As Donald Trump assumes the office of the president for the second time, the sense of dread across the country is palpable, for many good reasons. One that has been on my mind lately stretches back to 2020. It’s easy to forget in a world moving at light speed, but the beginning of the pandemic brought a splintering of America that to my terminal political science brain, reads as a harbinger of our future whose second act has just begun.

The United States’ democratic republic is unique in a lot of ways, one of them exhibited by 10th Amendment which establishes that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The American Constitution is the middle ground that slave financiers and slave owners found to establish a system of self-governance where they would not be taxed by the British crown. Because these initial negotiations were led by coalitions of states trying to maximize their individual and collective influence in this new republic, this Constitution gave a lot of power to the states.

And they were forced to exercise it during a period where President Trump abandoned the United States because elected Republicans are bad people who enjoy watching Americans suffer. Trump told state governors asking for federal help that “we’re not a shipping clerk” for life-saving supplies that hospitals needed to combat the virus in those early days before the vaccine. There are a lot of culprits spanning across multiple presidential administrations for the personal protective equipment (PPE) crisis in spring 2020 where 27 percent of nurses reported being exposed to confirmed COVID-19 patients without wearing appropriate PPE, but fragmenting the republic was practically federal policy as Trump told governors on a conference call that “you are going to call your own shots.”

So the states formed regional coalitions to help get supplies and coordinate around this (hopefully) once-in-a-generation shock to society that Trump repeatedly claimed was not his problem. The Western States Pact was formed between California, Oregon and Washington so they could combine their efforts to get supplies and fight the virus while also planning to reopen their interconnected economies in a way that prioritized public health. A similar collective formed in the northeast between New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware and Massachusetts, as well as in the Midwest with Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana and Kentucky.

We are staring down this fragmented barrel once again with the second Trump administration, as National Guard troops who “don’t want to be a Gestapo” could very easily be caught in a perilous legal battle between various states and/or the federal government depending on their role in Trump’s deportation regime, as Politico noted, “red states can activate the National Guard to help with immigration enforcement — possibly to assist federal agents — but blue states with control of their own Guard could simply refuse to go along.”

Now imagine this dynamic unfolding across a whole host of issues in the coming years. You can easily see it going the other way if the shoe was on the other foot in the future, with red states banding together to resist the federal government trying to do something evil like give their citizens healthcare (well, easy to see in the sense that blue and red state legislatures have vast opposing interests, not in the sense that this version of the Democratic Party could ever win a presidential election again).

States cannot replace the federal government, but they have a lot of power and can do things like form a, say, united group of states to replace some functions of it on a smaller scale, which is what happened during the pandemic. Given that this is an empire everyone agrees is in decline, the disintegration of federal functions enables someone, a state or a private actor or some combination of both depending on your preferred vision of our dystopian future, to step in and fill the power vacuum created by the decline. Republicans have long wanted to shrink the federal government “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” so their donors can loot it and replace it with less robust and more corrupt versions they profit from, and they are about to accelerate that mission. Powerful states like California are going to have an opportunity to help their neighbors when Trump refuses or outright removes the mechanisms to even provide help.

So what would a fragmented America look like?

Likely similar to America’s early days that repeated itself during the pandemic where the most powerful states were functionally regional authorities. California is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Texas is ninth, bigger than Canada, while New York is eleventh, just ahead of Russia. Florida is the sixteenth largest economy in the world, just behind Mexico, while Illinois is twentieth, just behind Saudi Arabia. Like with the Virginian slave economy of old, smaller states around them would be pulled in by the gravitational force of this power, forming regional governing coalitions along natural economic and social interests.

This splintering doesn’t need a decisive moment where the United States of America all of a sudden is not–it can just be the accelerating result of the degradation of our system we have been watching unfold in real time, as state governments step in to fill the growing void left by the federal government, and one day we all wake up and realize that California is functionally the Western states’ federal government.

But it could be driven by a decisive moment where the American system irrevocably breaks in some way. Imagine a future where California tries to do something really ambitious to try to fight an exceedingly destructive climate crisis, and the Supreme Court tells them they cannot do it. Say California invokes James Madison’s belief, supported by all Supreme Courts before the Roberts Court, that states can defy the Court, and they decide that it’s more important to stop the flames from enveloping their state than to adhere to the partisan whims of a corrupt institution which awarded itself God-like power in the 19th century to functionally declare slavery legal and spark a Civil War. What happens if the fifth-largest economy in the world just goes ahead and does it anyway? Does the Supreme Court send in the army? How does this work?

Given America’s penchant for laziness, I suspect that this process would follow the instinct that Trump exhibited during the pandemic and the one that Republicans are openly embracing now—that unless California does everything the GOP wants, they’re on their own without federal support—and California will inevitably take them up on that offer to varying degrees as necessary. In 2020, California replaced the federal government in small ways like negotiating its own supply chain with a consortium of businesses including the Chinese company BYD North America to produce PPE that they then sent to other states around them. It’s inevitable that as we slip into a future where Republicans are comfortable letting major American cities burn to the ground if they have diversity practices in place, that states, particularly blue ones, will build their own infrastructure that they can depend on when the United States government inevitably fails them.