Anarchy In the U.S.A.?

Donald Trump has already done considerable damage to the United States, and he's just getting started.  If you think his executive orders and his January 6 pardons are terrible, you're in for worse to come.

Right now, things look bleak enough.  Trumpism is dominant, MAGA is on the march, and there's less resistance than acceptance.  The Democrats, having expected to be in a period of triumph at this time for electing the first black female President, are too traumatized to object to Trump.  None of them have stepped forward to rally the party and, by association, anti-Trump Americans.  It seems that for every executive order that lawsuits have been filed against, there are at least two executive orders that are perfectly legal (like any executive order pulling the United States out of international agreements, for example).  There is more to come.  This is not going to end well.

However, I don't think this will end on January 20, 2029.  I don't even think it will only end later than that.  I think it will end sooner.

Trump is still threatening to take actions in foreign affairs that are sure to rile up other countries and isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world - more than it already is now.  He's likely to rattle his saber against Panama for control of the Panama Canal, and his historically based claims to the canal have disturbing parallels to Adolf Hitler's claim to the Free City of Danzig and the Polish Corridor in 1939, which led to the German invasion of Poland that began World War II.  An American invasion of Panama wouldn't necessarily began a global war, but it would cause severe economic dislocation in the world and might cause especially severe shortages and hyperinflation based on the scarcity of goods - both from the disruption caused in Panama and economic sanctions against the United States by the European Union and China.  Black markets would form.   Chaos would ensue.  State and local governments would have to  deal with civil unrest on a regular basis.   

We might not even need an illegal occupation of Panama for all that.  How about Trump's threatened deportations of Hispanic migrants, which would rattle the domestic economy because of all of the work migrants do to keep the flow of goods and services moving?  The actor Luis Avalos once called Hispanics the "dynamo" of American life; this is what he meant.  A forced removal of migrant workers would cause a breakdown of the country's economic system, and that would have the same effect as an international crisis in Panama.  

And what about Trump's withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which I talked about yesterday?  He likely gave, inadvertently, more control of the organization to China, which will inevitably further corrupt an already compromised international body.  All we need is another pandemic - not even a so-called "once in a century" pandemic like COVID, just a pandemic that causes enough instability and paranoia - or even an epidemic, and chaos results.

Any of these scenarios - and scenarios I haven't even pondered yet -  could lead to dysfunction of the federal government and encourage Trump to try to "dominate the streets" - not just in Washington but in other cities.  The entire system could collapse or could fall progressively in a domino effect.  It all leads to one thing - anarchy.

A breakdown of the system will inevitably lead to violence and destruction.  We don't need invading armies to lay waste to the homeland the way the Union did to the Confederacy in 1865 or the way the Allies did to Nazi Germany in 1945.  We're capable of rendering Washington by ourselves to the same fate as Richmond after the fall of the Confederate government or Berlin after the Red Army subdued it.  And Trump will likely stay in the White House - the physical building, I mean - but while he may not flee like Jefferson Davis or commit suicide like Adolf Hitler, he will definitely be deposed.  He could be taken captive by ordinary citizens who scale the fences of the White House and storm the mansion itself.  If that sounds unthinkable, remember that January 6 was unthinkable.  So was the idea that militant "students" in another country could scale the fence of our embassy there and storm the building and take its inhabitants hostage for a year and change - with their government's support. 

The United States, being a continent-sized nation of nation-sized states, won't feel the affects of such anarchy equally.  Some areas of the country will fare better than others, though it would be an uneducated guess as to which states would come out more favorably.  But once Trump is gone under such circumstances - circumstances of his own doing - the United States will be a wounded nation, a country that will need to be rebuilt physically and socially.  And I don't think the rest of the world will have much sympathy for us, so there won't be a Marshall Plan for us.  We'll be on our own.  

If we still have a country by then.  We could end up being a dozen separate countries, because even though mass merchandising and a nationalized consumer economy have rendered every place in America the same - "you make a right at Home Depot, pass two lights and make a left at Wal-Mart, pass McDonald's, and then you turn right into the parking lot of the mall where the Macy's wing is" - regional differences based on culture and politics still reign supreme.  An ugly highway of strip stores and shopping malls in Illinois may look no different than an ugly highway of strip stores and shopping malls in Texas, but the values of the people in each of those states are quite different indeed.   I even made a map of how I think the United States might split up.  (Click on the map to get a better look at it.)

Don't assume that this can't happen.  Back in 1978, when Pope John Paul II assumed the throne of Peter and began his crusade against communism in Eastern Europe, everyone agreed that the idea of the Soviet Union splitting up into fifteen separate countries was preposterous.