Do you live in one of the 14 states Trump plans to hold hostage? Your life may be at risk.
A plan to shut off federal money to Blue States would — without a doubt — meet the standard the Founders set for impeachment.
Last month, Trump declared that on February 1, he would cut all federal funding to Blue States that don’t support his immigration crackdown, a threat that could affect millions of Americans in ways that touch transportation, national security, healthcare, education, and beyond. Yesterday came and went without an announcement. But if Trump moves forward with the plan this week, it will be one of the most obvious impeachable offenses of his presidency.
On January 14, 2026, Donald Trump made a stunning threat on social media, writing this:
“Effective February first, no more payments will be made by the federal government to states for their corrupt criminal protection centers known as sanctuary cities.”
He then doubled down, stating this would include states that are home to sanctuary jurisdictions and asserting without detail that the funding would be “significant.” Unlike other late-night social media missives from the president, he followed through on this soon after. White House budget czar Russ Vought (pictured above) ordered federal agencies to compile data on money sent to 14 mostly Democratic-controlled states and D.C. as a possible prelude to a sweeping funding freeze.
To grasp the scale of what the president is threatening to do, you need to remember what “federal money” actually means — and what a big deal it is for the president of the United States to tell a third of the country that they’ll get “no more money.”
The U.S. government provides emergency assistance to millions of people across America every year in the form of FEMA disaster aid, homeland security grants, and counterterrorism funds… billions of dollars in transportation funding to keep highways and bridges functioning… life-saving healthcare and social services money to protect senior citizens and children… money to keep schools and universities running… and a zillion more functions too numerous to list. In California’s Bay Area alone, officials warned that cutting federal funding could mean billions of dollars lost in ways that directly endanger the health and safety of residents.
Are you listening, America?
If you live in one of these 14 Blue States or areas, Donald Trump is threatening to cut you off from federal support and to hold you hostage — possibly endangering millions upon millions of American lives — unless your leaders let him do what he did in Minnesota.
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Illinois
Massachusetts
Minnesota
New Jersey
New York
Oregon
Rhode Island
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
(and the District of Columbia)
When Trump did this before, on a smaller scale, he was rightfully impeached.
What’s also extraordinary about this is that the president was previously impeached for doing something similar. In 2019, Trump withheld several hundred million dollars in military aid to Ukraine and said he wouldn’t release it unless they opened an investigation into one of his political rivals, the Biden family, even though Congress had expressly appropriated the money. In other words, Trump had no legal authority to withhold it.
Back then, that “quid pro quo” was seen as scandalously illegal. The president cooked up a scheme to use taxpayer dollars to pressure a foreign leader for domestic political gain. In doing so, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the Trump administration violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 by withholding funds for a policy reason — something that law forbids absent specific congressional authorization.
Trump was impeached by the House over the Ukraine matter.
Now, imagine taking that logic and scaling it hundreds of times over, wielding not a few hundred million in foreign aid but hundreds of billions in domestic federal money as a weapon against domestic political opponents. That’s NOT a policy dispute. That’s a constitutional crisis of the first order.
When the Founders wrote Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution (which states that the president, vice president, and “all civil officers of the United States” shall be removed on impeachment for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”), they were concerned about abuses of public trust, corruption, and betrayal of constitutional duties. The Impoundment Control Act itself was enacted precisely because presidents like Nixon had tried to refuse to spend funds that Congress had appropriated, effectively vetoing programs without congressional approval.
The Constitution delegates the power of the purse to Congress and imposes on the president the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Donald Trump doesn’t get to decide what does and doesn’t get spent, based on who sucks up to him. Withholding or rescinding congressionally appropriated funds for political leverage — whether to force actions in Ukraine or to coerce states to actively facilitate his masked-agent immigration crackdown — is the kind of massive power abuse that impeachment was designed to remedy.
This is a life-risking power play. And it has to be met by Democratic states with furious resolve, not weakness.
To understand what’s happening, you have to understand one word that has defined Donald Trump’s entire life in business and politics: leverage. Multiple times when I was in his administration, he waxed philosophical to us about how much he’d learned about “leverage” in the corporate world. In his mind, that meant taking punitive action against someone, even if it was unjustified, to get them to capitulate.
When Trump threatens to cut off federal funding to entire states, the point is not simply to follow through. The point is to create chaos. He wants to send governors, mayors, and state legislators scrambling into emergency meetings, staring at spreadsheets and disaster-response plans, and wondering how the hell they will keep hospitals running, police departments staffed, wildfire response teams funded, and transit systems secure.
He wants panic in state capitals because panic produces pressure. And if Trump creates pressure, it might win him some concessions. There’s another word for this type of strategy. Coercion. What’s so grotesque this time is that he’s not using foreign military equipment as the leverage. He’s using American lives. Even if the plan never fully materializes, the threat itself is an act of governance by extortion.
If the White House moves forward, the nationwide response must be immediate, unified, and unflinching.
State attorneys general should already be drafting lawsuits and preparing to go into federal court the moment any unlawful funding freeze is announced. They’ve been here before. When Trump previously froze counterterrorism funding for New York City as a pressure tactic, the courts pushed back hard. Judges reminded the executive branch that Congress controls the purse, not the president, and Governor Kathy Hochul stood her ground. The White House then reversed the freeze.
In the meantime, governors must refuse to be picked off one by one. Trump’s strategy here depends on isolation, i.e. convincing each state that it stands alone and might be spared if it quietly cuts a deal. He did this with law firms and universities. We can’t let him do it to American states. Democratic governors should convene immediately, publicly, and visibly. They should say — together — that they will defend their residents and the Constitution by meeting Trump’s intimidation with total solidarity.
Most importantly, Donald Trump should be impeached if he does this.
Members of Congress can’t sit on their hands. I know that the political opposition doesn’t have the majority in Congress, so an impeachment would be unlikely to succeed, for now. But if they don’t file impeachment articles when Trump does this, they’ll look weak and derelict. Such an offense is vastly more serious than what Trump did with the Ukraine “quid pro quo” — because this time it would be aimed at American citizens — and Democrats need to show some guts by fighting back.
The president of the United States is saying your life is worth less to him if you live in a Blue State, and he’s also saying he’s willing to take your life hostage to advance his political goals. If that isn’t impeachable, what is?
The Constitution was designed precisely to guard against this kind of abuse. Congress writes the laws and appropriates the money. The president’s duty is to faithfully execute those laws, not to withhold funds as ransom until political demands are met. When a president turns the machinery of government into an instrument of personal leverage, he betrays the public trust at the heart of his office. Pure and simple.
So if Trump moves forward with a sweeping effort to cut off federal funding to states that defy him politically, it will go beyond “controversial” or “aggressive.” It will be one of the clearest impeachable offenses of his presidency — and a moment that tests whether the opposition in this country will cower at another threat or confront the man who’s torching the Constitution.
Your friend, in defiance,
Can I tell you how proud I am to be a part of the DEFIANCE.org community?
Just last week…
…YOU STOOD WITH PROSECUTORS - We launched the Fight Against Federal Overreach, a project to hold federal agents accountable by making sure law-breaking officers are CHARGED WITH CRIMES when they violate the rights of the people. We’ve now raised HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars to bring district attorneys and prosecutors together around the country to work together. This idea came up on a DEFIANCE Daily episode and was pulled together within days. We’ll have more announcements about it tomorrow.
THAT is the speed we need to move at to combat Trump’s abuses of power.
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…SOON, YOU’RE GOING TO STAND UP TO THE PRESIDENT, AGAIN. - We’re just three weeks away from hosting the biggest rebuttal to the State of the Union Address. The incredible Ruth Ben-Ghiat just added her name, as well as Representatives Eric Swalwell and Eugene Vindman. If you haven’t yet, get your in-person or virtual tickets to STATE OF THE SWAMP: THE REBUTTAL TO THE STATE OF THE UNION, scheduled for February 24. This will be one of the most powerful pro-democracy events of the year.
Every state and district on this list as well as every swing state needs to withhold payments of any kind to the Feds. Use that money to create support systems for your own people. Fuck the feds and fuck red states.
I live in one of the fourteen states: Colorado, where this all started several months ago.
1) Trump moved the Space Command center from Colorado Springs to Alabama (doesn't get any redder than that) yanking hundreds of jobs and billions of dollars from the local/state economy, 2) vetoed a bipartisan water infrastructure bill (sponsored by Lauren Boebert no less, which passed the Congress unanimously) that now makes it difficult to impossible to finish a critical water project that would supply drinking water to a rural part of the state where the vast majority of people voted for HIM.
His early efforts to spin up a massive ICE operation started here, but for some reason they decided to shine the Eye of Sauron elsewhere (for now). Google the community response to a bogus arrest in Durango if you want details.
He's also super pissed at Colorado (Governor Polis in particular) for not pardoning Tina Peters, the disgraced county clerk of court who broke a few state laws in working with My Pillow Guy to try to prove that the voting machines in her county were rigged. Spoiler alert: they weren't and she was convicted by a jury of her peers in a ruby red Mesa County in western Colorado. She now lives in a state prison and Trump can't pardon her because she broke state, not federal, laws. He is not happy about that.
Oh, yeah. Colorado is one of the fourteen alright. It started many months ago (seems like years).
Update: Oh, I forgot one. He also closed the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, which for decades has been an important part of weather prediction and climate research for the whole country. Hundreds of jobs and decades of climate research down the drain.