The Second Civil War

What Happens After January 20, 2025

So far the response to Donald Trump’s 2024 victory has been considerably more muted than the antics of 2016. Sure, we’ve seen lots of frothing, whining, and gnashing of teeth. But the hysteria isn’t being fanned nearly so much by the mainstream media. Nor have we seen nearly so many black-clad rioters breaking windows and burning buildings. And while a few “BlueAnon” types assumed that Trump and Elon stole the election using Starlink satellites, most Dems have grudgingly accepted Trump’s win.

Everything so far has been quiet. Too quiet, according to some who are convinced that this time Trump is absolutely positively going to be the Bad Orange Literal Hitler that he never was during his first term in office.

Are You Ready For an Anti-Trump Insurrection?

On December 6, Robert Reich warned his readers about “How Trump Could Start a Second Civil War:”

Trump may force a second civil war on America with his plan to use the military to round up at least 11 million undocumented people inside the United States — even if it means breaking up families — send them to detention camps, and then deport them.

As well as his plan to target his political enemies for prosecution — including Democrats, journalists, and other critics.

What happens when we, especially those of us in blue states and cities, resist these authoritarian moves — as we must, as we have a moral duty to?

What happens when we try to protect hardworking members of our communities who have been our neighbors and friends for years, from Trump’s federal troops?

What happens when we refuse to allow Trump’s lackeys to wreak revenge on his political enemies who live within our states and communities?

Will our resistance give Trump an excuse to use force against us?

Robert Reich is certainly an intelligent man with a great deal of political experience. I don’t always — OK, don’t often — agree with his conclusions, but he’s always worth a read. His points about the growing polarization between Red and Blue America are certainly salient, and so I’m taking his rhetorical questions seriously. But before we can start a Second Civil War simulation, we’re going to have to set our parameters.

What does Mr. Reich mean when he talks about “resist[ing] those authoritarian moves?” During the first Trump term, the violent resistance came from black bloc rioters, few of whom faced any kind of stiff sanctions for their behavior. If Trump really puts the Authoritarianism pedal to the medal, things will be very different. Violent protestors can expect stiff penalties and lengthy prison terms. They may even be facing live ammo rather than rubber bullets.

Will this serve to strengthen the resolve of The Resistance, or will it encourage them to sit down and shut up? We could expect an upsurge in isolated incidents from lone gunmen or organized cells. But we can expect that the mainstream media will give them as much sympathy as they have shown for Luigi Mangione. And if the loudest Resisters start losing jobs or getting arrested for insurrection, you’ll see a sharp decline in non-violent protests as well.

When we’re talking about resistance, we need to figure out how many people are actually willing to fight. Shrieking about Trump on Bluesky and Reddit probably won’t get you in any trouble. But that’s only because your rulers know that those tantrums pose no threat to their power. Hell, many of the loudest Trump critics have left X because their posts are now met with criticism and hurty words.

The J6 protestors clearly thought they were engaged in a nonviolent protest rather than a revolution. But if just a few dozen J6ers had showed up with weapons they could easily have decimated the Legislative branch. Storming the Capitol frightened your rulers very much. If you really believe that you will be forced to overthrow Trump tyranny, you need to learn from their mistakes. You must be ready to bleed and ready to shed blood.

Never Trump … Well, Almost Never

Let’s move on to The Hill, where Hanna Trudo explains to us how “Democrats recalibrate their resistance to Trump.”

Ahead of January 2025, the lack of a unified Democratic rebuttal to his second term is the latest sign that the party’s just beginning to soul search, trying to figure out what went wrong before banding together to bash the GOP.

“The one thing we seem to know is the strategy of being an anti-Trump party didn’t work any better than when we became a primarily anti-Bush party,” said Max Burns, a Democratic commentator. “In that transformation, we seem to have become unclear about what our actual pro-Democrat message is.”

“It’s more like Republicans post-1960 than anything,” he said, “where the loss led to a real round of questioning about what our values are and what our strategy is.”

The Drumpfh-Haters have grown increasingly angry at the “cowardice” and “treachery” evidenced by many politicians who are willing to compromise with the Bad Orange Man. But for those people politics isn’t just a hobby and an identity marker, it’s their day job. They’re doing what politicans do — working with the current administration and trying to cement power to win future elections.

In 2024 the heated and repeated denunciations of Trump’s absolute evil failed to produce the desired result. The frothing fringe may think that this is only because they didn’t denounce Literally Hitler loudly enough. But it’s unclear how mainstream media and the Democratic Party could have been any louder. Doubling down on a losing strategy is for amateurs. Professionals roll with the punches and come back with new approaches.

In the New York Times, Bret Stephens announced why he’s “Done With Never Trump.”

Who, and what, is Trump? He’s a man and the symbol of a movement. The man is crass but charismatic, ignorant but intuitive, dishonest but authentic. The movement is patriotic — and angry.

Some of that anger is intensely bigoted and some of it misplaced. That side of the anger gets most of the media’s attention. But some of it, too, is correctly directed at a self-satisfied elite that thinks it knows better but often doesn’t, whether the subject is Covid restrictions, immigration policy or how to get our allies to pay more for their defense.

It’s Trump’s sulfurous contempt for that elite — his refusal to be shaped by their norms or shamed by their scorn and his willingness to call out their hypocrisy — that makes him a hero to his followers.

If you want to fight Trump, you need to understand his appeal. Dismissing all his followers as racist racists who do racisms when they’re not doing misogynys and homophobias may appeal to your friends list. But it’s not going to help you formulate a response that might chip away at Trump’s support. As Stephens notes:

We also talked a lot about democracy. That’s important: The memory of Jan. 6 and Trump’s 2020 election lies were the main reasons I voted for Kamala Harris. But if democracy means anything, it’s that ordinary people, not elites, get to decide how important an event like Jan. 6 is to them. Turns out, not so much.

What ordinary people really cared about this year were the high cost of living and the chaos at the border. Why did Trump — so often deprecated by his critics as a fortunate fool — understand this so well while we fecklessly carried on about the soul of the nation?

You can certainly dismiss these critics as sellouts and traitors. But these are people who hold the reins of power, and if they dismiss you in return it’s going to make your revolution a lot more complicated. Many of the people who have been cheering you on are doing so based on information they get from NPR, CNN, the New York Times, and other fashionable news sources. If those sources stop promoting your party line, it’s a sure sign — to them anyway — that you’re, well, yesterday’s news.

Does that mean you should sit back and let Trump run roughshod over the Constitution? Not at all. But it means that you need to have a realistic view of your supporters and what they are willing to do for your cause. Because if this thing goes kinetic, or if a new cause becomes fashionable, you’re likely to find yourself increasingly ignored, mocked, and shoved to the sidelines.

Are You Hoping for an Authoritarian Presidency?

From Sherrif Ali, Xitter, November 24, 2017

I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen.

Donald Trump, Fox News, October 14, 2024

When he was asked about Trump’s “enemy within” comment, Harvard professor Steven Levitsky noted that frequently:

[Autocrats use] exactly this language: there's an enemy within that's more dangerous than our external enemies and that justifies the use of extra-constitutional measures. How many times does Trump have to use this rhetoric before we realize that this is not a normal election?

Trump has certaly used anti-immigrant sentiment to his advantage. In a 2016 Presidential debate he famously told Hillary Clinton that she didn’t want him in charge “because you’d be in jail.” And on October 22, 2024 NPR reporter Tom Dreisbach provided examples of more than 100 Trump threats to prosecute or punish political enemies:

[Trump] says if he wins, on Day 1, he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate President Joe Biden and Biden's family.

He says Vice President Kamala Harris should be prosecuted.

He's reposted calls for former President Barack Obama, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney to face military tribunals.

And then he's also pushed for prosecutions and arrests of people involved in the criminal and civil cases against him - prosecutors, judges, even a courthouse staffer.

And in one case, he floated the idea of prosecuting a member of the Georgia grand jury that indicted him for election interference.

While Levitsky was speaking of Trump, his observation could apply equally well to those who feel Trump should be stopped by any means necessary. If you’re genuinely concerned about America devolving into a country where leaders regularly imprison or harass political opponents, you may want to think long and hard before using those techniques against your opposition.

Are you concerned about authoritarianism, or are you concerned about Trump? Most Trump supporters, and many neutral parties, believe the various civil and criminal charges leveled against Trump were lawfare aimed at keeping him off the 2024 ticket. Many also believe that the 2020 election was stolen by people who wanted to “fortify the election” against voters choosing Trump for a second term.

You can dismiss these claims as “fake news” and “disinformation.” For four years journalists dismissed 2020 election fraud claims as “the Big Lie.” Yet after Trump’s surprise 2016 victory many Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and Jimmy Carter) claimed that he was an illegitimate President put in office by Russian interference. And more than a few people cheered when Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania.

You may feel that this is a special case, that Donald Trump is ontologically evil, that we must bend the rules just this once. If so, you’ve fallen prey to the “stomp reflex.” In your insistence to “save” American democracy, you’ve shown that you no longer have faith in American democracy. And if you think you’re doing it for a good cause, consider what happens when somebody else uses your precedent for a bad one.

We’ve spent nearly a decade in a state of high anxiety. At this moment in time, lots of Americans are looking for a strong leader who will make things right and punish the bad people. When we get that strongman, 50% of us will be bitterly disappointed at first. The rest will be bitterly disappointed later.

What Would a Second Civil War Look Like?

Perhaps the stupidest comment ever made on Twitter

The first Civil War was a war between the states, at a time when each state had its own official militias that fought against each other. During a period of tensions, the North and South organized those militias into the Union and Confederate Armies. We are far less likely to see battles between clearly delineated armies in a Second Civil War. Instead, our Second Civil War would more closely resemble post-Assad Syria or post-Roman Western Europe.

That war might start with Trump sending in the military to restore law and order after a hard economic downturn led to widespread food shortages. Or it might start after Trump decided to use the US military to bomb Latin American cartels, only to face widespread terrorist attacks from cartel members in the US. Instead of fighting state actors, American troops would face groups that spent as much time squabbling amongst each other as they did fighting their common enemy.

The government certainly has nuclear and chemical weapons at its disposal. But ultimately the only way you maintain control of a region is by putting boots on the ground. The continental United States covers a great deal of ground, and American civilians own many, many guns. Many of these militias would receive funding, training, and materiel from Russia, China, Iran, or other countries with scores to settle. Among their training would be instructions on how take out water treatment plants, irrigation systems, air traffic control towers, and power stations.

A quick and brutal takedown of dissenters might work in the short term. But it would breed lots of simmering resentment and serve to recruit many new militia members. As order breaks down, those militias will take over police and other public service duties. Some will be honest and many more will be corrupt. In time small groups will join forces to become larger groups and that process will continue as new political entities develop out of the wreckage.

What would arise out of the chaos would be a disunited States that might go through a series of confederations and treaties. Areas with arable land and potable water will come through the conflagration in better shape than major urban areas. Cities will shrink dramatically as supply lines, electricity, and water become less reliable. The abandoned neighborhoods of Detroit provide an example of what most major urban areas will resemble in a post-Second Civil War America.

Ultimately the official American map might look very much like our current map. But on the ground Washington might control very little territory outside the Boston-Washington Corridor. We’ve been using immigration as a way to prop up our population and economy. But few immigrants will feel enthusiastic about relocating to a war zone unless they are looking for jobs as mercenaries. And as with most conflicts, our Second Civil War will see more Americans die from disease and famine than from bullets or bombs.

Granted, this is a worst-case scenario. But if you let this genie out of the bottle, good luck getting it back in. Your peace negotiations will involve dozens of hostile groups and take place amidst a Gaza-sized humanitarian catastrophe.

So How Do We Prevent a Second Civil War?

When you find yourself stuck in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. You’ve spent eight years listening to shrieking on all sides. You’ve convinced yourself that half of America hates you and there’s nothing to do but hate them back. There’s no shame in that. Wealthy and powerful people spent a great deal of money keeping you and millions like you at peak hysteria.

Now that Trump has won, you’ve noticed that many of his loudest critics are now making conciliatory gestures and backing away from their earlier claims. You may wonder why it is that people who claimed yesterday that Trump is a dangerous fascist are now ready to recognize him as the validly elected President.

Let me let you in on a little secret; that act was always intended for the rubes. Those politicians were no more sincere when they warned about dangerous dictator Trump than they were when they took a knee and proclaimed that Black Lives Matter. Your outrage served their purposes, and so they fed you things that would keep you outraged. For a time it worked. But sooner or later dopamine burnout sets in, and what was once exciting becomes passé.

A few holdouts are still looking to profit from the outrage machine. So long as it continues to get them votes and airtime, they will present themselves as heroic freedom fighters holding back Trumpian evil. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that they’re willing to risk their careers or their lives. And don’t fool yourself into taking those risks on their behalf.

That’s not to say that your fears are unfounded. If the economy continues to decline, as I expect it will, we will likely see growing civil unrest. The longer that continues, the greater the chance of an incident that starts the conflagration. And when that spark hits the kindling, it’s impossible to tell when — or if — we will get things back under control.

You will have to decide for yourself what you are willing to suffer for your political beliefs. Are you willing to be debanked, audited, doxed, beaten, or arrested? Are you willing to put your career or even your life at risk? Will you endanger your family’s safety and stability for your cause, or are you just in this for online affirmation? You will have to determine the boundaries of your Resistance. Or you will have to figure out how you can maintain your sanity and your dignity under tyranny and anarchy.