Nation Unraveling— From Buchanan To Biden: How Failed Presidents Lit The Fuse For Our Cold Civil War

Trump Struck The Match, But His Predecessors Stacked The Kindling

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by Aaron Zitner, America Is Fracturing Into Red and Blue Nations, Redistricting Fight Shows, that warns that the U.S. is unraveling as a nation. “America’s identity as a unified nation is eroding,” he wrote, “with Republican- and Democratic-led states dividing into separate spheres, each with its own policies governing the economic, social and political rules of life. The bitter fight over redrawing U.S. House maps, triggered by Trump’s effort to protect his party’s majority in the 2026 midterm elections, is the latest example of how the dominant party in many states is making extraordinary efforts to impose its will.”

If a civil war is breaking out now, the culprit, of course, will be Trump… but not Trump alone. We’ll tell you who shares the blame in a moment but first let’s look at who historians blame for the first Civil War (1861-1865). Generally speaking, most historians don’t pin the blame for it on any single president, as the conflict stemmed from deep-rooted issues like slavery, economic differences and political polarization that built up over decades. However, several shitty presidents in the years leading up to the war are often criticized for actions— or inactions— that exacerbated tensions or failed to avert the crisis. Worst of all was James Buchanan— considered the worst president in history until Trump stole the White House in 2016— Lincoln’s immediate predecessor. His presidency saw escalating sectional conflicts, and historians criticize his weak leadership and pro-South bias. He supported the Dred Scott decision (1857), which inflamed Northern abolitionists by denying Congress the power to regulate slavery in the territories. His handling of the Kansas crisis, particularly his endorsement of the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, deepened divisions. Buchanan’s inaction during the secession crisis after Lincoln’s election in 1860— when Southern states began seceding— left the federal government paralyzed, leaving Fort Sumter vulnerable and the nation on the brink.

And right before Buchanan there was another sack of garbage in the White House: Franklin Pierce, whose administration is faulted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which allowed territories to decide on slavery via popular sovereignty. This led to violent conflict in “Bleeding Kansas,” intensifying North-South animosity. Earlier Millard Fillmore signed the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which enraged Northerners by requiring the return of escaped slaves. 

Another culprit today is John Roberts’ extremist Supreme Court, which has “shown great tolerance for partisan [election] gamesmanship and great skepticism about federal laws on campaign spending and minority rights. The court’s rulings have been of a piece with its conservative wing’s jurisprudential commitments: giving states leeway in many realms, insisting on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment and casting a skeptical eye on government racial classifications.”

Not exctly Mitch McConnell, but close

Virtually all historians parcel out some blame for the Civil War to the Roger Taney Supreme Court. The worst decision (7-2) was Dred Scott (1857) which ruled that African Americans, whether free or enslaved, were not U.S. citizens and that Congress lacked the authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, declaring the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional, pretty much making the Civil War inevitable by invalidating efforts to limit slavery’s expansion, emboldening Southern demands for federal protection of slavery and outraging Northern abolitionists and moderates. The Fugitive Slave Act case (Prigg v Pennsylvania in 1842 and Ableman v Booth in 1859) stated that states could not interfere with the federal obligation to return escaped slaves. It struck down state “personal liberty laws” that protected alleged fugitives, asserting federal supremacy.

Zitner noted that “in 40 states, a single party controls the House, Senate and governor’s office— a so-called trifecta— or else has enough power to block vetoes from a governor of the other party. That leaves less than 20% of Americans living in a state where the minority party has a meaningful voice in governance. The result has been a deepening of differences in red and blue America. Abortion is now banned or heavily restricted in about one-third of states, all of them controlled by Republicans, while abortion access is protected or allowed in every Democratic trifecta state. Every GOP trifecta state has passed bans or limits on gender-affirming care for minors. Red and blue states have moved in sharply different directions on employment law, gun regulation, immigration enforcement and other policies. When Louisiana passed a law last year that required the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, later struck down by courts, 18 GOP-trifecta states filed a legal brief in support... The television images of Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas for sanctuary in Democratic-led Illinois, New York and Massachusetts show that these differences reflect not just policy preferences, but are facets of a hostile confrontation. Red and blue states are threatening to use the maximum legal and political tools available to limit the power of the other party.”

“This is a war. We are at war,” said Kathy Hochul, New York’s Democratic governor, as she appeared this past week in Albany with fleeing Texas lawmakers. “And that’s why the gloves are off. And I say: Bring it on.”

Though Hochul is one of the worst governors in the country, she’s not on a level with modern-day secessionists like Greg Abbott (R-TX), Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Jeff Landry (R-LA). If there really is a kind of low-boil civil war we’re living through now, other presidents who will be blamed include Biden, for not sacking his incompetent Attorney General, who was too tepid to do anything about Trump stirring up the J-6 insurrection, although Biden’s failures don’t stop with Merrick Garland’s timid, bloodless approach to accountability. He came into office promising to restore the rule of law and protect democracy, yet time and again he refused to use the full power of his office when it mattered most. He let the filibuster stand like a brick wall between his party and urgently needed federal protections for voting rights. He refused to back expanding the Supreme Court or impose meaningful ethics reforms, even as Roberts, Alito and Thomas turned it into a corrupt, corporate-bootlicking wrecking crew. He treated the GOP’s creeping authoritarianism as if it could be bargained with— when history has shown that appeasement is the death of democracy.

Obama deserves a share of this indictment too. He let Mitch McConnell steal a Supreme Court seat without consequence, normalized “looking forward, not backward” when war criminals and Wall Street wreckers should have been hauled into court, and allowed the Tea Party’s proto-MAGA authoritarianism to metastasize unchecked. His fetish for post-partisan kumbaya governance helped cement the illusion that Republicans were still operating in good faith long after they’d gone feral.

George W. Bush? His and Dick Cheney’s administration lit the fuse for the current nightmare: illegal wars, the PATRIOT Act’s surveillance state and the elevation of a fanatical evangelical right to political power. His catastrophic mismanagement and cronyism, capped by the financial collapse, made voters desperate enough to believe in “outsiders” like Trump. And let’s not forget Bill Clinton, whose triangulation on welfare, deregulation of Wall Street, and “tough on crime” policies shredded the social safety net, accelerated inequality, and fed the prison-industrial comple—fertile soil for the right’s racial grievance politics.

Not everyone’s going to agree with this but for me the through-line from Buchanan to Biden is clear: presidents who either lacked the vision or the will to confront the gravest threats head-on leave the republic weaker than they found it. Trump is the arsonist-in-chief, of course, but the fire has been smoldering for decades, stoked by leaders from both parties who thought they could ride out the storm instead of stopping it, papering over cracks in the foundation, and pretending we were one people while the political fault lines widened into chasms. Now we are in a cold civil war, and the other side is playing for keeps. They are armed, organized and openly committed to dismantling democracy piece by piece. Trump may be the match, but decades of cowardice, corruption and compromise stacked the kindling high. And unless we finally confront this with the urgency of a nation already under siege, the next Buchanan is already waiting in the wings or, even worse, the next Edmund Ruffin, William Yancey, Robert Rhett, Louis Wigfall, John (MS) or Edmund (AL) Pettus or Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, the crackpot Mississippi congressman.

Back with Zitner, he interviewed Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, who told him that “It is an ‘essential error’ to think of America as a single nation. Rather, the U.S. is a ‘binational republic’— two nations, one red and one blue, he said. ‘There aren’t cannons, and this isn’t Bull Run,’ he said. ‘This is not a shooting civil war. But it’s very much a battle of how people are going to live in this country… In almost every way, life in blue America is different than in red America.’”

Trump has pressed for a more-aggressive use of his authority to disempower blue states and enhance Republican power. This past week, he called for the Commerce Department to start working on a census that excludes immigrants who are in the country illegally, a move that would surely face court challenges. When Trump made a similar call in his first term, he singled out California’s immigrant population and said the current census rules give the state two or three more congressional seats than it otherwise would be granted.

Currently, a single party holds both a legislative majority and the governor’s office in 38 states, while two states— Kentucky and Kansas— have large, GOP legislative supermajorities that can override vetoes from the states’ Democratic governors.

… Republican-led Florida, Texas and some other states have passed laws allowing challenges to books in school libraries or instructional materials. In response, at least eight states, six of them currently with Democratic governors and legislative majorities, have passed laws since 2023 intending to limit “book bans” or to protect librarians from lawsuits.

Rhode Island this year became the 10th state to ban the sale of assault-style weapons— all of them states with Democratic trifectas— while 25 of the 29 states that allow people to carry concealed handguns without a permit are currently led by Republican trifectas.

Some 26 states have “right to work laws” that allow workers to take a job without having to join a union or pay dues, provisions the labor movement bitterly opposes. Twenty-one of them are under all-Republican control.

Ten states— nine of them with Republican trifecta governments— have declined to expand their Medicaid programs using federal money from the Affordable Care Act. At the same time, Republican-led states are among the 40 that have expanded their Medicaid programs under the ACA, including Ohio, Utah and Oklahoma. 

Redrawing House districts for maximum partisan advantage would probably deepen the nation’s political divide further, wiping out some of the remaining Democratic House members from red states and Republicans from blue states, leaving the minority party in each state with less representation.

 “The two parties will become more geographically sorted, and the different interests of blue voters in red states and red voters in blue states will get lost in the wash,” said Ben Williams, who once tracked election legislation for the National Conference of State Legislatures and is now with FairVote, a nonpartisan voting-regulations group.

And if you’re wondering why some of the most extreme and partisan states aren’t part of Trump’s gerrymandering parade, Wyoming and the two Dakotas are at-large states with just one Representative each. (They should be combined into one state called Dakota on the same day Washington DC and Puerto Rico become states; that way we won’t have to design and manufacture new flags— and instead of 6 neo-fascist senators, there will only be two.) As for West Virginia, Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, Montana, Nebraska, Arkansas and Iowa, each already has a carefully-drawn congressional map to yield all-Republican delegations.