Inside the Plan to Split Red and Blue America

Trump and Putin’s shared project, sources warn, is to fracture America into rival blocs, weaken democracy, and leave Europe exposed as authoritarian power advances unchecked.

The call came at dusk, London time, with rainwater still seamed along the kerb and the city’s electric pulse returning after the storm. The source did not waste syllables. There was, they said¹, a plan, grandiose in ambition, plain in its terms. Separate America into “red” and “blue” polities; align the red states with an eastern geopolitical bloc centred on China, Russia and the wider BRICS constellation; squeeze the blue states into a Western rump with Canada and Europe; and, over time, weaponise the split to weaken Europe’s security and the liberal order that has sheltered under the phrase “the West” for three-quarters of a century. The name Vladimir Putin floated in the preamble. Donald Trump’s hovered close by.

Extraordinary claims seldom announce themselves with footnotes, and this one is no exception. But timing is a character witness. In Washington, the President has just invoked a half-century-old emergency valve in the District of Columbia Home Rule Act Section 740² to wrench operational control of the Metropolitan Police Department away from the city’s elected leadership, delegating command to the Attorney General and sending National Guard troops into public view. The White House order, dated 11 August, sets out the legal scaffold; the lived reality is a capital patrolled at the President’s pleasure. Even sympathetic lawyers describe Section 740³ as unusually elastic; critical scholars argue the move exceeds what the statute allows⁴. Either way, we are not in the realm of routine intergovernmental wrangling. We are witnessing a test of whether the separation of powers is a norm or a suggestion.

In the days since, the President has threatened to carry a similar crusade to Chicago⁵ and New York⁶, and to treat D.C. as a pilot for federal “law and order” interventions elsewhere. The rhetoric is familiar; the institutional appetite feels new. The tableau troops on the Mall, a local police force answerable to federal appointees, broad-brush talk of “slums” and “spitters” reads like the domestic twin of a foreign-policy doctrine that prefers command to consent.

Power rarely moves in a single line. On 27 June, the Treasury’s sanctions office⁷ renewed a Russia-related general licence GL 115B⁸ authorising certain transactions tied to civil nuclear energy, even where they involve entities otherwise immobilised by post-2022 sanctions⁹, including Russia’s central bank. The fine print matters: the authorisation is limited to projects initiated or under construction by 21 November 2024 and does not open the door to new buildouts. Still, general licences redraw practical boundaries. Money is fungible; exemptions become conduits. The Kremlin will understand the difference between a total freeze and a carve-out designed for “continuity” of nuclear supply chains. So will Kyiv¹⁰.

Fold these moves together and the source’s thesis de facto partition as political method begins to look less like fantasy and more like a governing style: centralise force where it can be centralised; hollow institutions that resist; padlock the narrative. Trump telegraphed as much long before January.