In a characteristically rambling speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), former President Donald Trump — still the front-runner for Republicans’ presidential nomination this year — claimed that the United States is “breaking up” without him as president.
In familiarly extreme terms, Trump was trying to make the case for sending him back to the White House. “It’s all happening, and if we don’t stop it, this is it,” Trump ominously warned his listeners. “2024 — if we don’t stop it, this is our last train. If we don’t stop it, we’re going to have a country — it won’t even be a country, you want to know the truth? It won’t even be a country. It’s breaking up.”
Similarly, Trump suggested at an earlier campaign event that the name of Pennsylvania would be changed if Dems see victory in this year’s elections. Neither the theory of the U.S. disassembling nor that of an imminent state-level name change are reality — though some on Trump’s own side have at times pushed for the kind of national disintegration he was referencing!
Avid Trump supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called her idea a “national divorce” roughly along political lines, though the real-world is much more complicated than these far-right delusions. Where would Greene’s own state fit, considering its support in the 2020 elections for both Joe Biden — a Democrat — and a slate of Republican state candidates?
Trump’s far-reaching proclamations on the supposed disasters seen without him as president are consistent. His campaign messaging is founded on a message of imminent — and even already unfolding — doom. Trump and his supporters also turn their ire against specific American locales like New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and major areas where election fraud was falsely alleged in the 2020 race. The areas they target as supposedly emblematic of claimed American decline often have substantial non-white populations.
