Trump’s weird war against the states

Throughout Donald Trump’s presidency, he hasn’t tried to hide the fact that he holds Americans who didn’t vote for him in contempt. Ever since his first term, when one of “his” red states suffered a natural disaster, he immediately showed sympathy and sent federal relief. But he did the opposite when California, a blue state, was hit by devastating wildfires, blaming the state’s Democratic leaders for failing to follow his absurd advice, which he claimed would have prevented the disaster in the first place. 

Such behavior is par for the course. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump blamed blue states for the crisis and tried to deny them federal aid, saying they weren’t deserving because their governments were poorly run by Democrats and the assistance would be unfair to Republicans. (According to a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine, the virus actually killed more Republicans, at least in Florida and Ohio, due in part to vaccine denialism.) He has never felt any obligation to America, only to the Americans who follow him and bend to his will. 

This problem has only become more acute during his second term. POLITICO found that Trump has approved just 23% of disaster funding requests from states led by Democrats and 89% from those led by Republicans. He has blocked at least $250 million that “would have been approved by every previous president, including Trump in his first term,” and he did it even after “FEMA had documented that the damage met its financial threshold to warrant receiving federal aid.”

One obvious example is Los Angeles, where, according to the Guardian, victims of the devastating fires of 2025 have now passed a “grim” milestone — “they have faced the longest delay in modern history for federal aid.” Trump has so far refused to appropriate the promised $15 billion in necessary long-term aid to rebuild the affected communities. The fires, he said, could have been prevented if only California Gov. Gavin Newsom had turned on “the valve” that would have sent water from Canada to L.A. to put them out. This is, of course, an absurd fantasy. But in the immediate aftermath of the fires, Trump told Sean Hannity that he expected the state to agree to enact voter identification and “let the water flow” if it expected any federal relief. 

This summer, Trump refused disaster requests from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island for a major February snowstorm while, virtually at the same time, approving them for six red states — and making sure to praise the efforts of their GOP politicians. In fact, he is now making a great show of combining the release of federal aid to red states with his endorsement of Republican candidates, a blatant act of partisanship any other president would be too embarrassed to attempt. 

In short, the president is using disaster funding as blackmail to force states to capitulate to his unlawful policies. 

After trying to work with the government to no avail, 25 Democratic-led states sued the administration in July, asserting that the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are using a “campaign of coercion” to force states to do Trump’s bidding with respect to vote suppression and its draconian immigration policies, all of which are already in litigation. 

This is unprecedented. No other president has used disaster funding as a system of partisan punishment and reward. But it’s not just disaster aid: Trump has canceled federal projects in blue states and given them to red states. He closed five of 10 regional Health and Human Services offices, all in states that voted for Harris in 2024, laying off thousands of citizens. He has unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the National Guard on Democratic-led cities, terrorizing citizens, residents and immigrants alike. 

In 2026 Trump found a new weapon: fraud accusations. Using bogus numbers and anecdotal evidence, he launched a nationwide crusade against “fraud” in blue states, commissioning Vice President JD Vance to lead it, with the help of the Department of Justice. The weapon they are using is withholding federal funds, generally based on nothing more than vague accusations. They are particularly focusing on child care, homeless programs, nursing homes, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and hospice care. Some of these allegations may be legitimate. But the administration’s public pronouncements only seem to apply to blue states when red states are equally implicated.

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This is all being done in the open; Trump has made no secret of his plans, and he doesn’t even pretend that it’s being done on the merits. At a Cabinet meeting in October, he promised, “We’ll be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly, because that’s the way it works. They wanted to do this, so we’re going to give them a little taste of their own medicine.”

But Trump has also made comments that indicate he has bigger goals in mind. When he was asked in the heat of the 2024 presidential race about how he planned to address child care, an issue affecting families of all political persuasions, he stumbled. He didn’t have an answer, which showed in the word salad response that followed. His daughter Ivanka, he said, was very involved in the issue and he thought tariffs and “growth” would take care of the problem, implying there would be funding forthcoming when all the money came rushing in. 

And in April, Trump was caught on video making an unexpected comment that was so inflammatory the White House pulled it down. At a private lunch in honor of Easter, Trump stated, “I said to Russell [Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget], ‘Don’t send any money for day care because the United States can’t take care of day care.’ We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.” He went on to say, “We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”

Comments like these have surely sent a huge thrill up the legs of many old-fashioned conservative movement types for whom “states’ rights” and “big government” have long-been mothers’ milk. Until now, Trump has been seen as a populist protector of the government programs, especially Social Security and Medicare, but he seems to have evolved, saying what those conservatives believed but never admitted to before: the federal government should be responsible for nothing more than the military, borders and federal law enforcement. In other words, an imperialist police state. All this namby-pamby “safety net” stuff should be up to the states, and if he has his druthers, the federal government wouldn’t provide anything to all the losers who failed at one of two things: being born rich, or managing to steal enough to become that way. 

With wars and conquest overseas and economic lethargy at home, Trump has betrayed most of his America First promises, so his shift on the federal government’s primary responsibilities should not be that surprising. The president has shown he is more than happy to use that big government jackboot to punish his personal enemies at home and abroad. So why would anyone not expect him to use a massive military and police state?