SkunkyArt | AlexanderNorthAH - Trumpline-191: How Few Remain

The Pacific States successfully gains the upper hand thanks to one of its generals not losing vital records of war plans, costing the United States a potential advantage. After the subsequent Pacifican capture of Austin and further American military failures elsewhere, the United States is forced to concede in November 2018. When a severe mental health episode ends with President Donald Trump in a coma [1], British Ambassador to the United States Kim Darroch's offer of mediation between the two American republics is accepted by Acting U.S. President Mike Pence and P.S. President Jay Inslee, with the resultant Treaty of Corpus Christi signed mere days before Trump regains consciousness.

The self-proclaimed state of Jefferson's attempted counter-secession is crushed, with its reintegration into Oregon and California accepted by the United States in exchange for the removal of troops from Pacifican-occupied western Montana and central Texas. However, the territory held by PSA-sympathetic forces in southwest Texas is also ceded to the PSA- some of Trump's political allies actually argued for the cession of all of southern Texas, which they saw as a devilishly clever move that would force the Pacificans to deal with the entire Mexican border as "revenge" for seceding, but that suggestion was shot down for the sake of not giving the Pacificans any more territory. [2] Outside of diplomacy, people on both sides of the new border are informally encouraged by Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. to "vote with their feet" if they don't like which country they've ended up in, which many with enough money to do so take their chance to while it's an option; most of these migrants are conservatives in Pacifican territory who believe they'll be oppressed under the PSA. [3] Despite this, for the sake of conservatives who choose not to move out of the occupied states of Idaho, Utah, and Arizona, the PSA is made to promise that all three states will be granted statehood by 2024 at the absolute latest.

Postwar, with enough states clamoring about how the wartime capital of Los Angeles makes the country feel too California-dominated, the victorious Pacific States decides to relocate its national capital, holding its first peacetime election in the form of a referendum on whether to move the capital to Portland, Oregon (on the border between two states/the favored option of California and Oregon) or Phoenix, Arizona (an option presented as an olive branch to conservatives who didn't move east). Surprising many, it's actually Phoenix that wins out, but despite grumblings from the west coast the referendum's outcome is respected by the newly-elected P.S. President Tom Steyer (himself a Californian) and the move goes ahead with just a smidgen of domestic terrorism to hinder it. The ceded portion of southwest Texas becomes the new state of Montezuma [4], while the Navajo Nation is later granted statehood alongside Utah and Idaho. The latter is a move conservatives accuse of just being a cheap tactic to make it even harder for them to win a Senate majority rather than the revolutionary step towards increasing Native American representation in government it's presented as, which is unfair: the two aren't mutually exclusive. The Pacific States quickly becomes politically dominated by the Egalitarian Party (formerly the Democratic Party before it rebranded), while the big-tent neoliberal/liberal-conservative/paternalistic conservative Independent Freedom Party later emerges in fits and starts as a generally ineffective opposition party attacking the Egalitarians from the right.

A postwar economic crash combined with record-low national morale, general instability, and accelerating criticism of wartime authoritarianism on Trump's part seals the deal, and he loses in a landslide to Steve Bullock in 2020. With the once-grand GOP seen as responsible for splitting the country in two, Democratic presidents continue to occupy the White House until the election of 2036, something greatly helped by the party putting in a lot of effort to win over poor voters in the South and Great Plains voters in general. Lacking a proper Pacific coast outside of Alaska and cut off from its Pacific island holdings, the United States tries and fails to cut deals with Canada and the PSA to rectify that, with its failures only ensuring Alaska begins to function more and more as a de facto independent country. While regaining access to the Pacific by seizing the Panama Canal is considered and even advocated for, the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress shoots this down for being flagrantly imperialistic; the same rationale is provided for not intervening when the PSA and France collaborate to prop up friendly governments in Cuba and Mexico.

Shortly after the election of Senator Tom Cotton, a staunch anti-PSA hawk and the first Republican president since Trump, the Pacifican government formally purchases Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, and Tamaulipas from the economically-collapsing Mexican government in order to gain access to the Gulf of Mexico. This is highly unfortunate for Cotton, who'd had not-very-secret ambitions of invading Mexico to seize enough of its northern territories for the United States to regain a Pacific coast, but what's even more unfortunate for him is the scope of the war that unfolds when he tries to use the Pacifican purchase as a casus belli. The United States is promptly dogpiled by Britain, France, Cuba, and Canada in addition to the PSA and PSA-friendly militia groups in the westernmost cities of the continental USA, and the so-called Second Mexican-American War is over by April 22, 2038 with the United States defeated. The Pacificans seize southern Texas to triple the size of Montezuma as punishment [5], while Alaska formally gains independence as a Canadian/Pacifican-supervised republic and America's Pacific island territories are divided between the PSA's allies.

As part of the postwar negotiations, ongoing attempts in the Pacific States to ban penal labor nationally (it was already completely abolished in Oregon, Utah, and Colorado, while the United States had banned it nationally in the late 2020s in an attempt to create more jobs) are forced to a halt by the burgeoning Alliance for Freedom and Democracy- specifically, by France and India, which are leading the way in pressuring other countries to adopt their form of neo-protectionism increasingly dependent on unpaid (or, less frequently, underpaid) convict laborers as a means to prop up their vital industries. Despite valiant Congressional opposition led by Senator Sydney Kamlager-Dove, the PSA reluctantly complies and nationally reinstates convict labor, not wanting to be abandoned by its allies and left to fend for itself against the increasingly pissed-off USA. [6] However, the Pacificans rapidly nationally adopt a scheme of "trauma vouchers" to reimburse prison workers who suffer psychological issues during imprisonment, and the system is intentionally designed to be so easy to abuse that in practice most penal laborers get paid minimum wage for their work (albeit in a stupid, roundabout way) while still creating plausible deniability as far as the other Alliance nations are concerned. Sure, it's not like the penal laborers have a choice or anything as to whether they're working, but it's not like anybody ever did under capitalism in the first place, so it all evens out, right?

Now humiliated twice by its snot-nosed western sibling, the United States undergoes a political realignment which starts with the splintering of the Republican Party: Rockefeller Republicans leave to join the Democrats, the far-right swaps over to the openly Dark Enlightenment-derived Reactionary Party initially formed by Donald Trump and his eldest children, and the rump GOP is reduced to an irrelevant third party of country club conservatives. Accepting the European Federation's offer to take it under its wing, the United States joins what will eventually becomes the globalist bloc as it increasingly pursues European-style socioeconomics and large-scale automation, though the revanchist left-nationalist ideology which comes to dominate its political discourse (known simply as "Retribution") is a purely American invention. Democrats, Reactionaries, and even the few remaining Republicans all swear that the United States will someday have its revenge, and starting in 2070 the nation will be given the chance to follow through...