Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him, and any other president in recent history would have been impeached for doing so.

One of the clearest differences between authoritarian and democratic government is whether public resources are distributed according to law and need, or according to political loyalty. That is not a new problem in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’s spoils system to Boss Tweed, the 19th-century New York oligarch who ruled with an iron hand, to the overtly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, the United States has seen its share of leaders who corrupted or suspended democracy for themselves and their allies.

But Trump and his right-wing allies have turned this kind of corruption from an occasional historical pattern into a governing philosophy.

Consider the reaction if Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that federal subsidies, emergency aid and other funding would go only to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have been immediate, and the media response would have been intense. Yet no modern president of either party had attempted such an openly corrupt use of government funds — until Trump.

Over the past several months, the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in green energy grants. It now appears that, with one exception, every canceled grant was tied to a Blue state, raising a broader question about whether federal programs can be used as partisan leverage without undermining the basic expectation that national agencies serve the whole country.

The New York Times reported the matter in a single-day story that received little attention elsewhere in corporate media. In a lawsuit, however, the general counsel for the Department of Energy (DOE) stated plainly:

“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.”

The filing came after Energy Secretary and fracking oligarch Chris Wright told Congress under oath that the cancellations were not politically biased. In total, the administration gutted roughly $7.5 billion across 223 projects in 16 states.

The same double standard applies elsewhere. Trump is also being accused of distributing FEMA disaster funds based on how states voted for or against him, something the conservative Cato Institute documented during his first term. Now the issue has returned, and 25 states and the District of Columbia are suing.

In addition, Trump is blocking $1 billion in Medicaid payments to Blue states on the claim that there is “fraud,” even as he has pardoned more than 70 people convicted of healthcare fraud, including one case involving a $1.3 billion theft from Medicare.

This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Recep Tayyip Erdoğan runs Turkey. How Narendra Modi administers India. It is the basic logic of a tinpot dictatorship: give loyalty and receive benefits; resist and be punished.

And it is not only the Trump administration that is undermining the constitutional principle of equal protection and representation. Republican-run states across the country are also defying their own voters in ways that benefit oligarchs and favored industries:

• In Oklahoma, voters expanded Medicaid by ballot initiative in 2020. Republican Governor Kevin Stitt responded on Memorial Day weekend in 2025 by signing SB 1027, which caps the signatures a 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 excluding the millions of Oklahomans who live in the strongly Democratic Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.
• In South Dakota, Republicans passed a package of restrictions in 2025 that closed the petition window by moving the filing deadline from May to February. They then placed the oligarch-supported Amendment L on the ballot for this November, which would raise the threshold for amending the constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent of votes cast.
• In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and the GOP-controlled legislature passed HB 1205, allowing county elections officials to redefine the “actual cost” of verifying each signature and raise the fee to $4.57 per petition in a county such as Palm Beach, from less than a dollar previously. The result was exactly what supporters of the law wanted: all 22 active citizen initiatives failed to qualify for the 2026 ballot.
• In Missouri, working people defeated the GOP’s so-called right-to-work law by 67 percent in August 2018 and approved paid sick leave with 58 percent of the statewide vote in November 2024. Eight months later, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe signed legislation repealing both. Voters now face Amendment 4 on the August 4 ballot, which would require a citizen-initiated amendment to win a majority in every one of the state’s eight congressional districts, while letting Republican-controlled legislative amendments pass with a simple statewide majority.

In the short term, this kind of corruption benefits the party that uses it and harms any party that refuses to play the same game. As a result, the Democratic Party — which has not embraced this sort of corruption since the Boss Tweed era — is effectively bankrupt, with about $2 million in debt as the country heads into what it calls the most important election in its lifetime.

By contrast, the Republican Party, which openly accepts this kind of blunt corruption, has about $130 million on hand, almost all of it from oligarchs and giant corporations. Trump’s SuperPAC has more than $400 million, again largely from the same sources.

None of this would have been possible without five corrupt Republican justices on the Supreme Court, who altered the rules of American politics through the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, both based on a falsehood attributed to a wealthy conservative Supreme Court clerk more than 140 years ago, according to the article’s author.

The result, the article argues, looks like an effort to create a new civil war in the United States. History shows that corruption and regional or political favoritism are among the leading causes of civil unrest and can signal or provoke the collapse of democracy.

Examples cited include Pakistan, where a 1971 civil war and genocide led to the creation of Bangladesh after the eastern part of the country, home to 60 percent of the population, was allegedly given as little as 20 percent of central development spending; Northern Ireland, where unionist-run councils allocated housing and municipal jobs by party loyalty, helping trigger decades of violence, according to Britain’s Cameron Commission in 1969; Nigeria, where unfair allocation of oil revenue contributed to famine that killed three million people and helped lead to Biafra’s secession; and Sudan, where the ruling clique operated the national budget as a spoils system for its own region and ultimately lost a third of the country to South Sudan.

Research published in the American Political Science Review found that while broad rich-versus-poor inequality can destabilize a society, regional inequality is the strongest predictor of social and political upheaval and the destruction of democracy. The favored side becomes more aggressive in rigging the system to protect its privileges and avoid accountability, while the disadvantaged side mobilizes against the inequality. As both sides harden their positions and more people see that some regions are being shortchanged while others prosper, the political system becomes unstable.

That, the article says, is what is happening in the United States now.

A federal judge has already ruled that removing these green energy dollars exclusively from Blue states is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, but Wright and Trump proceeded anyway and have offered no correction or apology.

The article says the canceled green energy grants, Medicaid payments and FEMA projects are only three examples of a much wider pattern of Trump and GOP corruption, but they should still be treated as a national scandal because they deepen regional resentment and political alienation.