Photo by Lee Lawson

The upcoming 2024 presidential election poses two critical questions: What happens if Donald Trump wins? And, equally troubling, what happens if he loses the election?

Attempts to address either question are now — months before the election and a newly elected president taking office — purely speculative.  Some have already begun to consider the first question.  In March, and in no uncertain terms, Trump addressed the second question, warned as to the consequences if he loses the November election:

“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole … that’s gonna be the least of it, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it.”

Trump’s threat of a “bloodbath” is spoken with the grave authority of the president who instigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In his speech at the “Save America” rally preceding the attack, he taunted his audience, ranting, “We fight like hell. If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

A second front little discussed in the MAGA strategy if Trump loses the election is the increasing calls for session.

In February 2023, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-R) tweeted, “We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”  She added, “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

Greene is not alone is in the increasing calls for session.  During her presidential campaign challenging Trump, Nikki Haley declared on the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” “if Texas decides they want to do that, they can do that.”  She went on to declare, “If that whole state says, ‘We don’t want to be part of America anymore,’ I mean, that’s their decision to make.” She cautioned, noting, “Let’s talk about what’s reality. Texas isn’t going to secede.”  So radical were her words, she shortly reversed her position.

Support for secession is most forcefully expressed by Daniel Miller, president of the pro-independence Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM).  He warns, “If you see major anomalies in the 2024 election the calls for TEXIT [i.e., Texas independence movement] will become overwhelming and I believe the same thing happens if Joe Biden gets reelected as president of the United States.”

Hy McEnery, vice president of “Free Louisiana,” insists state secession is constitutional.  He declared:

“The freedom of a state to withdraw its membership in any union is a state power that was not given up when the states formed the federal government. The U.S. Constitution has a list of things that states may not do, but it does not include secession. And the Tenth Amendment says any powers that states didn’t delegate to the federal government are retained by the states, or by the people.”

A 2022 poll of 625 Louisiana adults found 50 supported the state becoming an independent country while 49 percent were opposed.

There is a growing sentiment among Republican and conservative electorate that it’s time for secession. Such efforts being promoted by Republican legislators in states as disparate as Texas and New Hampshire; in Arizona, one in four Republicans support secession.

A 2024 YouGov poll finds that nearly one quarter (23%) of Americans support secession, and that “Republicans are more likely than Democrats to support their state seceding.”  It reports that the states with the highest support for secession are Alaska (36%) and Texas (31%).

Calls for secession are spreading to individual states. In Illinois, Jersey County officials have suggested that it secede from the state and become part of Missouri. In Madison County, locals will vote on whether could separate “from Cook County to form a new state and to seek admission to the Union.”

Individual states do not have the right to secede from the Union.  In the wake of the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White (1869) that states “entered into an indissoluble relation.” This view was backed by former Justice Antonin Scalia noted in 2006: “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede.”

In the wake of the growing controversy about illegal immigrants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has challenged this long-standing belief.  He argued that the Biden administration is violating the federal government’s “compact” with the states by failing to secure the boarder.  Together with 25 other GOP governors, he insists that Biden’s alleged failure justifies state usurpation of federal authority at the border. They argue that the Constitution is a “compact” or agreement and not a binding “contract.”  According to one interpretation, “This language embraces the Confederacy’s conception of the Constitution as a mere compact that states may exit when they feel it has been broken.”

Support for Abbott’s position on secession has been embraced by California Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R-Riverside).  In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom (Dem), he noted:

“As a border state, Californian has suffered substantial economic and societal harm because of the porous border. While I appreciate your efforts to crackdown on fentanyl smuggling by increasing the number of California National Guard service members deployed to interdict drugs at U.S. ports of entry, more must be done to secure our southern border.”

The Assemblyman ask Newsom to “make a public declaration of solidarity” with Abbott.

Insight into potential appeal of a call for secession is suggested by a Wisevoter map outlining two clusters of the most conservative states.  The first is located in the Northwest and includes Idaho (40% conservative voters), Montana (39%), Wyoming (46%), North Dakota (39%), South Dakota (45%) and Utah (41%).  The second is in the South/Southcentral region and includes Louisiana (43%), Mississippi (50%), Arkansas (41%), Alabama (46%), Georgia (39%), South Carolina (41%), Tennessee (43%), Indiana (39%), Oklahoma (43%), Kansas (39%) and Missouri (41%).

It’s difficult to imagine what the outcome of a second secession would be. However, one could imagine such a movement rising in the South/Southcentral states as it did a century-and-a-half ago.  On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president; on December 5^th, he won at the Electoral College in terms of popular and electoral votes; and on December 20^th, South Carolina secedes from the Union and was quickly followed by Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.  On April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor and the Civil War began.  Could this be reenacted in 2025?

Looking at the Northwest, four states – Montana, Wyoming South Dakota and Idaho – suggests what might be a second front in the secession effort.  According to Conservative Move, Wyoming is “the most conservative state in the United States.” It adds, “According to the 2023 PVI – Partisan Voting Index — score, Wyoming has a R+25 rating, and 69.9 percent of its voters supported Trump in the 2020 presidential election.”

Wisevoter notes, “The predominant values in Wyoming tend to be conservative, with a strong emphasis on limited government intervention, individualism, and gun rights.”  North Dakota had a PVI of R+20 with 65.1 percent of voters supporting Trump in the 2020 election.  In 2020, Idaho was ranked with an PVI of R+18 and 63.8 percent of Idaho votes supported Trump.  Equally revealing, as Conservative Move points out, “This means that the state has consistently voted for Republican candidates and has not elected a Democratic presidential candidate since 2000.”  Montana had a PVI of R+11 and Trump won 56.9 percent of the 2020 vote.

These four states have among the highest rates of personal gun ownership in the country. According to the Ammo.com website, these states rank in terms of “gun owners per capita” as follows: Wyoming (rank #2 at 245.8), South Dakota (rank #3 at 72.2), Idaho (rank #4 at 40.2) and Montana (rank #1 at 33.2).

Many white Americans, especially men, believe they are being “replaced” by women, African Americans, Jews and the growing number – and diversity – of immigrates who’ve settled in the U.S. over the last quarter century.  Fox TV host Tucker Carlson ranted on-air about replacement months before the January 6^th attack.  “In political terms,” he said, “this policy is called ‘the great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”  More troubling, white nationalists who participated in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, shouted the slogans, “You Will Not Replace Us” and “Jews Will Not Replace Us.”

This resentment was most evident in the failed 2020 effort by 13 men, seven of them members the Wolverine Watchmen, a paramilitary militia group, to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat.  According to a Times report, the kidnappers were “threatening to start a civil war ‘leading to societal collapse’ and planning to kidnap the governor and other government officials.”  The kidnappers’ effort may foreshadow the type of reaction that might follow a Trump defeat in the 2024 election.

The 2024 election is slowly approaching, and its outcome remains uncertain. Nevertheless, its outcome — no matter who wins — portends a scary fate for the nation especially if far-right groups and Republicans push a secessionist agenda that could become a second Civil War. As Rachael Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “The events on January 6 are not past. They are prelude.”