U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One en route to Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, to attend a world leaders' summit on ending the Gaza war, amid a U.S.-brokered prisoner-hostage swap and ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, Israel, October 13, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris warned The Nation that blue states may have to resort to a ‘tax strike’ to stop being the MAGA regime’s ‘second tier’ Americans.

“Since his election, Trump has … treated blue states not as equals … but rather like defeated vassals who must pay tribute to their new emperor in the form of policy capitulations and abrogations of their constitutional rights,” said Faris, adding that Trump’s explicit mandate to make blue states suffer “is the gravest threat to the constitutional union since the Civil War.”

“Last week, Trump escalated this campaign of autocratic intimidation by screaming on his fourth-tier microblogging website that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson should be imprisoned,” Faris said. “His corrupt henchman — er, ‘immigration czar’ — Tom Homan has distributed threats of arrest on cable news like he’s tossing paper towels to hurricane victims, against everyone from New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to California Governor Gavin Newsom.”

Meanwhile, Faris said Trump and his “Cabinet goons can count on the reliably servile U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to do whatever the administration asks.”

Faris said Trump is also using ICE to disproportionately target blue states and Democratic-run cities, with CNN reporting that Trump’s troops deliberately marching up and down Latino-majority streets is “killing business” and shutting down whole sections of Chicago.

“Citizens in blue states feel like they are living under a constant state of military siege, rhetorical harassment and punitive partisan budgetary cuts because that is in fact what is happening. And it is not sustainable for another three years,” said Faris. “The compact between the states is not magical or self-executing or ordained by divine providence to ensure that it can’t be undone by ruthless MAGA tyrants. It has fallen violently apart once before.”

Faris said blue state officials are already mulling a tax strike.

“In 2024, California and New York alone combined to send nearly $1.2 trillion in income and other taxes to the federal government, making up close to a quarter of all revenue. The reliance of many small, rural Republican-leaning states on federal funding is well known,” Faris said. “… By themselves, the states that voted for Kamala Harris — leaving aside the consensus battleground states — represent half of all federal tax revenue.”

The gamble, said Faris, is that Trump’s own diminished IRS would not be able to summon the resources or personnel to verify and punish citizens participating in a strike, even though Faris said Trump appears more than willing to muster some form of federal force to discourage a protest from taking “root on its own.”

Another option, said Faris, could be a national general strike with infuriated federal workers walking off their jobs and bringing society “to a screeching halt.”

“If workers in just the Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs went out at once (they would need to resign, take time out under the Family and Medical Leave Act, or find some other workaround to avoid prohibitions on striking), and if they were joined by, say, public school teachers, the country would be snarled in an almost unimaginably chaotic crisis within 24 hours.”

Read the Nation report at this link.