How Blue States Can Fight the MAGA Backlash

Shortly after the first government shutdown since 2019 began earlier this month, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought announced that he was freezing $8 billion in infrastructure projects exclusively in states that voted for Kamala Harris. The projects that Vought consigned to funding purgatory included a multibillion-dollar renovation and expansion of the Hudson Tunnel from New Jersey to New York City and an extension of the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line. As has become the unapologetic norm in this vengeance-minded administration, President Donald Trump did not bother to hide the real motivation for these cuts. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things,” he said.

Since his election, Trump has talked about and treated blue states not as equals under America’s increasingly distressed system of federalism but rather like defeated vassals who must pay tribute to their new emperor in the form of policy capitulations and abrogations of their constitutional rights. The cumulative impact of these transgressions—inflicted under the explicit mandate to make blue states suffer—is the gravest threat to the centuries-old constitutional union of American states since the Civil War. And until leading Democrats at the federal and state level understand and articulate the scale of Trump’s plot to subjugate blue states as subservient, underfunded entities under the new MAGA regime of abusive federalism, they will be incapable of leading the national campaign of direct action that is the only way to stop it.

At this point, the litany of hardball maneuvers deployed against states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 is long enough that it can’t fit in a single article. The Trump regime has aggressively and illegally targeted both Democratic leaders and their supporters. Federal agents have arrested the Democratic mayor of Newark and a Democratic member of the House, and assaulted a Democratic US senator on camera. Trump’s Mob-like Justice Department has targeted prominent Democrats like California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James for vindictive investigations and prosecutions, with more to come.

Last week, Trump escalated this campaign of autocratic intimidation by screaming on his fourth-tier microblogging website that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be imprisoned. His corrupt henchman—er, “immigration czar”—Tom Homan has distributed threats of arrest on cable news like he’s tossing paper towels to hurricane victims, against everyone from New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to California Governor Gavin Newsom. These forays into state-sponsored ideological intimidation no longer require even a fig leaf of legal pretext, since Trump and his cabinet goons can count on the reliably servile US Attorney General Pam Bondi to do whatever the administration asks—very much counter to the Justice Department’s mission.

ICE’s rapidly metastasizing deportation complex has also disproportionately targeted blue states and Democratic-run cities. These raids have involved tactics—like last week’s sickening and wildly unconstitutional raid of an apartment complex on the South Shore of Chicago—that have no place in a democratic society. In addition to visiting their reign of terror on ordinary civilians in the city, ICE agents have assaulted a Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois on camera, assaulted religious leaders for peacefully protesting, detained an alderman of the Chicago City Council, arrested reporters and charged a University of Chicago professor with a groundless felony in connection with the ongoing protests outside of the suburban Broadview detention facility.

The president, whether knowingly or operating on information fed to him by the curators of his narrow and conspiracy-riddled information diet, is also obsessed with crime in blue-state cities. He has ordered National Guard troops to be deployed in stateless Washington, DC, on the pretext of a hallucinatory crime wave, and is federalizing National Guard troops from Texas to send to Illinois. In his bizarre, rambling speech to the country’s military leaders on September 30, hastily summoned to Quantico from their posts around the world to see him and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cosplay as warrior princes, Trump singled out San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles as “very unsafe places” and promised to “straighten them out one by one” by using them as “training grounds” for the military. Our president is apparently incapable of thinking of the places where Democrats win electoral majorities as truly American or deserving of equal treatment under the law.

Citizens in blue states feel like they are living under a constant state of military siege, rhetorical harassment and punitive partisan budgetary cuts because that is in fact what is happening. And it is not sustainable for another three years. The compact between the states is not magical or self-executing or ordained by divine providence to ensure that it can’t be undone by ruthless MAGA tyrants. It has fallen violently apart once before, and there is no particular reason other than inertia and delusion to believe that it couldn’t once again succumb to corrosive pressures from within. The Constitution itself, after all, was the product of an extrajudicial coup against the Articles of Confederation, which contained no legal mechanism for replacing themselves with a brand-new political order.

If JD Vance is reading this article, in a publication he’s described as “esteemed,” I want to be clear: I am not advocating for secession and have absolutely no interest in living through the dissolution of this country. But the self-appointed mandarins of American Greatness in Trumpworld need to hear that what they are doing, hour by hour, is the most debilitating assault on American unity since the Civil War. And once the veneer of state juridical equality is stripped away under the Supreme Court’s delusional embrace of unitary executive theory, allowing presidents to just cut off the flow of funding to states they are mad at, it’s only a matter of time before enterprising leaders in the new blue-state underground imagine themselves as the rulers of an independent country rather than as the governors of second-class provinces.

That is precisely why we need to keep thinking about what, beyond protest in the streets, can be done to stop the administration from simultaneously dismantling the federal government that blue-state largesse props up while also constantly blackmailing those same state governments to forfeit their clear rights under the Constitution. Because there has never been a presidential administration that so unapologetically used this kind of gutter partisanship to punish entire states full of people, the policy options here are largely unknown. But some ideas are starting to bubble up.

It is common practice for municipal institutions like museums to charge one rate for residents and another, much higher rate for out-of-towners, a practice that most state university systems also follow. This principle could be extended to other forms of commerce. For example, Illinois could charge vehicles one rate to blue-state drivers who are using roads on the sprawling Illinois tollway system, and another for those from red states. They could pass laws enacting steep excise taxes for residents of red states in hotels and Airbnbs. Labeling her proposals “soft secession,” Mother Jones editor argues that blue states could also terminate licensing reciprocity agreements with red states while “disinvesting our pension funds from red-state companies like AT&T, American Airlines, ExxonMobil, and Tesla.”

While these are all fine and quite clever ideas to make the White House uncomfortable, communicate blue state outrage, and give red-state partisans a taste of their own medicine, they are unlikely to cause disruption at the scale necessary to force the hands of Trump and his apparatchiks. We also can’t count on the intended recipients of this campaign to connect the dots between the Trump administration’s actions and a blue-state counteroffensive. The country’s new MAGA overlords will only grasp the full scope of the threat before them via coordinated national action of the sort that is second nature for citizens of countries such as France or Italy—which recently staged a general strike in support of the Gaza flotillas—but virtually unheard of in the United States.

One idea is a tax strike. In 2024, California and New York alone combined to send nearly $1.2 trillion in income and other taxes to the federal government, making up close to a quarter of all revenue. The reliance of many small, rural Republican-leaning states on federal funding is well known, although there are a number of Democratic-leaning states like Maine and New Mexico in the same position. By themselves, the states that voted for Kamala Harris—leaving aside the consensus battleground states—represent half of all federal tax revenue.

Alas, there is no easy button to press to make a coordinated tax strike happen. It would require individual Americans to take enormous risks of after-the-fact penalties for withholding too much money or not filing their taxes at all. The gamble here would be that a diminished IRS wouldn’t be able to summon the resources or personnel to verify and punish citizens participating in a strike—but the massive mustering of ICE agents doesn’t suggest that the Trump White House would let a tax protest just take root on its own. When I floated this idea to one Chicago-area tax professional, I got this reply: “I am with you in theory, but I don’t know how that would play out in practice.”

That brings us to Italy’s recent example of a national general strike. In practice, it wouldn’t actually take much to bring society to a screeching halt. If federal workers in just the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs went out at once (they would need to resign, take time out under the Family and Medical Leave Act, or find some other workaround to avoid prohibitions on striking), and if they were joined by, say, public school teachers, the country would be snarled in an almost unimaginably chaotic crisis within 24 hours. Organizers could set the date for March 4, which marks the 236th anniversary of when the new constitutional order went into effect.

The big proviso here is that translating the inchoate anger of normie liberal soccer Moms wearing their first “Fuck ICE” T-shirts into a national strike will take time and work—and buy-in from Democratic elites. We would need strike funds, precinct leaders, legal defense teams, and considerable logistical preparation everywhere we’d expect people to take to the streets for extended periods of time, in red and blue states alike. Americans need to start exercising their protest muscles, and while many already are by attending No Kings protests and participating in ICE Watch shifts, they need to understand that they are in training for a much more comprehensive set of actions.

In planning a nationwide strike, it is worth remembering, and communicating to participants, that the whole idiotic scheme of red and blue states—a concept whose toxic contribution to our national predicament should be obvious—only dates to the disputed 2000 election and the arbitrary color scheme that TV networks employed that night to color in states won by Democrat Al Gore or Republican George W. Bush. Prior to that historic stalemate, it was common for networks to choose blue for Republicans and red for Democrats. But we are deep enough into this psychodrama that the designation of every state as red, blue, and purple is part of the national imagination.

It is actually surprising that it took this many years for someone steeped in this divisive, childish patois to take it to its logical extreme. In preparing to mount a nationwide general strike to reclaim basic rights of self-determination and autonomy guaranteed under the Constitution, a key objective should be to abolish, once and for all, the phony and superficial sorting of Americans into monolithic hyper-partisan camps. The one useful civic lesson the second Trump administration has driven home is that such dismal, pundit-grade thinking is the prelude to fascism, and a recipe to tear us apart for good.