America's political divide is being described in increasingly stark terms this week, as a prominent novelist warns the country is trapped in what he calls a bitter, loveless marriage, while President Donald Trump and a rising Democratic Senate candidate publicly clash over what each says are two fundamentally different versions of the nation.
Writing in The New York Times on Sunday, author Kurt Andersen, whose upcoming novel The Breakup imagines the United States ceasing to exist, argued that talk of a national divorce or even a civil war is no longer confined to fringe rhetoric. Andersen noted that days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene renewed her call for what she termed a peaceful national divorce, saying the country is too far gone and too divided to remain safe. Andersen pointed to polling conducted since 2021 by universities, YouGov and other pollsters that has consistently found a third or more of Americans expect some form of civil war within the next decade.
Rather than predicting outright collapse, Andersen described a slower, quieter unraveling he calls uncooperative federalism or soft secession, in which states increasingly ignore or actively undermine federal authority depending on who controls the White House. During Democratic presidencies, he wrote, many red states and counties declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries and directed police not to enforce certain federal gun laws, a mirror image of the sanctuary city movement that shields residents from federal immigration enforcement. Andersen cited Texas Governor Greg Abbott's decision to deploy the National Guard to string razor wire along the Rio Grande and order troops to block federal border agents from assisting migrants caught in it, a move endorsed by more than two dozen Republican governors.
Andersen argued the same dynamic is now playing out in blue states under Trump. Local police departments in numerous cities are declining to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he wrote, while several states have passed laws shielding residents from prosecution if charged elsewhere with facilitating abortions, and some have stockpiled abortion medications in anticipation of federal restrictions. He also pointed to coalitions of blue states forming their own climate alliances to participate in international forums the Trump administration has abandoned, creating de facto carbon markets, and issuing independent childhood vaccination guidance. A coalition of roughly two dozen state attorneys general has sued the administration over birthright citizenship, tariffs and the withholding of federal funds from Democratic-led states, according to Andersen.
He warned that this arrangement, in which the country remains technically unified but increasingly unwilling to cooperate, is not sustainable indefinitely. Andersen floated the possibility of states or regions gaining far greater autonomy, comparing the idea to Spain's regional communities, some of which collect nearly all local taxes before forwarding a negotiated share to Madrid, or to Switzerland's cantons, which retain significant control over citizenship decisions. Short of that, he suggested that if the country ever did split apart, Americans should look to the 1993 breakup of Czechoslovakia, known as the Velvet Divorce, as a model for how to separate without violence. Historian Timothy Snyder made a related point in July, arguing that the United States marking 250 years of existence does not guarantee it will still exist in five, ten or fifteen years, and suggesting Trump's presidency is more likely to fracture the country than to forge it into a homogeneous authoritarian state.
That sense of a country split into rival camps found a very literal expression over the weekend in Michigan, where Trump and Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed traded pointed exchanges over whose America is the real one. On Saturday night, Trump posted an image on Truth Social pairing a photo of himself with First Lady Melania Trump alongside one of El-Sayed, who is Muslim, and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, who wears a hijab. The caption read, in Trump's characteristic style, Two VERY DIFFERENT America's.
Asked about the post on CNN, El-Sayed did not push back on the framing. Yeah, he's right, El-Sayed said, before drawing his own contrast: one America is run by overlords who don't particularly like each other but join forces to profit off ordinary people, he argued, while the other is built by people who genuinely want to raise families with a fair shot at good things. Donald Trump's vision is the one you're living in right now, El-Sayed said. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries?
El-Sayed, an epidemiologist, won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary this week and will face former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in a general election widely seen as pivotal to Democrats' hopes of retaking the Senate. Trump has repeatedly used El-Sayed's full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, and called him a communist during a Thursday speech, adding an expletive that drew loud cheers from the crowd. El-Sayed fired back on Sky News, telling the outlet, at least I don't let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.
Despite running to the left of his primary rival, former Congresswoman Haley Stevens, El-Sayed has said he is a capitalist who wants capitalism to work better rather than a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Barack Obama called El-Sayed after his primary victory, according to NBC News, in what was widely read as an early signal of support, and Politico reported that Obama also called Stevens, who urged him to campaign for Democrats in Michigan. Should El-Sayed defeat Rogers in November, he would become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate.
El-Sayed has pushed back on Republican attempts to cast him as extreme, telling NBC's Meet the Press that it is not radical to believe people should afford groceries, have healthcare, or that a president shouldn't be able to profit billions from office. Noting that Trump and Republicans regularly invoke Obama's middle name, Hussein, in the same way they highlight his own, El-Sayed said America is bigger than what small figures like Trump, Vice President JD Vance or Rogers want it to be.
