1). “The Biggest Attack on Abortion Since the End of Roe: A federal court wants to end mifepristone by mail—it's not happening”, May 2, 2026, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
p/the-biggest-attack-on- abortion-since >. 2). “Reproductive Freedom for All Condemns Fifth Circuit Decision Gutting Telehealth Access to Mifepristone Nationwide”, May 1, 2026, Anon, Press Release from Reproductive Freedom for All (Formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America), at < https://
reproductivefreedomforall.org/ news/reproductive-freedom-for- all-condemns-fifth-circuit- decision-gutting-telehealth- access-to-mifepristone- nationwide/ >. Pardon, but I could not see what part of this site to post, nb 3). “Court Ruling Blocks Access to Medication Abortion Through Mail and Telehealth”, May 2, 2026, Anon, Press Release from Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, at < https://www.plannedparenthood.
org/planned-parenthood- northern-new-england/newsroom/ court-ruling-blocks-access-to- medication-abortion-through- mail-and-telehealth > 4). “Latest SCOTUS Ruling Has People Asking 'Are We Headed Toward Balkanizing and Becoming the States of the Former USA?' ”, May 2, 2026, Christopher Armitage, The Existentialist Republic, at < https://cmarmitage.substack.
com/p/latest-scotus-ruling- has-people-asking >.
~~ recommended by desmond ~~
Introduction by desmond: No doubt the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-birth movement leaders were happy about the ruling by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court ruling to require that mifepristone must be dispensed in response to prescriptions issued after an IN PERSON APPOINTMENT at a physicians office. It is certainly ironic, if not planned, that they issued their order on May 1, 2026 the most prominent holiday and protest day for working people. While millions of people assembled peacefully to protest the Trump Abortion Bans and other outrages against working people by the now Overtly Fascist Federal Government of the United States. In Item 1)., “The Biggest Attack on Abortion ….” Jessica Valenti lays out a detailed analysis of just how this will all work out in the near-term. Item 2)., “Reproductive Freedom for All ….”; and Item 3)., “Court Ruling Blocks Access ….” present press releases / statements condemning this action by the most right-wing court jurisdiction in the U.S. the Fifth Circuit that is actually more fascist and reactionary than the U.S. Supreme Court with its 6 corrupt and loathsome toadies in their black robes. As Minnie Timaraju (Reproductive Freedom for All President and CEO) wrote “.... Anti-abortion politicians know their policies are unpopular, so they are using every lever of government they can. Louisiana built this case on debunked, junk science. The safety of mifepristone has never actually been in question. ….” (Emphasis added)
In Item 4)., “Latest SCOTUS Ruling ….” the innovative political and socioeconomic thinker Cristopher Armitage points out that the U.S. has now reached the point that it cannot survive as an intact liberal democratic society. He notes that he sees 5 potential paths for the disintegrating U.S. these are noted below along with some further explanations:
“The first path is Balkanization. The Yugoslavia ending. The term usually describes fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines, but the dynamic does not require those lines, only fault lines deep enough that people on either side stop recognizing each other as countrymen. The collapse of the United States will be remembered similarly to the fall of the USSR. …. Federal authority collapses, the Court keeps stripping protections out from under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the country fractures into warring blocs that no longer recognize a common federal authority. If you feel relief at the end of constantly being under threat of Christian nationalism and kleptocracy, you may be among the millions ready to go separate ways rather than fighting over fundamentally different values.
“The second path is the Troubles. Fascism lite holds the federal apparatus, corporate power consolidates behind it, and blue states mount sustained opposition without ever quite breaking away. The federal government does not collapse; it weaponizes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Minneapolis, federalized National Guard deployments in Portland, prosecutors charged with sedition for doing their jobs. Blue state officials respond with civil suits and public portals as the public feels less and less represented, people start lashing out. ….
“The third path is soft secession.¹ Blue states quit pointing at Congress and the courts and the next election and start expanding the powers they already have. Parallel financial infrastructure independent of federal banking authority. Interstate compacts on healthcare, climate, labor, and reproductive care that function as treaties in everything but name. State-level prosecution of federal officials who break state laws.² This is the move that keeps every door open. It pushes back on federal overreach and shields the people inside blue states from the damage the federal government is already doing while the pushback takes hold. ….
“The fourth path is what soft secession might become if path three cannot restore order. Call it the European Union (EU) model. A thin federal layer handling defense, currency, and interstate commerce, while most governance happens at the state and regional level. The Pacific states coordinate on climate and labor. New England pools healthcare. The Great Lakes states negotiate water as a bloc. ….
“And then there is the fifth path. The zero path. The path where things simply work themselves out. We have a free and fair enough election, the country swings hard against the regime, a new president takes office with a working congressional majority, the courts get rebalanced, the fired civil servants come back, and we settle into something resembling Hungary's current trajectory rather than collapse or permanent GOP rule. ….
“A third of the country approves of all this. A third of the country is sealed off from reality by the autocrats who built the seal. Half the states are run by the people who would have to certify their own removal. The institutional machinery required for a Hungarian-scale correction, impeachment of the entire cabinet, conviction of Supreme Court justices, override of a presidential veto, amendment of the Constitution itself, demands supermajorities that do not exist on any timeline that matters, inside a judiciary doing everything it can to keep elections tilted in favor of Republicans. (Emphasis added)
“If we are betting on path zero, we are unwitting controlled opposition. Truly. That is the state-approved plan, gang. That is the kind of opposition Trump and the GOP and the oligarchs approve and allow. (Emphasis added)
“What that gets us is not democratic recovery. It is steady-state fascism with a permanent opposition party that exists to lose most elections respectably, son some here and there, and reassure its donors that next time will be different. Hungary has had that arrangement for fifteen years, they also arguably had a more robust democracy since they were never a duopoly. The regime does not need to crush us if we are willing to crush ourselves on a four-year cycle, dust off, and try again with the same playbook.” …. (Emphasis added)
“This is what happens when you take capitalism to its greatest extremes. The most selfish narcissist among us ends up in charge. Everything including the Supreme Court is for sale. Truth is determined by profit loss statements. The opposition is paid to deliver weak half measures. The government lives to take our money and hand it to the politicians' financiers, and foreign governments can pay our politicians directly to send our young adults to fight in foreign wars for corporate profit. The Dow hit fifty thousand the same week the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The market is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.” (Emphasis added)
So maybe we have reached the point at which the Blue States need to pass legislation that contradicts the Federal Ban on Mifepristone as it is dispensed by tele-health. Maybe abortion rights and reproductive health care activists need to set up their cyber infrastructure in foreign countries and send the pills to women living in the Dark Ages Red States from places that are hostile to the Trumpista Regime. Just backing down to using Misoprostol only for telemed abortions, and timidly obeying the openly fascist / reactionary Fifth Circuit is a losing strategy. Yes the latest ruling must be appealed to the SCOTUS, but that must be only part of the response. The Confederate activists after Reconstruction and the Right-wing Activists who ran Southern State Governments in the 1940s - the present never meekly submitted to the rulings of the SCOTUS or other courts. These people are the minority in this country now, including in the South and fascist controlled mid-western and mountain states. They have no credibility whatsoever outside of their MAGA base, and the MAGAs are a distinct minority in this country,
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The Biggest Attack on Abortion Since the End of Roe
Yesterday, a federal court temporarily blocked the FDA rule that allows mifepristone to be prescribed without an in-person visit. The notoriously conservative Fifth Circuit of Appeals ruled in favor of Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who argued telehealth access to the abortion medication harms her Republican state by allowing women to sidestep its ban.
The decision is the biggest legal blow to abortion rights since the end of Roe, and conservatives hope it will end the shipping of abortion pills nationwide.
Let me be clear: that is not going to happen. Patients will continue to seek out abortion pills, and providers will continue to ship them. Nothing in this ruling criminalizes patients who use abortion medication, and women can still legally obtain abortion pills by mail—either by using a misoprostol-only regimen or connecting with a provider who will ship both medications.
That’s right: while conservatives want Americans to believe they can no longer get mifepristone by mail, multiple legal experts tell Abortion, Every Day that’s just not the case. Some providers plan to keep shipping mifepristone while the litigation plays out—relying on shield state protections that Democratic governors have put in place.
“We anticipated this moment and have worked hard with our allies at the state level to create the legal landscape and legislation to empower states to protect access to abortion nationwide,” says Julie F. Kay, founder Reproductive Futures.
To put it plainly: We are not going back.
Still, I won’t downplay the situation: this decision is a chilling attack on women’s ability to access care. With this ruling, the federal court has allowed Louisiana extremists to dictate abortion rights for the entire country—overriding laws in pro-choice states. As Reproductive Freedom for All president Mini Timmaraju put it, “The court’s decision moves us one step closer to a national abortion ban.”
Remember—telemedicine accounts for almost 30% of American abortions, and for nearly every abortion that happens in banned states. Abortion pills by mail are largely the reason the national abortion rate hasn’t dipped since the end of Roe, and telemedicine has been one of the most important tools we have holding access together.
That’s why conservatives have been hitting abortion medication so hard: they’re furious that it allows women to sidestep their draconian bans. They want to control us, and abortion pills make that much, much, harder.
I waited until now to publish for a reason: there are a lot of moving parts, things are moving quickly, and I don’t want to feed into chaos and confusion. If/When/How tells AED that their legal helpline has already been inundated with calls from patients worried that taking abortion pills is illegal. That is exactly what the anti-abortion movement wants: patients afraid, and us overwhelmed.
Since last night, I’ve been on the phone with legal experts, providers, and abortion rights leaders—and while there are different opinions about what might happen next, everyone agrees on this: what we do next needs to be steady, considered, and strategic.
And when I say “we,” I mean it. The folks who read this newsletter are activists, providers, journalists, researchers, lawyers, legislators, and organizers. Even if you don’t work in this space, chances are you’re the person a friend or neighbor comes to when they have a question about abortion. Every single one of us has a tremendous amount of influence in our own communities, and it’s vital that we’re using it wisely.
Every day that you’ve read this newsletter has prepared you for a moment like this one, and now it’s time for us to get to work.
Below is an explainer of the case, the ruling, what it means, what happens next, and what we can do. Feel free to skip around using the headers.
What is Louisiana v. FDA? - How has the Trump administration responded? - What does the federal ruling say? - Will providers really keep shipping mifepristone? - What about miso-only abortions? - How will the ruling change access to abortion? - What happens next? - How can I help?
What is Louisiana v. FDA?
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed a lawsuit against the FDA last year, asking the court to reinstate a requirement that patients obtain mifepristone in person from their doctor. (The Biden FDA suspended that requirement during COVID, and made the change permanent in 2023.)
Murrill argues abortion pills are unsafe—citing a widely-debunked ‘study’—and claims telehealth access allows abusers to surreptitiously poison women with abortion pills. Cynically co-opting ‘coercion’ has become central to attacks on abortion medication: it allows Republicans to pretend as if they’re protecting women—which is a whole lot more popular than restricting abortion.
Murrill also says that Louisiana suffers “sovereign and financial harms” as a result of telemedicine access. This last argument is important, because the Supreme Court unanimously threw out a challenge to mifepristone in 2024, ruling that the anti-abortion doctors who brought the suit couldn’t show that they’d been personally harmed:
Murrill didn’t want the same thing happening in her case, so she claims Louisiana is being forced to spend Medicaid dollars treating women who’ve had complications from mifepristone (financial harm), and that the FDA’s rules nullify the state’s ban (sovereign harm).
It’s also important to know that this suit—and yesterday’s ruling affirming it—isn’t just about attacking abortion pills. It’s about eliminating shield laws. Republican attorneys general have been in a race to get blue state abortion protections to the Supreme Court; with this decision, the Louisiana AG is leading the charge.
How has the Trump administration responded?
We haven’t heard from the administration on yesterday’s ruling yet, but I’m betting they’re not very happy with having to deal with abortion ahead of the midterms.
That’s why Trump’s FDA asked the court to pause Murrill’s suit in January. The administration argued that the agency needed time to finish its bogus ‘safety review’ of mifepristone—but the truth is that they were desperate to delay a high-profile abortion fight until after the midterms. Republicans—Trump, especially—know this is a loser issue for them.
Still, that doesn’t mean that Trump plans to leave abortion pills alone entirely: in its request to pause the case, the administration did not disagree with Louisiana’s core argument. In fact, they even suggested the FDA could end telehealth access to mifepristone itself, depending on the outcome of its review.
In other words, they want to restrict mifepristone on their own terms and timeline. And last month, a judge gave Trump’s FDA the stay it asked for.
Yesterday’s ruling upended that plan, forcing the administration into a precarious position: either alienating the anti-abortion movement by appealing the ruling, or pissing off voters by going along with a national abortion restriction.
As law professor Mary Ziegler told The New York Times, “This ruling will put abortion back on the map as an election issue.”
What does the federal ruling say?
You can read the full decision here, but the short version is that the judges agreed with Murrill. Trump appointee Judge Kyle Duncan wrote that the FDA rules “cancel Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is [a] human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person.’”
The ruling temporarily pauses the 2023 FDA rules that allow mifepristone to be dispensed without an in-person visit to a medical provider.
In other words, a radical attorney general in Louisiana and Trump-appointed judges are trying to control what abortion rights look like for the entire country. So much for leaving abortion to the states!
As Sen. Patty Murray put it:
“Three judges on the most extreme appeals court in the country sided with anti-abortion politicians over the FDA's career scientists, over a quarter-century of safety data, over millions of American women who have safely used mifepristone, and over practically every major medical association in the United States.”
Will providers really keep shipping mifepristone?
Some will, yes. Telehealth abortion providers across the country are weighing their next steps right now. Providers aren’t a monolith: some will keep shipping mifepristone, while others switch to miso-only protocols while the case plays out. They’ll be making decisions based on what state they’re in, what their shield law looks like, what kinds of resources they have access to, and what their risk aversion is.
It would also help, I’m sure, if pro-choice leaders—attorneys general and governors, specifically—came out immediately to make clear that they will continue to protect providers who ship abortion pills, and that the status quo will hold while litigation continues.
AED’s legal sources point out that yesterday’s ruling is a regulatory one: it applies to the FDA, and the FDA can decide what to do next. Crucially, the agency’s enforcement authority is typically directed toward manufacturers and distributors—not providers.
“In the meantime, the people who have mife already on hand, labeled correctly and FDA compliant when they received it, could decide to continue on course until told otherwise by a federal agency,” says Rachel Rebouché, professor at University of Texas School of Law.
That’s not to downplay the risk providers have to weigh: it’s not nothing to go up against a federal ruling or the FDA—should the agency decide to go along with the Fifth Circuit’s decision. But the legal implications of shipping mifepristone in light of this ruling are not nearly as clear-cut as conservatives would like Americans to think.
What about miso-only abortions?
Even without mifepristone, you can still have a safe and effective medication abortion using just misoprostol—which was not impacted by yesterday’s ruling. Planned Parenthood has a guide to miso-only abortion here.
And while it’s important to spread the word that miso-only abortions are available, let’s be real: there’s a reason that the recommended regimen is mifepristone and misoprostol. Miso-only abortions are often longer and less comfortable. A few advocates I spoke to worried that we’d see more ER visits because of miso-only abortions—not because the regimen isn’t safe, but because patients will be in more pain.
It’s added cruelty from the anti-abortion movement.
How will the ruling change access to abortion?
Right now, two things are true at the same time: patients can still get abortion pills by mail, but this ruling is also primed to upend access to abortion and miscarriage care.
We have our work cut out for us, because we need to make sure our communities understand both. We need to thread the needle of relaying what a big deal this decision is, and how it’s a major attack on national access—but also reminding people that they can still get care, and that there are advocates across the country dedicated to helping them get it.
After years of covering this issue, I have a tremendous amount of faith that all of the worst-case scenario planning that advocates and providers have done will kick in. As Lizzy Hinkley, legal director for the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT) says, “Shield law providers have been preparing for this moment, with support from ACT, and together we are working to ensure there are no gaps in access.”
We also know that people have already been going through informal channels to access care—like international telehealth, community networks, and websites that sell pills. This decision won’t impact those resources.
Still, let’s be clear-eyed: if the ruling stands, it will have a massive chilling effect on care. Not everyone will be able to connect with the advocates who can help them get pills by mail. Some patients will be forced to travel hundreds of miles just to pick up a prescription. Others will have to forgo abortions altogether.
What I’m most worried about? Republicans have done an unfortunately excellent job instilling fear across the country. There’s a reason states have passed laws that classify shipping abortion pills as “drug trafficking,” or have criminalized “aiding and abetting.”
That chilling effect has been made much worse by the very public moves towards criminalization more generally. American voters can see that women are being arrested for their miscarriages—why would they feel safe seeking out abortions?
No matter what happens next, the anti-abortion movement is already getting something it wants: chaos and confusion.
What happens next?
A lot will depend on what the U.S. Supreme Court and the Trump administration decide to do.
Mifepristone manufacturer Danco Laboratories has already asked SCOTUS for emergency relief, petitioning the court today to block the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. Democratic attorneys general are also expected to go directly to the Supreme Court—though it’s unclear if they’ll move quickly or wait for a response to Danco’s filing. AED sources say the AGs will seek to limit the scope of the ruling; I’ll let you know as soon as I find out.
If the Trump administration appeals, they’ll likely offer the same argument they did when asking for the stay: a defense of the FDA’s authority.
Some of my sources, however, aren’t convinced they’ll challenge the ruling at all. They think there’s a chance the administration lets it stand—giving them the opportunity to restrict abortion medication while shifting political blame onto the courts. After all, the administration is packed with Heritage Foundation maniacs—extremists not just interested in banning abortion, but birth control, IVF, and anything else that aids in women’s freedom.
And even if the administration is scared enough of abortion to hold off until after the midterms—what happens then?
Similarly, while some feel confident that the FDA’s integrity will hold through the agency’s supposed “safety study” of mifepristone, others find that idea naive.
How can I help?
Make sure your communities—online and off—know they can still legally use abortion pills. Need language for social media? I’ve got you covered:
This ruling does not make it a crime to use or seek abortion pills. If you’ve already ordered abortion pills, you’ve done nothing illegal or wrong. You can continue as planned. If you need abortion pills now, you can still get them. Go to websites like Plan C Pills or I Need An A.
Abortion, Every Day also has a robust resources page that you can share—with links to providers, legal and medical help, abortion funds, and more.
If you live in a shield state, contact your governor and attorney general.Thank them for their continued commitment to reproductive rights and women’s autonomy, tell them you don’t want Louisiana extremists dictating what happens in your state, and let them know how important it is that they protect providers who ship abortion pills across state lines.
If you live in New York, encourage Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign S8544/A9217, which further protects providers if the FDA’s approval status for mifepristone changes. (California passed a similar law last year.)
Support your local abortion fund and providers. As a result of this ruling, more patients will seek out in-person care, necessitating money for travel, lodging, child care, and the procedures themselves.
Remind people this is why elections matter. I know that can feel like a hollow thing to say when we’re watching courts dismantle rights in real time. But the anti-abortion movement has been playing a long game for fifty years—stacking courts, electing AGs, flipping state legislatures. And it’s working. We need voters to show up with the same focus and fury—especially because we have the power of the people on our side.
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Court Ruling Blocks Access to Medication Abortion Through Mail and Telehealth
On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay in a Louisiana court case surrounding mifepristone, one of two drugs commonly used in a medication abortion. While this stay is in effect, mifepristone cannot be dispensed in any state through a direct-to-patient telehealth model or certified mail-order pharmacy, including here in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
The decision reinstates a medically unnecessary requirement that patients visit a health center in person. This change means that patients everywhere will face barriers to abortion care — even in states where abortion is legal or protected. Because the FDA regulates prescription drugs at a federal level, each state and provider must now adhere to these new rules regarding mifepristone.
The case, Louisiana v. FDA, challenged the FDA’s 2023 Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) that removed the requirement that medication be dispensed in person in a medical facility. It is one of several cases that have been filed by anti-abortion advocates since the Dobbs decision in 2022.
In response to the stay, Planned Parenthood of Northern New England (PPNNE) announced it will pivot to a different medication abortion drug protocol in its telehealth program.
Statement from Nicole Clegg, President & CEO, PPNNE:
“We closely monitored this court case, and we identified a way to keep telehealth medication abortion access intact for our patients. We will switch our drug formula to misoprostol-only. This type of medication abortion has been used successfully for many years in other parts of the world where access to mifepristone is restricted.
But let me be clear – we shouldn’t even have to make this change. An overwhelming body of medical research and evidence proves that using mifepristone for medication abortion is a safe, effective way to end a pregnancy, including when prescribed via direct-to-patient telehealth. This case was never about safety or protecting patient health – it was another thinly veiled attempt by anti-abortion advocates to ban abortion nationwide; in whatever way they can.
No matter what they throw at us, PPNNE will continue to pivot and adapt to ensure our patients can get the care they need – today, tomorrow, and beyond.”
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Latest SCOTUS Ruling Has People Asking "Are We Headed Toward Balkanizing and Becoming the States of the Former USA?
The Supreme Court just gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act. If the federal government no longer guarantees that a Black voter in Alabama and a Black voter in Minnesota have the same rights at the ballot box, what country are we actually living in?
Turmoil is coming either way. The only question is what shape we give it.
There are five paths from here. Four are real. The fifth is a fantasy. And the first three are already happening in pieces, in different states, at different intensities, right now. The choice in front of us is how much of paths one and two we let in by default, and how hard we build toward path three before paths one and two close the door on us.
The first path is Balkanization. The Yugoslavia ending. The term usually describes fragmentation along ethnic and religious lines, but the dynamic does not require those lines, only fault lines deep enough that people on either side stop recognizing each other as countrymen. The collapse of the United States will be remembered similarly to the fall of the USSR. And it does not require a strongman pushing the country apart. The Soviet Union dissolved under a reformer who was trying to save it. Gorbachev wanted to modernize the system; he ended up presiding over its collapse because the centrifugal forces had been building for decades and his reforms loosened the seal. Path one can play out over five years or thirty. Drift gets us there as surely as malice does. Federal authority collapses, the Court keeps stripping protections out from under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the country fractures into warring blocs that no longer recognize a common federal authority. If you feel relief at the end of constantly being under threat of Christian nationalism and kleptocracy, you may be among the millions ready to go separate ways rather than fighting over fundamentally different values.
The second path is the Troubles. Fascism lite holds the federal apparatus, corporate power consolidates behind it, and blue states mount sustained opposition without ever quite breaking away. The federal government does not collapse; it weaponizes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Minneapolis, federalized National Guard deployments in Portland, prosecutors charged with sedition for doing their jobs. Blue state officials respond with civil suits and public portals as the public feels less and less represented, people start lashing out. Thirty-five hundred people died in a place the size of Connecticut, and nobody who lived through it would call it peace.
The third path is soft secession.¹ Blue states quit pointing at Congress and the courts and the next election and start expanding the powers they already have. Parallel financial infrastructure independent of federal banking authority. Interstate compacts on healthcare, climate, labor, and reproductive care that function as treaties in everything but name. State-level prosecution of federal officials who break state laws.² This is the move that keeps every door open. It pushes back on federal overreach and shields the people inside blue states from the damage the federal government is already doing while the pushback takes hold. If it works, we restore the union we have. If it does not hold, we already have the architecture in place to handle whatever comes next. The Brookings Institution called the framework provocative. I will be less polite. It is the only path that gives us a real chance at preserving the country we live in, while leaving the door open for a more peaceful departure if soft power fails to result in meaningful reform.
The fourth path is what soft secession might become if path three cannot restore order. Call it the European Union (EU) model. A thin federal layer handling defense, currency, and interstate commerce, while most governance happens at the state and regional level. The Pacific states coordinate on climate and labor. New England pools healthcare. The Great Lakes states negotiate water as a bloc. Eventually somebody calls a constitutional convention and we write down what we have already become. This is not a failure state. It is a deliberate restructuring, and it is the fallback we want if the union itself stops being salvageable.
And then there is the fifth path. The zero path. The path where things simply work themselves out. We have a free and fair enough election, the country swings hard against the regime, a new president takes office with a working congressional majority, the courts get rebalanced, the fired civil servants come back, and we settle into something resembling Hungary's current trajectory rather than collapse or permanent GOP rule.
Look at the polling. Trump's approval rating sits at thirty-four percent in the latest Pew survey, right at his baseline. His floor has never budged.³ The FiftyPlusOne polling average has him at thirty-seven percent approve against fifty-nine percent disapprove.⁴ A landslide rejection is not looking likely with the current numbers.
A third of the country approves of all this. A third of the country is sealed off from reality by the autocrats who built the seal. Half the states are run by the people who would have to certify their own removal. The institutional machinery required for a Hungarian-scale correction, impeachment of the entire cabinet, conviction of Supreme Court justices, override of a presidential veto, amendment of the Constitution itself, demands supermajorities that do not exist on any timeline that matters, inside a judiciary doing everything it can to keep elections tilted kn favor of Republicans.
If we are betting on path zero, we are unwitting controlled opposition. Truly. That is the state-approved plan, gang. That is the kind of opposition Trump and the GOP and the oligarchs approve and allow.
What that gets us is not democratic recovery. It is steady-state fascism with a permanent opposition party that exists to lose most elections respectably, son some here and there, and reassure its donors that next time will be different. Hungary has had that arrangement for fifteen years, they also arguably had a more robust democracy since they were never a duopoly. The regime does not need to crush us if we are willing to crush ourselves on a four-year cycle, dust off, and try again with the same playbook.
It is going to be ugly no matter what. Four years of Biden. The justice system. Republicans who criticize the regime chased out of Congress for fear of violence. Two impeachments. Thirty-four criminal convictions. Jack Smith. So much more. And Trump is still here. The GOP too.
“This time will be different,” says the man repeatedly running into a brick wall hoping to get to Hogwarts.
This is what happens when you take capitalism to its greatest extremes. The most selfish narcissist among us ends up in charge. Everything including the Supreme Court is for sale. Truth is determined by profit loss statements. The opposition is paid to deliver weak half measures. The government lives to take our money and hand it to the politicians' financiers, and foreign governments can pay our politicians directly to send our young adults to fight in foreign wars for corporate profit. The Dow hit fifty thousand the same week the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The market is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
The Callais ruling did not create the fork in the road. It just turned the sign so we can finally read it. Pieces of paths one and two are already showing up in different states at different intensities. The choice is whether we let those pieces grow into the whole picture, or whether governors and attorneys general and state legislators build path three fast enough to reduce the overall suffering that we face. Lessons in history books will see this moment as the failed experiment in unmitigated capitalism that the United States has deformed into, the same way they see Soviet collapse as the failed experiment in state communism. The federal cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry, and we have some building to do.
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References
¹ Armitage, C. (2026). The Constitutional Architecture of State Opposition: A Taxonomy of Sovereign Posture Under Federal Authoritarian Capture and Electoral Autocracy. SSRN Working Paper No. 6416178. https://ssrn.com/abstract=6416178
² Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019). https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/17-646
³ Pew Research Center. (2026, May 1). Trump Loses Ground on Several Personal Traits as Approval Rating Slips. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/05/01/trump-loses-ground-on-several-personal-traits-as-approval-rating-slips/
⁴ FiftyPlusOne. (2026, May 1). Presidential Approval Rating Average. https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/approval/president
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