Trump just changed how federal money is handled — and it’s not normal

U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement regarding his administration's policies against cartels and human trafficking, from the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 23, 2025.

Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this.

One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.

This is not a new idea in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’s spoils system to Boss Tweed (the morbidly rich oligarch who ruled 19th century’s New York with an iron fist) to the nakedly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, we’ve had more than our fair share of autocrats who’ve corrupted or even paused democracy to the benefit of themselves and their friends.

But now Trump and his reichwing lickspittles have turned this form of occasional/historical corruption into an entire philosophy of governance.

Imagine, for a moment, if either Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that they were only going to send government subsidies, emergency aid, and funding to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have come fast and furious, and the media reaction would have been explosive.

This is purely a thought experiment, though, because no president of either party in the modern era ever had the temerity to try such a nakedly corrupt misuse of government funds.

Until Trump.

The Trump administration cancelled billions in green energy grants over the past months, and, it turns out, with a single exception all of the cancelled grants were in Blue states.

The New York Times caught it in a one-day story that was barely mentioned by the rest of our corporate media; when forced to tell the truth in a lawsuit, the general counsel for the Department of Energy (DOE) came right out and said, explicitly:

“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.” (emphasis added)

The filing came after Energy Secretary and fracking oligarch Chris Wright lied under oath to Congress that the cancellations had nopolitical bias in the roughly $7.5 billion gutted across 223 projects in 16 states.

(While Republicans are claiming that Jack Smith “lied to Congress” and should therefore go to prison, there’s no such similar call for consequences for Wright, either from Republicans or our flaccid Democratic leadership.)

On top of that, we now also find that this administration is passing out FEMA disaster funds based on how states voted for or against Trump, as the hard-right CATO Institute documented from the first Trump administration; he’s now back at it again, and this time 25 states and DC are suing.

Additionally, Trump is blocking a billion dollars in Medicaid payments to Blue states, claiming there’s “fraud” there. This as he pardoned over 70 people convicted of healthcare fraud including a $1.3 billion theft from Medicare.

This is how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. How Erdoġon runs Turkey. How Modi is administering India. And how pretty much every third-world tinpot dictatorship in the world works: “Give us your loyalty and we’ll shower you with gifts; stand against us and you’ll be punished.”

And it’s not just the Trump administration that’s ripping up the idea of equal protection and representation under the law that the 5th and 14th Amendments proclaim; Republican-run states across the nation are enthusiastically defying their own citizens just to enrich the oligarchs and industries that feather their nests:

— In Oklahoma, voters expanded Medicaid themselves by ballot initiative in 2020, so Republican Governor Kevin Stitt answered on Memorial Day weekend 2025 by signing SB 1027, which caps the signatures any 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 locking out the millions of Oklahomans who live in the dark blue Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.

— In South Dakota, Republicans passed a bundle of restrictions in 2025 that closed the petition window by moving the filing deadline from May to February, and then put the oligarch-supported Amendment L on the ballot for this November, which would raise the bar for amending the constitution from a simple majority to 60 percent of votes cast.

— In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and the GOP-run legislature passed HB 1205, which let county elections officials redefine the “actual cost” of validating each signature and jack the fee up to $4.57 per petition in a county like Palm Beach, from under a dollar before: the result was exactly what they wanted, with all 22 active citizen initiatives failing to qualify for the 2026 ballot.

— In Missouri, working people had killed the GOP’s phony “right to work” law by 67 percent in August 2018 and won paid sick leave with 58 percent of the statewide vote in November 2024. So, Republican Governor Mike Kehoe signed the repeal of both eight months later, and 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 leaving the Republican-controlled legislature’s own amendments free to pass on a simple statewide majority.

Over the short-term, this sort of corruption works to the advantage of the party using it, and to the detriment of any party that refuses to play the game. As a result, the Democratic Party — which hasn’t endorsed such corruption since the days of Boss Tweed — is effectively bankrupt with a debt of around $2 million as we head into the most important election in our lifetimes.

But the Republican Party — which openly embraces such crude, bare-assed corruption — is sitting on $130 million (almost entirely from oligarchs and giant corporations) and Trump has a SuperPAC with over $400 million (ditto).

None of this could have happened if five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court hadn’t completely altered the rules of our politics with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, both based on a complete lie told by a wealthy conservative Supreme Court clerk over 140 years ago (as I document in detail in Who Killed the American Dream?).

It’s as if they’re trying to create a new Civil War here in America. Seriously: history tells us that corruption and regional/political favoritism is one of the leading forces causing civil unrest and often signals or provokes the end of democracy in a nation.

— The 1971 civil war and genocide in Pakistan that resulted in Bangladesh forming and splitting away was caused by a corrupt Pakistani government reducing to as little as 20 percent of central development spending monies for the eastern part of the country — which held 60 percent of the population — keeping the rest for themselves in the west.

— In Northern Ireland, thirty years of killings were provoked by unionist-run councils allocating public housing and municipal jobs by party loyalty, as Britain’s own Cameron Commission concluded in 1969.

— When Nigerian politicians unfairly allocated that nation’s oil revenue it led to a famine that killed three million people and led to Biafra splitting away as a separate republic.

— Sudan’s ruling clique similarly ran the national budget as a spoils system for its own region and lost a third of the country to South Sudan (I was there during the civil war).

Research published in the American Political Science Review found that while a generalized rich-versus-poor inequality can tear a society apart, regional inequality is the number one predictor of social and political upheaval and the consequent destruction of democracy in a nation.

The “winning” side begins to more aggressively rig the system to protect their own privileges and keep themselves out of jail, while the “losing” side mobilizes to protest the inequality.

As both double-down on their positions and word spreads about how some regions are being screwed while others get rich, the body politic is thrown into turmoil.

Like we’re seeing right now in America.

A federal judge has already ruled that stripping these billions of green energy dollars exclusively from Blue states is a clear violation of the Fifth Amendment, but Wright and Trump did it anyway and are making no apologies or corrections.

We must put a stop to this now; while these cancelled green energy, Medicaid, and FEMA projects are merely three examples of increasingly widespread Trump and GOP corruption, they should still become a national scandal if for no other reason than that they feed this deadly process of regional resentment and political alienation.

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