by T. G. Metcalf

The teacher, a woman in her early forties, was seated at a table in her study. The students were scattered within a one-hundred-mile radius of where she sat. The year was 2137. The subject was United States History.

“Looking back at it from our perspective now, one hundred years later,” she said, “the breaking apart of the United States looks as inevitable as the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire must have looked to the people who were witnessing the carnage of World War I, from 1914 to 1918. The United States were never really all that united. It was held together by the rule of law, which turned out to be fragile.

“The first major crack in the dam that was soon to collapse occurred when President Donald Trump, at the age of seventy-eight, was elected to his second term, in 2024, after a one-term President named Joseph Biden took office when Trump’s first term ended. While Biden was President, Trump was convicted of thirty-four felonies, and Trump therefore had to win the election, and become President a second time, or go to jail. A number of billionaires leveraged that fact, knowing that if they funded and engineered Trump’s reelection campaign, and he won, they would be able to manipulate him. That, as we shall see, is exactly what happened.

“In the beginning of 2025, Trump began his term by starting to dismantle the federal government. Doing that pleased the people who had voted for him, and it shifted the balance of power away from Washington, DC, and toward the billionaires who got him elected – an essential step in the breaking-apart of the country. Trump also pardoned fifteen hundred of the anti-government people who had attempted the violent coup d’état on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Those fifteen hundred pardons were also crucially important in the first stage of the country’s breakup, because it showed that a certain type of lawlessness – the kind directed at the federal government – was not only okay, it was actually a form of lawlessness that President Trump, himself a convicted felon, condoned, and considered worthy of being rewarded with grants of unconditional clemency. Trump’s pardons signaled to hundreds of thousands of other Americans who hated the federal government that under his presidency they could commit violent acts of treason and not be punished for it, if what they did met with his approval.

“So when President Trump started to dismantle the federal government, and pardoned the people who had tried to take it down, a small but extremely dangerous group of anti-government military personnel – people you might least expect to be haters of the government, since it was the source of their paychecks – felt empowered to act on their hatred of the bureaucracy in Washington, DC. Their subsequent approach, which I’m about to describe, was modeled on countless coup d’états and secessionist movements which, throughout human history, have employed military might to their advantage, either simply through the threat of employing it, or through its actual use. That recurrent phenomenon can be seen in the histories of ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, and it continues to this day, in the standoffs among the many nations that have nuclear weapons.

“Those military personnel, in 2026, were at Air Force bases in states that were then called Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, which had a total of five hundred nuclear-armed intercontinental nuclear missile sites in underground silos, with each of those missiles having a range of about 8,700 miles.”

The teacher put on the students’ screens a map showing the F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, with a caption stating that it was home to 150 ICBM silos; the Malstrom Air Force Base in Montana, with 200 ICBM silos; and the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, with 150 ICBM silos. 

“The top military commanders at those Air Force bases banded together, threatened President Trump that they would fire nuclear missiles at Washington, DC if he didn’t permit those three states to secede from the U.S., and he immediately agreed to their request, to which the secessionists, with President Trump’s approval, added two more states, named Idaho and South Dakota, to their breakaway nation, because legislators in those states wanted to be part of the new country, which at that point was recognized worldwide as possessing nuclear firepower capable of destroying entire countries and initiating World War III.

“Some historians believe that a billionaire senior White House aide, close to President Trump, actually authored the breakaway nation’s strategy, and got approval from Trump to plant the idea among the military personnel who executed it, and soon named the country Montidakoning. Those historians believe that such a pre-approval from Trump explains his immediate capitulation to the secession, but we have no solid evidence of that, notwithstanding the fact that one of Trump’s billionaire senior aides later became the de facto chief executive of Montidakoning, and multiplied his wealth a hundred times over.

“Montidakoning became its own country in June 2026. Its economy was based on mining, lumber, paper products, gun manufacturing, agriculture, food processing, energy, technology, banking, and gambling. The mining industry included the extraction of such minerals as gold, coal, silver, talc, gemstones, and vermiculite. The energy industry was based on the country’s huge reserves of coal, oil, and shale gas, and on windmills. Starting with the year of its founding, Montidakoning’s GDP experienced explosive growth, in large part because federal environmental regulations and laws no longer mattered.

“Once that first domino fell, it was clear to all the other states that they, too, could secede, without any interference from the ever-weakening federal government, whose dismantling was occurring at a frenetic pace under President Trump, who had initiated trade wars with Mexico, Canada, and China, in what ultimately led to the catastrophic collapse of the value of the U.S. dollar. As might have been expected, one of the first things the government of Montidakoning did was to put its military personnel, who had defected from the U.S., at its borders, to prevent people from entering, and it expelled all of its non-U.S. citizens. Then it issued Montidakoning proofs of identity to its citizens, established its own cryptocurrency, to be used for all transactions within its borders and in international trade, and made extremely lucrative offers to all the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps personnel who had worked within its borders, to join the new military divisions of the new country.

Other states watched Montidakoning with envy as its GDP quickly rose, in parallel with its leaders eliminating every U.S. environmental regulation and law that had previously limited the regions’ industries from contaminating the air, water, vegetation, and wildlife within its borders and beyond. 

Even the leaders and electorates in states that initially did not want to secede from the U.S. soon felt they had to, as a matter of self-preservation, because by the end of 2026 President Trump and his billionaire enablers had become targets of mockery for Canada, Mexico, China, Europe, and Russia, whose leaders banded together, isolated the U.S. as a renegade country, and could not figure out whether President Trump and his party – known, ironically, as Republicans – were destroying the federal bureaucracy because all his billionaire friends were profiteers, who wanted to replace it with their own private, money-making enterprises, or they were simply incompetent, short-sighted home-wreckers, so to speak, like the apparatchiks who drunkenly presided over the laughably clownish decline and collapse of the Soviet Union in the latter half of the twentieth century.”

The teacher looked up at the clock on the wall of her study.

She put a map on the screen that showed the five new countries, in five different colors.

“This map shows you the five countries that the United States broke into, between 2026 and 2037,” she said.

Western Washington, Western Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Alaska had become a country named Pacifica; eastern Washington and eastern Oregon had joined Montidakoning, as had Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico; Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas had united as Heartland; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine became Northland; and Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana became Southtopia.

“Most historians agree that the collapse of the United States marked the beginning of the post-democracy world we’re in now. Billionaires – people who ensured that President Trump would be elected to his second term, and whom they knew they could manipulate – became virtual monarchs in each of the five countries that had once, collectively, been called The United States. Those billionaires were not qualitatively different from the rapacious American robber barons in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but quantitatively their ruination of the environment, at all levels, across North America and beyond, is what has led to the twenty-percent worldwide drop in life expectancies since that time. 

All historians agree on the fact that the extraordinary degradation of the Earth’s environment, begun long before 2025, was accelerated exponentially by President Trump’s destruction of the U.S. federal government, and the catastrophic environmental effects of his second term as President, whose magnitude paralleled the explosive growth in the wealth of each of billionaires who monarchically controlled the five new breakaway countries, explains why we all have to wear our special air-purifying astronaut helmets whenever we’re outside, and why global warming has caused much of what was once south Florida and the cities along the coast of Southtopia to be submerged, and why environmental pollutants have tripled the rates of stillbirths, birth defects, and cancers of the lung, liver, bladder and skin in the last hundred years.

“We’re getting close to the end of the period. During our next class we’ll review what happened next to the former United States, including the water war between Montidakoning and Pacifica, which began in 2041, caused the deaths of over 150,000 people, and involved the use of chemical and nuclear weapons.

“Please also review your texts. I’ll take all your questions next time. Goodbye.”

She ended the session and went to her kitchen, to get a cup of coffee.