Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ ve been impeached for this.
One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.
This is not a new idea in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’ s spoils system to Boss Tweed( the morbidly rich oligarch who ruled 19th century’ s New York with an iron fist) to the nakedly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, we’ ve had more than our fair share of autocrats who’ ve corrupted or even paused democracy to the benefit of themselves and their friends.
But now Trump and his reichwing lickspittles have turned this form of occasional / historical corruption into an entire philosophy of governance.
Imagine, for a moment, if either Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that they were only going to send government subsidies, emergency aid, and funding to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have come fast and furious, and the media reaction would have been explosive.
This is purely a thought experiment, though, because no president of either party in the modern era ever had the temerity to try such a nakedly corrupt misuse of government funds. Until Trump. The Trump administration cancelled billions in green energy grants over the past months, and, it turns out, with a single exception all of the cancelled grants were in Blue states.
The New York Times caught it in a one-day story that was barely mentioned by the rest of our corporate media; when forced to tell the truth in a lawsuit, the general counsel for the Department of Energy( DOE) came right out and said, explicitly:
“ With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and / or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators(‘ Blue State’ grants). …
“ DOE accepts that the inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’ s state, i. e., whether the recipient’ s location and / or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.”
This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Erdogan runs Turkey. How Modi is administering India. And how pretty much every third-world tinpot dictatorship in the world works:“ Give us your loyalty and we’ ll shower you with gifts; stand against us and you’ ll be punished.”
( emphasis added) The filing came after Energy Secretary and fracking oligarch Chris Wright lied under oath to Congress that the cancellations had no political bias in the roughly $ 7.5 billion gutted across 223 projects in 16 states.
( While Republicans are claiming that Jack Smith“ lied to Congress” and should therefore go to prison, there’ s no such similar call for consequences for Wright, either from Republicans or our flaccid Democratic leadership.)
On top of that, we now also find that this administration is passing out FEMA disaster funds based on how states voted for or against Trump, as the hard-right CATO Institute documented from the first Trump administration; he’ s now back at it again, and this time 25 states and DC are suing.
Additionally, Trump is blocking a billion dollars in Medicaid payments to Blue states, claiming there’ s“ fraud” there. This as he pardoned over 70 people convicted of healthcare fraud including a $ 1.3 billion theft from Medicare.
This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Erdogan runs Turkey. How Modi is administering India. And how pretty much every third-world tinpot dictatorship in the world works:“ Give us your loyalty and we’ ll shower you with gifts; stand against us and you’ ll be punished.”
And it’ s not just the Trump administration that’ s ripping up the idea of equal protection and representation under the law that the 5th and 14th Amendments proclaim; Republican-run states across the nation are enthusiastically defying their own citizens just to enrich the oligarchs and industries that feather their nests:
• In Oklahoma, voters expanded Medicaid themselves by ballot initiative in 2020, so Republican Governor Kevin Stitt answered on Memorial Day weekend 2025 by signing SB 1027, which caps the signatures any single county can contribute at 11.5 percent of that county’ s last gubernatorial turnout for statutory measures and 20.8 percent for constitutional ones, effectively locking out the millions of Oklahomans who live in the dark blue Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.
• In South Dakota, Republicans passed a bundle of restrictions in 2025 that closed the petition window by moving the filing deadline from May to February, and then put the oligarch-supported Amendment L on the ballot for this November, which would raise the bar for amending the constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent of votes cast.
The Trial Lawyer 67