Some weigh cutting national ties that no longer bind

Americans who voted for Donald Trump to slash egg prices and deport immigrants may be stunned at his post-election rhapsodizing about using economic and military force to retake the Panama Canal, annex Greenland and make Canada our 51st state. He has even toyed with the idea of withholding federal disaster relief from fire-ravaged California till the state overturns its arguably lax voter ID law.

That would be like the Biden administration withholding disaster relief funds from, say, hurricane-ravaged North Carolina and Tennessee because they have stringent voter ID laws.

So in this increasingly toxic, topsy-turvy Make America Great Again world where apparently anything goes, is it absurd to suggest that California and perhaps the entire West Coast secede from the United States to embark on a prosperous journey as an independent republic? Or even, after secession, to apply to Canada for annexation on the grounds that Canada at least looks after its own and isn't trying to pick fights with its neighbors? It’s pretty clear MAGA is willing to let California go to blazes – literally.

Why secession? Why not? During a long but lively weekend I spent at the Texas Nationalist Movement convention in Waco in 2023, resolute, optimistic Texas First advocates from across the state and beyond justified Texas' parting ways with the United States on the grounds that the U.S. Constitution lacks any specific provision forbidding a state from leaving the union. And by then the TEXIT bunch had experienced quite enough of the Biden administration, thank you.

Crazy? Certainly not within the Republican Party of Texas, whose May 2024 state convention embraced a platform resolution that the Legislature “pass a bill in its next session requiring a referendum in the next general election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the state of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation." And while the party’s more sober legislative priorities committee balked at this proposition, a number of Republican state legislative candidates signed TEXIT pledges to work toward putting a separatist question on the statewide ballot.

And if all this is good enough for red-blooded Bubbas and Joe Bobs from Texas – well, then why not all those California lefties, socialists, tree-huggers and Hollywood elites?

The idea of California secession – and such an initiative already exists – could gain traction if that state's fire-ravaged victims discover they don't rate any better treatment than, say, Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that suffered mightily after the Trump administration withheld billions in disaster relief following a 2017 encounter with Hurricane Maria. The storm devastation constituted one of the deadliest U.S. natural disasters in more than a century.

Some Californians are already considering how their state should respond if the Trump administration drags its feet as it did with Puerto Rico. As former California first lady and longtime newswoman Maria Shriver opined on "X" last month: "The more I think about Trump’s threat to withhold aid to fire victims, California should think about making its federal taxes contingent on responsible federal action…"

President Trump certainly didn't help matters when he overrode state officials and ordered the release of some 2 billion gallons of water into California's Central Valley, which means it would have little if any impact on Los Angeles wildfires, Trump claims to the contrary notwithstanding. "Here's how stupid Trump thinks we are," California Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman informed constituents. "He just dumped a bunch of valuable water from two federal flood-control dams, wasting it into the Tulare Lake bed where it evaporates. None goes to LA, but he claims he's saving LA. Pissing on us and telling us it's raining."

News accounts suggest many Californians were already fuming over Trump's suggestions of conditioning Federal Emergency Management Agency relief on California’s instituting a tougher voter ID law (despite the fact each state has the right under the U.S. Constitution to set rules for its own elections) and haphazardly addressing water problems highlighted by Los Angeles firefighting efforts (which the president clearly misunderstands, likely a consequence of where he and too many MAGA disciples get their news).

Some Californians may see as providential the fact California’s secretary of state on Jan. 23 approved the start of a formal petition drive requesting a public referendum on whether California should become an independent nation. This non-binding CALEXIT referendum seeks to repeal a provision in the California Constitution stating that California is "an inseparable part of the United States" along with any acknowledgement that the U.S. Constitution is "the supreme law of the land." The question would appear on the 2028 statewide ballot and trigger a study on the challenges behind independence.

As it so happened, longtime CALEXIT firebrand Marcus Ruiz Evans proved a particularly popular speaker at the TEXIT convention in Waco, even if his political sentiments hardly aligned with the strong pro-Trump sentiments displayed by most TEXIT speakers such as former state Rep. Kyle Biedermann and state Sen. Bob Hall. During his address, Ruiz Evans argued that California, whose residents and elected officials are routinely vilified by right-wing Americans, should thus be granted a peaceful divorce from the United States to set its own course.

Ruiz Evans made a relevant point, too, about our widening national divide. Secession talk is the result of reckless politicians such as (but not limited to) Trump who encourage Americans to see one another as mortal enemies more than our actual enemies around the world. No argument there. While I was out surveying Central Texans’ opinions during the 2018 midterm elections, a bookkeeper in her 50s handing out Halloween candy to children told me of living in Colorado and how great it was till Californians began spilling into the state, contributing (she said) to crime and higher taxes. She now lived in a mostly white suburb in Texas – yes, that meant at some point she too was an outsider – and feared Californians pushing further east would contaminate the Lone Star State.

When she first referred disdainfully to “immigrants” during our doorstep exchange, I thought she was talking about people from south of the border. Then it dawned on me that she was referring to fellow citizens.

Of course, the hill just got higher to climb for the TEXIT initiative. Given the support for Trump in our state – he won 56 percent of the 2024 vote – the enthusiasm of some voters for secession has probably dissipated, now that their man is in total charge and running amok with reckless threats and imprudent executive orders. The TEXIT movement's best hope – a 2023 petition drive – was effectively invalidated through the actions of then-Republican Party of Texas chairman Matt Rinaldi and the Texas Supreme Court.

In a Dec. 27, 2023, letter to Rinaldi, normally mannered, patient Texas Nationalist Movement President Daniel Miller accused Republican Party of Texas leadership of "grasping for any tactic, no matter how ridiculous, to suppress the voices of Republican voters who merely want their voices heard on this fundamental issue of governance." Besides a number of Republican state legislators, current Texas GOP chair Abraham George has signed a TEXIT pledge to work toward "legislation and resolutions to call for a vote on Texas reasserting its status as an independent nation in every term that I am elected until such a referendum is held." 

We'll see if such political pledges come to anything. Meanwhile, Miller keeps up what he regards as the good fight. In a Nov. 5 post, he reminded TEXIT faithful: “After today's election, Texas will still send BILLIONS to DC for them to waste. Different players, same game.”

All this leaves legitimate questions concerning Trump 2.0. Consider for a moment President Trump’s rambling views while visiting hurricane-ravaged North Carolina last month that “FEMA has turned out to be a disaster” and “I think we're going to recommend that FEMA goes away and we pay directly, we pay a percentage, to the state.” Are red-state governors all for this reimagining of a cut-rate FEMA? I await opinions of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Sen. Ted Cruz and Republican Party of Texas leadership. Did FEMA come in handy, say, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 rained down $125 billion in damage on Houston and Southeast Texas?

Although Trump may not have fully grasped it, there could be at least some logic in what he says. I remember when, through little fault of the federal government, an ammonium nitrate explosion at a fertilizer plant in West blew nearly a fourth of the Central Texas town off the map in April 2013, killing 15 people (12 of them first responders), injuring scores more and damaging or destroying some 150 homes and buildings. And when FEMA under the Obama administration hesitated to assist with more federal funding than designated, many of the ordinarily independent-minded, go-it-alone residents of West and their political representatives raised whatever roofs in town yet remained.

To quote then-Congressman Bill Flores – elected three years earlier from the area as a tea-party Republican –without the federal government's involvement in West recovery efforts, "this community would be in a world of hurt with a lot tougher road to recovery."

In short, folks there got their money – along with subsequent assurances from state legislatures and eventually the federal government (but under Trump, not Obama) that the deadly and costly explosion wouldn’t force on agricultural businesses any onerous regulations to deter such calamity in the future. While talking with residents of West in the immediate wake of the blast, one good ol’ boy remarked glumly to me that he hoped the politicians wouldn’t use the disaster as an excuse to pass a bunch of regulations.

In short, getting blown to smithereens is just a reasonable risk for robust capitalism and free enterprise.

Compelling individual states to assume even greater responsibility for disaster relief might prompt some to take far more seriously not only sobering statistics about climate change and workplace safety but reasons why insurance in many areas of our nation is becoming more expensive or nearly impossible to procure. Given insurance executives’ reliance on actuarial tables and bottom lines, red states such as Texas might in time rethink their populist, knee-jerk vilification of regulations.

As for Trump, his threat to leverage FEMA aid for political concessions and his semi-resolve to scuttle FEMA only adds incoherence to his talk of buying Greenland and making Canada a U.S. state. For instance, on Jan. 25 he suggested Canada, if it joined the United States, would “have much better health coverage” – a promise at odds with his signing an executive order to reduce access to health care for millions of Americans and his signing another that could raise prescription-drug prices, particularly for Americans on Medicare and Medicaid.

And Trump's needless vacillating and pontificating and bullying on levying a punishing, on-again, off-again 25 percent tariff on imported Canadian goods on the flimsiest of excuses this month (and in violation of his own 2019 trade agreement) renders moot any Canadian consideration of joining the United States.

Trump’s rancor confirms to the most rational among us that governance by MAGA isn’t about betterment, unity or greatness but, rather, payback, cruelty, ignorance and division on levels foreign to even our most mediocre of presidents. And as the nation’s 250th anniversary looms, it appears Trump is focused more on adding real estate to his vast domain than protecting the rights and ensuring the general welfare and satisfaction of constituents he clearly views as mere subjects.

Bill Whitaker in November 2020 retired from Texas journalism after a career of nearly 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist. He served as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor during his final dozen years in the profession. This column has been revised and updated as of Feb. 4.