The United States is facing the largest threat to its continued existence as one nation-state since the Civil War. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration: I have extensively studied the Civil War and American history as a whole, and we are in dangerous waters. As I see it, the threat is a massive leadership vacuum coming from the Washington and Donald Trump.

The problem with the vacuum is that far too many states, cities, and people are not content to just twist in the wind regarding health care, global warming, and immigration. The American people and their state and city representatives are going to step up and fill that vacuum, leading to a potential clash between state and national power the likes of which have not been seen for well over a century.

Even some Liberals are skeptical of the Trump-Russia connection, but if Vladimir Putin made a wish for the United States when he blew out his birthday candles last October, he’s already gotten most of what he wanted. There has been a massive erosion of faith in the American government, the media and even factual, objective reality as a whole; the USA has largely relinquished the leadership role it has held since the end of World War II and is more isolated than any time since just before the War. Now, with the recent G-20 Summit and Trump’s decision to quit the Paris Climate Accords, the rest of the free world openly mocks us. And most troubling of all going forward, our nation is splitting at the seams as the political, cultural, ideological, and economic ties that have bound our nation together for so long are ripped apart.

And the end of our nation may be coming sooner than later. Donald Trump has less legitimacy and political capital than any president in American history, and it isn’t even that close. We already see individuals, states, and cities rising to fill the leadership vacuum, but I believe the real problem will come to a head soon as a result of 2 potential sequences of events, both involving Trump’s role as Commander-in-chief.

1.) Trump grows angrier and angrier over the increased resistance to his rule and to approval ratings lower than intestinal parasites and he and his advisers decide that military action will cause the American people to line up behind him out of patriotic duty. Now, recent history (Iraq) should show him and his advisers that this approach is flawed in the extreme, but Trump neither knows nor cares about recent history. In 2002, President George W. Bush labeled Iraq, North Korea, and Iran an ‘axis of evil,’ and Iraq, the ‘easiest’ target of the 3 is no longer on the list. That leaves the nuclear-armed North Koreans, and Iran, a nation of 80 million people (for comparison, Iraq had 26 million when we attacked in 2003) that will achieve nuclear arms pretty quickly once we tear up the deal that we – along with the UK, France, China, Russia, and Germany – made with them in 2015. Not only will any pre-emptive US attack on those nations devastate our allies and further isolate us more than Trump already has, but there will be many in our armed forces who will not risk their lives for an aggressive war that will be transparently political. For maybe the first time in American history, those who protest the war at the start or who refuse to fight will be those celebrated as patriots.

2.) The more likely scenario as I see it. Trump grows angrier and angrier over the increased resistance to his rule and to approval ratings lower than genital warts, and he finally decides he can’t ‘allow’ protests anymore (First Amendment be damned), and he orders either the National Guard or regular military to disperse the most high-profile and disruptive protests; he does not order them to use deadly force but to use all force short of lethal. It is again easy to see many refusing to follow such orders, which is the very type of situation at the start of many revolutions throughout history.

When the US faced the greatest crisis in our history, we had an almost perfectly designed leader to handle it in Abraham Lincoln. When the Great Depression threatened to end our democratic republic, we had an almost perfectly designed leader to handle it in Franklin D. Roosevelt. We are now at the precipice of national disaster just as we were in 1860 and 1932, but instead of having Lincoln or FDR, we have an erratic, petty, angry, ignorant, short-sighted, dishonest, and probably mentally ill man standing where those two giants once stood. There is no easy answer for this type of situation in the Constitution: we have to find it our selves, and we must identify, elect, and follow leaders in our states, cities, and towns, because there is a vacuum in Washington right now, and we have to recognize it, and decide whether or not it is fatal to the United States as we know and understand it.