One of the biggest challenges I’ve had in the last nine months and especially since the summer is how to convey both the very brittle, thin nature of Trump’s power and also the scale of the threat his government poses. Jamelle Bouie captured a key dimension of this in a weekend column in the Times: if you wanted to drive the country into literal disunion it’s hard to imagine what you’d do differently than what he is doing right now. He is both rhetorically and (with increasing intensity) literally unleashing the U.S. military on the strongest bastions of opposition to his government (basically blue cities in blue states). He is also canceling more and more of the funding the federal government gives to those states, despite the fact that it is disproportionately funded by taxes from those states. This is definitionally fairly close to warlordism, a broken state in which the leader holds on to power — if not legitimacy — by hoarding state resources for loyalists and depriving opponents of any of them.
I have a deep ideological commitment to the American union. And beyond ideology, red and blue states are largely a fiction. The big red and blue states have huge minorities of the other “side” within their borders. Still, governance on these terms is illegitimate and unsustainable. The only recourse is a much more aggressive use of the sovereign powers of the states than state governments are currently doing.