Are We Witnessing a "Soft Secession"

“I actually think,” Rush Limbaugh told his many millions of listeners during the weeks between Donald Trump losing the 2020 election and his supporters’ assault on the Capitol, “that we’re trending toward secession. It can’t go on this way. There cannot be a peaceful coexistence of two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.”

Twenty months later, on the day the F.B.I. seized thousands of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, The Times reported that “posts on Twitter that mentioned ‘civil war’ had soared nearly 3,000 percent in just a few hours” and “jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Mr. Trump and ‘MAGA Republicans’ a threat to ‘the very foundations of our republic.’”

Days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene reiterated her push for legally splitting up the country: “I want a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.” Polls since 2021 by universities, YouGov and others have consistently found that a third or more of Americans said they expected a civil war during the next decade or so.

A national divorce — let alone a civil war — is, for now, the stuff of fiction. But while loose talk from rabble-rousers has distracted us, the nation has sunk, almost unnoticed, into an unspectacular yet profoundly strange new arrangement. It’s not yet a divorce; it’s more like a bitter, loveless marriage in which the parties stay technically but less and less enthusiastically united because splitting up is too complicated or dreadful or expensive.

...During the past two Democratic presidencies, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries, prohibiting their police forces from enforcing some federal gun regulations. (The term was a trollish play on Democratic sanctuary cities, which did the same for federal immigration policies.) Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas took it upon himself to override federal immigration policy, deploying the National Guard to string the banks of the Rio Grande with coils of razor wire and ordering his troops to prevent federal border agents from helping migrants who got tangled in them. More than two dozen Republican governors endorsed the show of anti-federal strength.

Now that Mr. Trump is back in office, Democratic-led states and cities are getting almost as aggressive, overriding or ignoring federal and state policies they find objectionable. Local police departments aren’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many states passed laws to shield residents from prosecution if they are charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and several have stockpiled abortifacients in case federal law or regulations make them hard to get.

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What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right

“You can never institutionalize the gut instincts of a great, heroic populist like Donald Trump, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Andrew Jackson,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told me this spring. “But the point is that, moving forward, on the evening of Jan. 20, 2029, President Trump will have left the stage. We as conservatives have to answer the question, Where is this movement going? And what it can’t do — what it must not do — is go back to 20 years ago.”

The Heritage Foundation currently finds itself engulfed in an internal struggle that mirrors the one roiling the Republican Party: how to harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else. Long accustomed to placing its experts in key positions in Republican administrations, as it did in Trump’s first term, Heritage presented its Project 2025 as just the kind of master plan an uncompromising second Trump administration would need to implement its agenda.

But once Trump took office, Heritage was instead pushed to the side. As it tried to work its way back into the center of power, the foundation was consumed by a vicious in-house conflict. An old guard of establishment experts saw themselves swamped by an influx of more radical, often younger conservatives eager to remake the institution for the post-Trump right in their image: terminally online, ruthless in fighting the culture wars and vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar conservatism.

A watershed moment came last October, when Roberts posted a video to X in support of Tucker Carlson, who had been widely criticized for inviting the 27-year-old white nationalist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes onto his show. Condemnations flooded in from across the right, with several of Carlson’s closest allies breaking with him over his decision to turn his show into what one of them, the Israeli American philosopher Yoram Hazony, recently called “the leading clearinghouse for virulent antisemitism on the political right.” Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and arguing that conservatives should “feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class” and the “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts later apologized to Heritage staff for his choice of words, which some had criticized as playing into antisemitic tropes, and for having “let down this institution.” But when I asked him about the video, he insisted that it was Heritage’s job to figure out how to bring together a coalition that can win elections and exercise power effectively. Roberts, who is 52, projects a friendly, confident energy. He was wearing a fitted blue suit along with alligator-style cowboy boots, in keeping with his years as president of Wyoming Catholic College. Before taking over at Heritage in 2021, his pitch to the board of trustees, according to The Dispatch, was that he could marry the conservative movement’s new populist ethos with a traditional institution like Heritage. “You can’t have a governing coalition if you’re saying, I’m not even going to talk to people who occasionally listen to a podcast by someone who’s a total goofball,” he went on, referring to Fuentes. “That doesn’t mean that we endorse what that person says. We endorse trying to convince these people of what’s right, and what isn’t right.”

Many employees and experts at Heritage appeared to disagree with the premise that such people belonged in their coalition, and especially that anyone was trying to set them right. Longtime Heritage employees told me that the people they usually collaborated with in congressional offices, circuit courts, foreign embassies and other institutions no longer wanted to be publicly associated with Heritage and what they perceived as its fidelity to Carlson. In a resignation letter later made public, Josh Blackman, a legal scholar who had for years been working on a new edition of “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” said the volume’s contributors pulled out of an event promoting the book and refused to sign copies. Judges who had spoken at the foundation, Blackman wrote, said “they would no longer affiliate with Heritage.”

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Marjorie Taylor Greene: 'MAGA was a lie.'

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said President Trump’s Make American Great Again slogan was a “lie,” saying his first year back in office was focused on obliging wealthy supporters.

“I think people are realizing it was all a lie. It was a big lie for the people. What MAGA is really serving in this administration, who they’re serving, is their big donors,” Greene said in a Wednesday interview with radio personality Kim Iversen. 

“The big, big donors that donated all the money and continue to donate to the president’s PACs and donate to the 250th anniversary and are donating to the big ballroom,” she added.

The former Georgia representative recently resigned from Congress, after airing concerns over the future of health care premiums and the war in Gaza, citing fractures within the GOP and falling out with Trump and MAGA, despite years of loyal support for the president.

On Wednesday, she said the people who truly benefit from backing Trump are financial benefactors, telling Iversen: “Those are the people that get the special favors. They get the government contracts, they get the pardons, or somebody they love or one of their friends gets a pardon.”

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Is the far right embracing imperialism?

The U.S. administration’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump’s plans to open that country’s oil reserves to major energy companies has sparked a resurgence of pro-colonialist sentiment among some prominent figures inside the White House and the broader MAGA political movement.

“Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories (despite have already made them far wealthier and more successful),” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, one of the aides Trump has tasked with overseeing the Venezuelan government, wrote on X the day after American forces raided Maduro’s compound and brought him to the U.S. for trial on a series of charges.

“The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to these newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry,” Miller wrote. “The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.”

The ode to colonialism, delivered by an aide who has been described as Trump’s id, comes as Venezuela’s stability is in question and Trump has cast his eyes on Colombia, Cuba and Greenland — two independent nations and one large territory that has long belonged to Denmark.

Miller’s take is at odds with most mainstream scholarship on the topic of colonialism, not to mention the ethos of political self-determination and economic independence that fueled the American revolution. In the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, University of Arizona professors Ritwik Agrawal and Allen Buchanan wrote in February that the “fundamental wrong” at the heart of the “immorality of colonialism” is “colonizers regarded the colonized as incapable of managing their own affairs, in effect relegating them to the status of minors or mentally incompetent adults.”

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Ashli Babbitt, Jan. 6 rioter killed in Capitol, offered military funeral honors

Pardon me while I throw up.

The Threat to Madisonian Democracy

...In an astounding 80 percent of our states, a single party already controls the House, Senate and governor’s office — a so-called trifecta — or has enough power to block gubernatorial vetoes from the other party. With further redistricting, this figure could hit 90 percent before the end of Trump’s term.  

The upshot is that Americans are increasingly living in airtight partisan state and local political bubbles, while being governed nationally by a single individual openly hostile to the interests of half the population.

From a Madisonian perspective, American democracy is at present spiraling headlong in the wrong direction. In the words of famed Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, Trump has established and demonstrated his position as “sovereign” by repeatedly “deciding” unilaterally on “exceptions” to the constitutional order, then designating for punishment political “enemies” he sees as obstacles to the exercise of his sovereign will. 

He has singled out former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, former CIA director John Brennan, former FBI director James Comey, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James for legal retribution — even declaring some of them guilty of “treason.” He has shaken down law firms and universities and even refuses to rule out pursuing a constitutionally prohibited third term. 

Abroad, he has declared outlandishly bogus “emergencies” under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to threaten or impose massive import tariffs — tariffs such as those targeted at Brazil for its judicial prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro. He has even threatened to annex Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. 

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W's Crystal Ball

George W. Bush called out the MAGA agenda years before Trump rode down that escalator. pic.twitter.com/17U0d1DkBy

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 7, 2025

I've had my differences with George Bush, but he nailed this one.

Gasoline on a fire

FEMA employee removed from role after telling relief team to skip houses with Trump signs after Florida hurricane

The number of conspiracy theories emanating from the usual sources on the far right in recent years has been off the hook. Most are too silly for serious discussion and some are just bat-fecal matter-crazy. Unfortunately this nuttery has taken a firm hold in Trump world. So when you get the odd incident like the above, that actually is true, it just reinforces the belief in all the others. There is a veritable cottage industry out there made of kooks, cranks and conmen who are making a comfortable living off the credulous that regard people like Alex Jones as a more reliable source than the New York Times.