The Road to Splitsville ARE WE THERE YET?

The Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

The fact is—and we wanted you to hear this from us—The Split is fiction. (We hear you rise up as one and cry, “What? No! That can’t be! It’s so realistic and persuasive and shit!”) Thanks, but yes, it’s fiction. Actually, it’s speculative fiction, which we think of as fiction squared. Normal fiction presents people and events that never happened, set in a world (in the present, or even the past) that we can all agree does, or did, really exist. Speculative fiction presents people and events that never happened, in a world that itself never existed--or, at least, doesn’t exist yet.

OR DOES IT!?

The whole premise of “The Road to Splitsville” is that, however horrifying (or, if you prefer, however tempting) the prospect of a red-state/blue-state “divorce,” it hasn’t really happened. We’re still a single country. We may, in this newsletter, be documenting various phenomena that might presage such a separation—that might, if it were to actually take place, lead us to look back and think, “We should have seen this coming”—but still: As of this writing, there are fifty states in the USA.

But what if that’s only technically true? What if the US as a “united” polity is itself a kind of speculative fiction, a story about a place that doesn’t actually exist?

Anyone wishing to make this case need only present two exhibits into evidence. So, okay, ladies and germs, Exhibit A: Time Magazine’s new cover story, in which Donald Trump cites a series of things he will do if elected to a second term.

It’s as bad as you think, and worse. But first: Applause for writer Eric Cortellessa…No, wait. But first first: Time Magazine? Really? Is it still around? And, if so, has it become (like Newsweek) a toothless, feeble version of its former self?

It is still around, and we don’t know what it’s become because we don’t read it. But this piece is first-rate. Applause for writer Eric Cortellessa, who asks good questions, captures Trump’s third-grader vocabulary (Would Trump prosecute Atlanta D.A. Fani Willis or Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg? “’No, I don’t want to do that,’ he says, before adding, ‘We’re gonna look at a lot of things. What they’ve done is a terrible thing.’”), and notes when his subject is factually wrong. (Gluttons for punishment will want to read the entire transcript, which also links to a fact-check page.)

None of what emerges in the interview is a surprise, and all of it is horrifying.

To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding.

While with one hand criminalizing immigrants, pregnant women, and doctors, he would, with the other, pardon and de-criminalize actual criminals:

He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.

With some statesmen, it can require intelligence and finesse to analyze their fundamental motivations. You find yourself having to parse what you can perceive of their understanding of history, their sense of morality, their feelings of responsibility, and their instincts about human nature. With Trump, none of those matter. He’s a simple-minded monster. He’s only interested in and moved by four things: Recreationally, sex and golf. Professionally, revenge and money. If, in the pursuit of the latter two, he can indulge his bully’s sense of sadism, so much the better.

The piece ends on an idealistic question that prompts a predictable, but not inaccurate, answer:

Whether or not he was kidding about bringing a tyrannical end to our 248-year experiment in democracy, I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles? Trump says no. Quite the opposite, he insists. “I think a lot of people like it.”

And that brings us to Exhibit B: A lot of people like it.

Usually when Trump invokes “a lot of people,” it means he’s inventing some justification for something (“a lot of people think I’m the best President in history”) or he’s projecting and covering up his recently-revealed ignorance (“A lot of people don’t know that viruses and bacteria are two different things”). In this case, though, he’s right. Alas.

By any measure, in whatever polls and however slanted or inaccurate they prove to be, tens of millions of people approve of and will vote for Donald Trump. (Here’s one now.) And even if many or most of those people are unaware of, or couldn’t care less about, any of the policies mentioned above, it doesn’t matter. Trump’s vile qualities and aberrant personality have been on national public display since at least 2016, and that’s what his fans adore.

It's worth mentioning, here, something that we haven’t seen much acknowledgment of in all the What Trump Will Do articles of the past year: No matter how specific Trump’s agenda, or how “disciplined” (as described by the comically corrupt Elise Stefanik) those around him now are, no matter how planned-out the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (which will put a torch to every conceivable aspect of our “heritage”), things are not going to go the way Trump and his supporters have outlined.

Imagine “rounding up” 11 million people. Imagine forcibly tearing them from homes, jobs, friends, relatives, colleagues, and neighbors, and putting them—feeding, housing, and keeping them--in detention camps. Imagine calling for the arrest and trial of Trump’s political enemies, who have (like Biden) obviously committed no crime. Imagine letting Russia “do whatever the hell it wants.”

One common observation among pundits these days is that Trump “isn’t really modeling himself after Hitler. He’s more like Victor Orban of Hungary, a 21^st-century type of authoritarian.” Uh-huh. Except that the US isn’t Hungary. Its history, traditions, values, and population are nothing like Hungary’s. Recall that the mere fact of Trump winning in 2016 triggered one of the biggest mass demonstrations in US history. What would follow a Trump election this year isn’t the stern-and-problematic-but-orderly imposition of these policies. What would follow is public revolt, military crackdown, and chaos.

How could it be otherwise? Rick Wilson, who deserves discredit for spending a lifetime promoting Republicans and thus leading us to this pretty pass, but who deserves credit for seeing early on what Trump is and for writing and speaking smartly and amusingly in condemnation of him, titled one of his books Everything Trump Touches Dies. Ain’t that the truth. Actually, it's more than that. It's an iron law of Newtonian political physics. If he were to win a second term, Trump would touch the entire Federal government, with that predictable consequence. Regardless of the competence, or lack thereof, of his acolytes and loyalists (who would fall to squabbling and backstabbing among each other), Trump would find the Presidency under those circumstances to be as manageable as a tornado. (And his tiny hands wouldn’t be able to control a Sharpie yooge enough to save him!) 

Of course, his people, the MAGA army of orcs, don’t know this. And if you brought it to their attention, they’d smile and say that they look forward to it. Tell them such a scenario would destroy the country, and they’d say the country is already destroyed. Why do they think that? Because Trump has been telling them that for years. They think the cities are lawless hellholes, when in fact crime is down. They think the economy is in ruins, when in fact it’s the strongest in the world. Between Trump, Fox News, and church, they live in a world defined by lies, propaganda, and religious fantasy. There’s no reasoning with them. There’s no talking them out of it. And there’s certainly no bargaining with them. When someone wants to burn down your house, you don’t compromise with them and let them just burn down the first floor.

So we’re faced with two questions: What happens if Trump wins? And what happens if he loses? In any case, maybe we already live—mentally, emotionally, psychologically—in two different countries. Maybe we’re not so much on the Road TO Splitsville as on the Road THROUGH it. We’re now tooling through the Greater Splitsville Area, the relatively placid suburbs. Up ahead is Downtown, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.