracy: competitive elections, accessible voting, quality public education, free information flow. When something does not work, citizens can demand change and elected officials face accountability. The capacity to course-correct exists. Policy can evolve based on outcomes. Red America continues its trajectory of gerrymandering, voting restrictions, mass misinformation, and public education cuts. Even when policies produce catastrophic outcomes, citizens possess diminishing tools to demand change through democratic participation. One country can iterate. One country cannot.”
Some of the results after 3 or 4 decades of diverting fates for Blue States versus Dark Ages Red States are that:
“Hawaiians can expect to live to 79.9 years. Mississippians can expect 70.9.⁴ …. Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate stands at 40.7 deaths per 100,000 births. California’s is 10.1.⁷ A woman giving birth in Louisiana faces four times the risk of dying as a woman in California. Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is 8.94 per 1,000 live births. New Hampshire’s is 2.93.⁸ …. Ten states still refuse to expand Medicaid despite the federal government covering 90 percent of the cost: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.¹⁰ In states that expanded coverage, the uninsured rate among low-income adults fell from 35 percent to 15 percent.¹¹ …. Governor Tim Walz, a former teacher, put it more simply when explaining why Minnesota now provides free breakfast and lunch to all public school students regardless of family income: 'The haves and the have-nots in the lunchroom is not a necessary thing. Just feed our children.' ¹⁶ …. The gun death data follows the same geography. Mississippi reports 29.4 firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts reports 3.7.²³ States that enacted gun safety legislation have dramatically lower death rates. States that removed restrictions have dramatically higher ones,”
Armitage also points out the increasingly well-known fact that:
“Blue America controls roughly 70 percent of national GDP with roughly half the population.²⁵ An independent Red America would need to either raise taxes dramatically or cut services deeply to replace the federal subsidies currently flowing from blue states."
It is time to take decisive action to deny the Dark Ages Red States continued access to the teat they have been sucking on to subsidize their draconian agenda and subsidize their main base in this country, the Dark Ages Red States.
In Item 3)., “Stop Waiting for Trump to Die: ….”, Armitage points out that Trump is just a major cog in a massive wheel crushing our country and working to impose authoritarian / fascist rule. He begins the article with this paragraph:
“The GOP has spent 50 years building a machine to end democracy, funded by oligarchs who will outlive any single president. They want us to believe this ends with one man. It doesn’t. We don’t need false comfort right now, we need real clarity. That means acknowledging that as long as the seditious and openly criminal Republican Party exists, we are fighting the same machine that built him, protected him, and will replace him the moment he’s gone. We have spent ten years personalizing a systemic crisis around a single figure. That personalization is itself a form of control. It lets us imagine that removing him solves the problem. It lets us fantasize about accountability and a soft landing. It lets us wait for rescue instead of doing the work.”
The majority of Americans don't want what the Republicans and Trumpistas are trying to do to us. It is sobering to remember that the NAZIs never got above 37% of the vote in Germany, and mostly polled quite a bit less. Still they took power, those facts stand as a stark warning to us. Complacency will result in a hellish nightmare that will last for years.
References to Item 1)., “If You Steal Our Elections ….” They were put in the comments. I could not find the references to Item 2)., “Full Blown Secession?” that are also in the comments, but there are nearly 600 comments to Item 2)., and I could not find them. Item 3).'s references are in the text of the article at the bottom
If You Steal Our Elections, You Don't Get Our Money
Bottom Line Up Front for the Hardcore Activists (BLUF-HA): The courts will not save us. The DOJ dropped its voting rights cases. The Supreme Court handed Trump immunity and delayed his trial past the election. He won, and every case disappeared. If we want to protect elections in this country, then we need a tool that’s stronger than hope. Blue states can pass trigger laws that automatically order the redirection of federal tax revenue the moment the federal government interferes with their elections. Go to the end of the article for some governor contact info and where to get ahold of your state legislators.
The Department of Justice has dropped nearly all voting rights cases it was pursuing.¹ The Civil Rights Division has lost 70 percent of its attorneys.² CISA terminated approximately 130 employees in initial cuts, including members of election security teams, and has since lost roughly one-third of its total workforce.³ The Federal Election Commission lacks a quorum and cannot enforce campaign finance law.⁴ In 14 states, the DOJ is now suing to obtain voter roll data, including Social Security numbers, for a citizenship verification database that no law authorized.⁵
This has already happened, all of it in 2025.
At the state level, 29 restrictive voting laws have passed in 16 states this year alone.⁶ Forty-one percent of local election administrators have turned over since 2020, the highest rate in at least two decades.⁷ In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the State Election Board, fired the executive director, and banned digital student IDs for voting.⁸ In Georgia, activists have filed approximately half a million voter registration challenges since 2021, and in July 2025 the state began removing 478,000 voter registrations in one of the largest mass cancellations in U.S. history.⁹ In Nevada, Washoe County commissioners voted against certifying primary results for the first time in the state’s 160-year history.¹⁰
And now this: Trump’s Executive Order 14248 directed the Election Assistance Commission to rescind certifications of voting equipment and establish new requirements that no current systems can meet.¹¹ Courts permanently blocked key provisions, ruling Trump lacks authority to direct an independent agency.¹² The EAC complied on the voter registration form but is proceeding with voting system changes that civil rights groups say violate the same constitutional reasoning.¹³ Meanwhile, across the administration, court orders are being ignored in real time on deportations, funding freezes, and agency dismantlement. Comply where you must, circumvent where you can, defy where you think you can get away with it.
The DOJ took over two and a half years to indict Trump for January 6.¹⁴ The Supreme Court then delayed his trial past the election by granting broad presidential immunity.¹⁵ He won, and the case was dropped.¹⁶ Now he is ignoring court orders in real time and facing zero accountability for doing so. If we are waiting for the legal system to save us, we will be waiting while the 2026 election is dismantled in front of us.
We need to be honest about what we are looking at. The Trump administration faces no criminal accountability for any of this. The courts move slowly when they move at all, and in the case of the Supreme Court, they are complicit. Many say that the only remaining check is electoral: vote them out. But if the only consequence they face is electoral, the rational move is to make sure elections stop working. Why wouldn’t they? Well, they are already doing it. That’s our starting point.
This creates a problem that conventional politics cannot solve. We cannot vote our way out of a situation where the vote itself is the target. We cannot wait for 2026 to see if elections still work, because every month we wait is a month where the machinery of fair elections is being dismantled. By November 2026, we may discover that fair elections no longer exist.
We need a credible weapon, established now, that changes the calculation.
Trigger laws do this. A trigger law is legislation passed in advance that establishes a specific red line and a specific automatic consequence if that line is crossed. The red line is public. The consequence is pre-committed. There is no ambiguity, no debate after the fact, no opportunity for normalization. Cross this line, and this happens.
The red line: the federal government decertifies state-approved voting equipment, deploys federal forces to polling places against state consent, refuses to certify legitimate state election results, or takes any action to cancel, delay, or invalidate a state’s elections. The state legislature and governor jointly determine when a trigger has been crossed.
The consequence: the state orders 90 day compliance for all employers in state to divert federal tax revenue to escrows pending restoration of legitimate democratic governance.
The mechanism is legally sound. I wrote a free ebook detailing how states can execute “Tax Warfare.” The strategies in the booklet were reviewed by CPAs, attorneys, constitutional lawyers, and politicians to ensure the strategies contained within it are legally bulletproof. The legal framework exists. You can download it here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theer/e/485448
This is not symbolic. California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington together send hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal government every year. If those states pass trigger laws and the federal government steals the 2026 election, those states stop the money the next day. The federal government faces an immediate fiscal crisis. Not a rhetorical crisis. A real one.
The threat has to be credible to work. That means it has to be law, not a promise from a governor. It has to be public, passed and on the books before the election. And it has to be coordinated, because one state acting alone is easier to isolate and crush than six or ten acting together.
Some will say this is extreme. They are right. It is extreme. It is a proportional response to an existential attack on democracy. If they try to end elections, we stop recognizing their authority to govern us. That is the only response that matches the scale of the threat.
Others will warn of escalation. What if the federal government retaliates? That is exactly why red lines must be drawn in advance. The alternative to this risk is not safety. The alternative is a single-party radical GOP-controlled nation achieved through election theft, with no mechanism to ever remove them. That is where we end up if we do nothing.
This strategy does not directly help people in Texas or Florida or Ohio. It will not stop Republican fuckery in their own states or fix the wildly unfair bias our electoral system gives to rural states. Those are real limitations. But the principle of putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others applies here. Blue states must secure their own democratic legitimacy first. That creates the foundation for everything else.
Will governors like Newsom, Hochul, and Pritzker actually do this? Their track records suggest caution, not confrontation. That is precisely the point of red lines passed as law by state legislatures. Laws bind future action. Laws create commitment that political instincts might otherwise avoid.
The alternative is hoping they don’t do the thing they are already doing, hoping the courts will save us while they ignore court orders, hoping 2026 will be free and fair despite everything we are watching happen. Hope is not a strategy. A pre-committed, automatic, public consequence is a strategy.
Here is what we need to do.
Unprecedented times require unprecedented action. We make this happen by evangelizing these ideas. Mormons knock on doors to get people to join their church. We need to show up and educate and build consensus with the same persistence. Every one of us is a lobbyist and evangelizer for the ideas that align with our values. That is how cautious politicians get pushed past caution.
If you live in California, contact Governor Gavin Newsom at (916) 445-2841¹⁷ and your state legislators through the California Legislature’s website at legislature.ca.gov. Demand they introduce and pass trigger legislation that escrows federal tax revenue in the event of federal interference with state elections.
If you live in New York, contact Governor Kathy Hochul at (518) 474-8418¹⁸ and your state legislators through the New York Legislature’s website at nysenate.gov and nyassembly.gov.
If you live in Illinois, contact Governor JB Pritzker at (217) 782-6830¹⁹ and your state legislators through ilga.gov.
If you live in New Jersey, contact Governor Phil Murphy at (609) 292-6000²⁰ and your state legislators through njleg.state.nj.us.
If you live in Massachusetts, contact Governor Maura Healey at (617) 725-4005²¹ and your state legislators through malegislature.gov.
If you live in Washington, contact Governor Bob Ferguson at (360) 902-4111²² and your state legislators through leg.wa.gov.
When you call, say this: I am calling to urge the Governor and legislature to introduce trigger legislation before the 2026 election. This legislation should order all employers to redirect all federal tax revenue in the event of the federal government interfering with our state’s election administration or refusing to certify our legitimate election results. We need this protection in place now, not after our elections are stolen.
Pass trigger laws. Draw the red line publicly. Make politicians show us they are more than talk.
If we wait until after they steal the election to figure out our response, we have already lost.
If you want to go deeper on these strategies, check out the Intro to Soft Secession booklet. It covers things that can be found for free here at The Existentialist Republic, it’s all just organized in a single booklet rather than a series of articles. The booklet is a primer for activists who want to understand the toolkit for taking power away from MAGA and putting it into our hands. You can find it here: Just click anywhere in this sentence.
References in comments
1. Goodman, R., & Weiner, A. S. (2025, May 27). What just happened: The Trump administration's dismissal of voting rights lawsuits. Just Security. https://www.justsecurity.org/
2. Rabinowitz, K., & Polantz, K. (2025, April 28). Justice Department Civil Rights Division sees mass exodus of attorneys. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/
3. Bertrand, N. (2025, June 3). One-third of U.S. cyber agency CISA has left since Trump took office. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2025/06/
4. Perkins Coie. (2025, May). Federal Election Commission loses quorum. https://perkinscoie.com/
5. U.S. Department of Justice. (2025, December 2). Justice Department sues six additional states for failure to provide voter registration rolls [Press release]. https://www.justice.gov/opa/
6. Brennan Center for Justice. (2025, October 21). State voting laws roundup: October 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/
7. Bipartisan Policy Center & UCLA. (2025, August). Election official turnover rates through the 2024 election. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/
8. Wilkie, J. (2025, May 7). Election director in North Carolina ousted in Republican power play. WUNC/Associated Press. https://www.wunc.org/politics/
9. Niesse, M. (2025, July 10). Georgia begins one of the largest voter registration cancellations in history. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. https://www.ajc.com/politics/
10. Herndon, A. W. (2024, November 4). What happens if local officials won't certify elections? A Nevada case may be a model. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/
11. Trump, D. J. (2025, March 25). Executive Order 14248: Preserving and protecting the integrity of American elections. The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.
12. Votebeat. (2025, October 31). Judge permanently blocks Trump executive order's proof of citizenship requirement. https://www.votebeat.org/2025/
13. Brennan Center for Justice. (2025, May 15). Letter re: Implementation of Section 4(b) of Executive Order No. 14248. https://www.brennancenter.org/
14. Feuer, A. (2023, August 1). Trump indicted on charges of plotting to overturn 2020 election. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/
15. Howe, A. (2024, July 1). Justices rule Trump has some immunity from prosecution. SCOTUSblog. https://www.scotusblog.com/
16. Cohen, Z., & Herb, J. (2024, November 25). Special counsel Jack Smith drops election subversion and classified documents cases against Donald Trump. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/
17. Office of the Governor of California. (2023). SB 410 signing message. https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-
18. Office of the Governor of New York. (2025, November 20). Statement from Governor Kathy Hochul. https://www.governor.ny.gov/
19. Office of the Governor of Illinois. (n.d.). Contact us. https://www2.illinois.gov/
20. Office of the Governor of New Jersey. (n.d.). Contact the Governor. https://nj.gov/governor/
21. Governor's Office of Constituent Services, Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (n.d.). Email the Governor's office. https://www.mass.gov/info-
22. Office of the Governor of Washington. (n.d.). Senate confirmation and personal financial affairs statements. https://governor.wa.gov/
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Full Blown Secession?
A note from The Existentialist Republic and Christopher Armitage: Consider following Glass Empires by W. Lawrence on Substack. Most publications report on power. Wendy autopsies it. She maps the architecture of authoritarianism through history and psychology, revealing how cruelty becomes strategy as well as the “why” hidden beneath all this “what.” Her work pairs well with ours and I've found it to be a solid resource. https://wendy664.substack.com/
This is a thought experiment, not a manifesto. I’m acting as a researcher here, following the data to see where it leads. More Americans are talking about full secession than at any point since the Civil War, and rather than clutching pearls about it, I wanted to examine what the numbers actually say would happen if the two dominant political coalitions each peacefully received exactly what they wanted.
The reason this conversation has moved from fringe fantasy to serious discussion deserves acknowledgment. Many people now believe the 2026 midterm elections will either be cancelled or nullified. This belief does not emerge from paranoia. It emerges from observation. Not once in recorded history has a fascist leader or their party been democratically elected and then democratically removed from power through standard means. The structural changes this administration has implemented follow a documented playbook that Trump did not write, and it’s meant to nullify and dismantle democratic safeguards that make elections matter.
Project 2025 was authored by conservative institutions that have planned single-party rule for decades. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts described the project’s goal as “institutionalizing Trumpism”¹ and declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”² Republican-controlled legislatures have demonstrated remarkably little institutional resistance to any of it.
People are reasonably worried. And when people are reasonably worried, they start exploring alternatives.
So I followed the data. If peaceful full blown secession occurred and each side got exactly what they wanted, what would those two countries actually look like?
What follows is a best-case scenario for the two most powerful factions in American politics. There are many sides, but these are the ones currently holding substantial state power. Full implementation of stated agendas. No federal obstruction. No need for compromise. Two nations, finally free to build what they claim to want.
The most important distinction between these two hypothetical countries is not which policies they would implement. Blue America under current Democratic leadership would expand healthcare access, raise minimum wages, invest in climate infrastructure, protect reproductive rights, and support organized labor. Red America would continue dangerous deregulation, refuse Medicaid expansion, eliminate minimum wage floors, ban abortion, and weaken workers’ rights. We know this because these are the policies each side already pursues at the state level.
The crucial difference is what happens when policies fail. Blue America retains functioning democracy: competitive elections, accessible voting, quality public education, free information flow. When something does not work, citizens can demand change and elected officials face accountability. The capacity to course-correct exists. Policy can evolve based on outcomes. Red America continues its trajectory of gerrymandering, voting restrictions, mass misinformation, and public education cuts. Even when policies produce catastrophic outcomes, citizens possess diminishing tools to demand change through democratic participation. One country can iterate. One country cannot.
The gap in life expectancy between the longest-lived and shortest-lived states has reached nine years, the largest in American history.³ Hawaiians can expect to live to 79.9 years. Mississippians can expect 70.9.⁴ Jennifer Karas Montez, a demographer at Syracuse University who has spent her career studying how state policies affect population health, found that this gap traces directly to policy choices. “The chances that an individual can live a long and healthy life appear to be increasingly tied to their state of residence and the policy choices made by governors and state legislators,” Montez said.⁵ Her research identified which policies matter most: healthcare access, environmental protection, labor standards including minimum wage, and civil rights protections. States that invest in these areas produce populations that live longer. States that run for-profit prisons, incarcerate at the highest rates on earth, strip workers of the right to organize, and override local democracy to keep wages down produce populations that die younger. Connecticut gained 9.6 years of life expectancy since 1959. Oklahoma gained only 4.7.⁶ Both states started at roughly the same place. They made different choices.
The consequences fall hardest on women and children. Louisiana’s maternal mortality rate stands at 40.7 deaths per 100,000 births. California’s is 10.1.⁷ A woman giving birth in Louisiana faces four times the risk of dying as a woman in California. Mississippi’s infant mortality rate is 8.94 per 1,000 live births. New Hampshire’s is 2.93.⁸ The CDC estimates that more than 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States are preventable.⁹ California has built prevention systems. Louisiana has not.
Ten states still refuse to expand Medicaid despite the federal government covering 90 percent of the cost: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.¹⁰ In states that expanded coverage, the uninsured rate among low-income adults fell from 35 percent to 15 percent.¹¹ In states that refused, 1.4 million people currently fall into the coverage gap, earning too much for traditional Medicaid but too little for marketplace subsidies.¹² Texas has an uninsured rate among working-age adults of 23.6 percent. Massachusetts has 2.6 percent.¹³ Researchers estimate Medicaid expansion has saved 27,000 lives nationwide.¹⁴
Governor Gavin Newsom frames California’s approach in terms of concrete deliverables: “California is tackling the cost of health care head on. Under the California Blueprint, our state will be the first to achieve universal access to health care coverage.”¹⁵ Governor Tim Walz, a former teacher, put it more simply when explaining why Minnesota now provides free breakfast and lunch to all public school students regardless of family income: “The haves and the have-nots in the lunchroom is not a necessary thing. Just feed our children.”¹⁶ At the Democratic National Convention, Walz drew the contrast explicitly: “While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”¹⁷
Compare this to what Republican governors say versus what actually happens. In November 2021, Governor Greg Abbott promised Texans: “I can guarantee the lights will stay on.”¹⁸ Two months later, with another winter storm approaching, Abbott reversed himself: “No one can guarantee there won’t be load shed events,” referring to planned blackouts.¹⁹ The Texas grid has failed repeatedly since his initial promise, and roughly 700 Texans died during the February 2021 collapse that Abbott blamed on everyone but himself.²⁰ Governor Ron DeSantis declared during his presidential campaign launch: “There’s not been a single book banned in the state of Florida.” PolitiFact rated this claim FALSE.²¹ PEN America documented 1,406 book ban cases in Florida school districts, and DeSantis’s own education department published a list showing roughly 300 books removed in a single school year.²²
The gun death data follows the same geography. Mississippi reports 29.4 firearm deaths per 100,000 residents. Massachusetts reports 3.7.²³ States that enacted gun safety legislation have dramatically lower death rates. States that removed restrictions have dramatically higher ones. California’s attorney general calculated that if other states reduced gun violence to California’s level, 140,000 additional Americans would be alive today.²⁴
Blue America controls roughly 70 percent of national GDP with roughly half the population.²⁵ An independent Red America would need to either raise taxes dramatically or cut services deeply to replace the federal subsidies currently flowing from blue states.
Peaceful secessions have happened throughout history, from Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Divorce in 1993 to the Baltic states leaving the Soviet Union in 1991, so the mechanisms exist even if Americans have never used them.
So what does daily life actually look like in each country five years out?
Blue America has universal or near-universal healthcare coverage. Minimum wages sit at seventeen-twenty dollars and is perhaps tied to inflation. Workers have paid family leave. Kids eat breakfast and lunch at school regardless of family income. Power grids function because utilities answer to regulators instead of shareholders. Elections reflect what voters actually want because districts are drawn fairly and ballot access is protected. Housing costs remain brutal in major metros, homelessness persists, and plenty of policies fall short of their goals. But when something breaks, voters can remove the people responsible and try something else. The system learns.
Red America has medical debt as a leading cause of bankruptcy. Workers earn seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour with no path to organize for more. Women flee across state lines for reproductive healthcare or die because they couldn’t leave in time. Schools are defunded and stripped of books. Rolling blackouts hit every summer and winter because the grid was never fixed and nobody went to jail for the deaths. For-profit prisons warehouse a population incarcerated at rates that exceed any nation on earth. And when all of it fails, there is no mechanism to change leadership. The elections are gerrymandered beyond competition, the courts are captured, and the information environment tells everyone it’s California’s fault.
One country looks like a bustling modernized democracy working to take governance seriously while valuing human life. The other looks like Mississippi with F-16 Fighter Jets and school issued “Trump Bibles” that have pictures rather than words since reading is for liberals.
When California’s policies fail to deliver, Californians can vote for change, access accurate information about what went wrong, and hold officials accountable. When Texas policies fail and people die, Texans face the kind of voter suppression that gets countries placed under UN observation and EU member states stripped of voting rights. They face restricted ballot access, an underfunded education system that limits civic knowledge, and an information environment increasingly dominated by outlets that protect Republican leadership from accountability.
One country retains the ability to learn from its mistakes. One country has systematically dismantled the mechanisms that would allow its citizens to demand something better.
That is the real divergence. And it’s already underway.
I want to hear from you. Some will say this kind of analysis is exactly what America’s enemies want: division, fracture, the end of the union. Others will say that may be true, but the current situation is untenable and pretending otherwise helps no one. Sound off in the comments. And remember: this was an empirical exploration of what one outcome would look like, not a personal endorsement. I followed the data. We each decide what to do with it.
For a comprehensive guide to how blue states can build strategic autonomy through coordinated legal and fiscal action, protecting their populations while federal institutions undergo this degradation process, check out the Introduction to Soft Secession Booklet. It’s a fantastic primer for the system that uses every tool available to disempower fascists while avoiding potential dangers that accompany full secession https://theexistentialistrepublic.myshopify.com/products/intro-to-soft-secession
References for this article will be in the comment section.
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Stop Waiting for Trump to Die
Bottom Line Up Front for the Hardcore Activists (BLUF-HA): The GOP has spent 50 years building a machine to end democracy, funded by oligarchs who will outlive any single president. They want us to believe this ends with one man. It doesn’t. We don’t need false comfort right now, we need real clarity. That means acknowledging that as long as the seditious and openly criminal Republican Party exists, we are fighting the same machine that built him, protected him, and will replace him the moment he’s gone. We have spent ten years personalizing a systemic crisis around a single figure. That personalization is itself a form of control. It lets us imagine that removing him solves the problem. It lets us fantasize about accountability and a soft landing. It lets us wait for rescue instead of doing the work.
Robert Reich recently argued that Trump’s end is imminent. The MAGA base is falling apart, he wrote. Congressional Republicans are finding their backbones. The ground is finally shifting.
I respect Robert. He’s been a consistent voice on the proper side of this fight for decades. So let’s take his argument seriously. Let’s look at the evidence he’s citing and ask what it actually tells us.
The polling decline is real. Trump’s approval has hit 36% in Gallup tracking, his second-term low.¹ A CNN poll found 61% of Americans say his policies have worsened economic conditions.² These numbers are bad.
But context matters. Trump’s all-time low was 34%, right after January 6. His first-term average was 41%. He never once reached 50% approval in his entire first presidency.³ The mid-30s is not a collapse. It is his floor, and the floor is holding.
But context matters. The Republican Party’s project is not to be popular or win elections. It is to make elections unnecessary for holding power. Gerrymandered maps, voter suppression, a captured judiciary, and the procedural stranglehold of the Senate filibuster all serve the same function: insulating Republican rule from democratic accountability. Trump’s approval among the broader public matters only if that public can translate disapproval into political consequences. The party has spent decades building the infrastructure of preventing democratic functioning.
The November 2025 elections were a Democratic sweep. Spanberger won Virginia’s governorship by 15 points.⁴ Sherrill carried New Jersey by 13.⁵ Mamdani became New York City’s first Muslim mayor.⁶ Exit polls showed 55-69% disapproval of Trump across every major race.⁷ These results are significant.
But this is swing voters responding to chaos. This is the suburbs recoiling. This is not the MAGA base defecting. The coalition that carried Trump to victory in 2024 has not abandoned him. Voters at the margins have. That matters electorally. It does not mean the movement is collapsing.
Reich points to Republican fractures. Some are grumbling about the budget. Some reject the tariff dividend proposal. Some want to extend ACA subsidies. Hawks dislike the Putin courtship.
But grumbling is not governing. When it came time to vote on the Big Beautiful Bill, two Republicans out of 273 voted no. That is a 1% defection rate. The tariff dividend was never even brought to a vote. The ACA subsidy debate remains unresolved because leadership won’t allow a floor vote. The fractures are nonexistent in practice. The grumbling itself is the performance, a way to maintain the fiction that Republicans aren’t voting in lockstep while they vote in lockstep.
And then there is Marjorie Taylor Greene. After Romney. After Cheney. After Kinzinger. After the party systematically destroyed every Republican who broke ranks. After years of enforcing total loyalty, his most devoted defender finally walked away. One more name on a short list that keeps getting shorter as the party purges dissent.
She was his most loyal defender. She voted with him 98% of the time.⁹ She spent millions on his campaigns. She flew from her father’s brain surgery to vote against his second impeachment.¹⁰ And when she broke with him over the Epstein files, he called her a traitor within days. She also announced her resignation timed to within a few days of her congressional pension beginning.¹¹
This is not a crack in the foundation. This is the foundation demonstrating how solid it is. The apparatus that destroyed Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and Mitt Romney’s political future did exactly what it was designed to do: enforce total loyalty and obliterate dissent.
So let’s say Reich is right about all of it. Let’s say the polling collapse accelerates. Let’s say Republicans lose the House in 2026. Let’s say Trump’s health fails, his mind deteriorates further, or he simply dies. He is 79 years old. It could happen tomorrow.
Here is what does not change:
The 43 Republican senators who acquitted him after he incited an insurrection remain in office or have been replaced by others who would have done the same. The Supreme Court that ruled him above the law serves for life. The federal judiciary packed with Federalist Society judges will shape American law for decades. The 47% of Project 2025 already implemented does not reverse itself.¹² The 200,000 federal workers fired or forced out do not return to their jobs.¹³ The gutted agencies do not rebuild overnight. The dismantled regulations do not reassemble themselves.
The Varieties of Democracy Institute, the world’s leading authority on measuring democratic health, identified the United States as undergoing the fastest episode of autocratization in modern American history.¹⁴ Director Staffan Lindberg stated in March that if the current trajectory continues, the United States will no longer qualify as a democracy when they assess 2025.¹⁵ That trajectory is not about one man. That trajectory is about captured institutions and a party apparatus committed to single-party rule.
We tried the institutional remedies. We impeached him twice. The Senate acquitted him twice. A jury convicted him of 34 felonies. No judge sentenced him. The Supreme Court granted him immunity. We voted him out in 2020. He came back and won by a wider margin.
Four years of Biden changed nothing structurally. The courts remained captured. The gerrymandered maps remained intact. He was able to make marginal progress that was obstructed at every turn, overturned by SCOTUS, or immediately undone by Trump. The filibuster remained in place, allowing Republicans to block voting rights legislation with unified opposition. We followed the rules. They ran out the clock. And at the end of it, we got a second Trump term that has done more damage in ten months than his entire first four years.
Trump did not build this. The Heritage Foundation wrote Project 2025. The Federalist Society built the judicial pipeline. The Republican National Committee enforces party discipline. The conservative media ecosystem manufactures consent. State legislatures draw maps that let them choose their voters. Dark money networks fund the whole operation.
Trump is their most effective instrument. He normalized what was previously unthinkable. He proved what was possible. He moved the ball further down the field than anyone before him. But he is still an instrument. When he is gone, everything he proved remains proven. Every precedent he set remains set. Every norm he shattered remains shattered.
The Republican Party has been building toward this for 50 years. The Powell Memo.¹⁶ The Heritage Foundation. The Federalist Society. Gingrich burning down congressional norms. The Southern Strategy. Gerrymandering. Voter suppression. McConnell holding a Supreme Court seat hostage for a year.¹⁷
Trump did not break the system. He is the product of a party that spent half a century crafting the tools to end American democracy.
As long as the Republican Party exists, our democracy remains under threat. That was true before Trump and will remain true after him. The party must be dismantled. Not defeated in one election. Not moderated. Dismantled and its leaders incarcerated for sedition and corruption.
So when the headlines tell you the ground is shifting, maybe something is happening. When pundits tell you the MAGA base is cracking, maybe the margins are eroding. When Trump eventually leaves the stage, it will feel like relief. We will want to exhale. We will want to believe the worst is over.
Do not exhale.
The day after Trump is gone, we have the exact same work to do. The same captured courts. The same gerrymandered maps. The same consolidated media. The same oligarch class. The same party apparatus that protected him through everything and will find another vehicle for their project before his body is cold.
And the next vehicle will be less repugnant. Someone who passes the same fascist laws and strips away the same freedoms but with less spectacle, someone who makes it all look more professional, and then people stop paying attention. Trump’s repulsiveness keeps people in the streets. But the Republicans are the ones passing the policies anyway. They’re the ones telling him what to support. A polished version pushing the exact same agenda without the daily outrages will be far more dangerous. The next one gets a grace period while the world celebrates, and the fascism continues while everyone exhales.
He covered a lot of ground for them. That doesn’t all reverse with him gone. The project does not end with him, and if we act like it does, we hand Republicans a free pass for everything they built while we were staring at one man.
We have spent ten years personalizing a systemic crisis around a single figure. That personalization is itself a form of control. It lets us imagine that removing him solves something. It lets us fantasize about accountability that will never come through the institutions they have captured. It lets us wait for rescue instead of doing the work.
Stop waiting for Trump to die. The fight is the same either way.
So what actually works? Three things. First, states must investigate, prosecute, and criminally indict corrupt politicians at every level and refuse to hand those cases up to federal jurisdiction. If we don’t hold these people accountable ourselves, no one will. This should be done through an interstate anti-corruption compact where states work together to rid our federal government of criminal actors. Second, states must build social safety nets at the state and multi-state level that actually improve residents’ lives, because the federal government has been captured and isn’t coming to help. Third, multi-state non-compliance with bullshit SCOTUS and federal decisions. That’s it. That’s what needs to happen. It takes political will, and it takes us demanding it from every state official we can reach.
For more information, I have a free book and two free booklets available right now: ‘Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder,’ ‘Intro to Soft Secession,’ and ‘Tax Warfare.’ All free. No paywall. The Existentialist Republic is also building an activist toolkit for the fight ahead, and gatekeeping it behind a subscription defeats the purpose. We are building a powerful movement, our strength as opposition grows and that’s thanks to the folks who show up, make the calls, send the letters, and understand the assignment.
References
Brenan, M. (2025, November 28). Trump’s approval rating drops to 36%, new second-term low. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-drops-new-second-term-low.aspx
CNN Politics. (2025, November 3). Democrats are more enthusiastic about the midterms as Trump’s approval hits second-term low, CNN poll finds. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/03/politics/cnn-poll-democrats-trump-midterms
Jones, J. M. (2021, January 18). Last Trump job approval 34%; average is record-low 41%. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/328637/last-trump-job-approval-average-record-low.aspx
NBC News. (2025, December 3). Virginia governor election 2025 results: Abigail Spanberger wins. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2025-elections/virginia-governor-results
NBC News. (2025, December 3). New Jersey governor election 2025 results: Mikie Sherrill wins. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2025-elections/new-jersey-governor-results
Romo, V. (2025, November 5). Zohran Mamdani wins NYC mayoral race. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/11/04/nx-s1-5597788/election-results-zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-mayor
CNN Politics. (2025, November 4). CNN exit polls find voters in key races dissatisfied with Trump, concerned with economy. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/04/politics/exit-polls-nyc-nj-virginia-california-elections
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. (2025, July 3). Roll Call 190, Bill Number: H.R. 1 – One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2025190
CBS News. (2025, December). Former MAGA loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump policies are not America First. CBS News 60 Minutes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/marjorie-taylor-greene-trump-relationship-change-60-minutes/
Greene, M. T. (2025, November 21). Full resignation statement. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-resigns-statement-in-full-11092645
Brady, D. (2025, November 22). Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation timing secures her congressional pension by three days. National Taxpayers Union Foundation. https://www.ntu.org/foundation/detail/marjorie-taylor-greenes-resignation-timing-secures-her-congressional-pension-by-three-days
Center for Progressive Reform. (2025, October 15). Tracking Project 2025 update: 47% of domestic policy to-do list commenced ahead of government shutdown. https://progressivereform.org/publications/tracking-project-2025-update-oct2025/
Partnership for Public Service. (2025, August 26). Federal harms tracker: Cost to your government. https://ourpublicservice.org/federal-harms-tracker/cost-to-your-government/
Nord, M., Altman, D., Angiolillo, F., Fernandes, T., Good God, A., & Lindberg, S. I. (2025). Democracy Report 2025: 25 years of autocratization – democracy trumped? University of Gothenburg: V-Dem Institute. https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf
U.S. News & World Report. (2025, March 25). Democracy expert raises alarm about U.S. trends under Trump. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2025-03-25/democracy-expert-raises-alarm-about-u-s-trends-under-trump
Powell, L. F., Jr. (1971, August 23). Attack on American free enterprise system [Memorandum to Eugene B. Sydnor Jr.]. Lewis F. Powell Jr. Papers, Washington and Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons. https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/1/
Totenberg, N. (2018, June 29). What happened with Merrick Garland in 2016 and why it matters now. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2018/06/29/624467256/what-happened-with-merrick-garland-in-2016-and-why-it-matters-now
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