Trump finds a ‘Southern Strategy’ to save his dreams of dictatorship

James Comey, the former FBI chief who was the nation’s top federal law enforcement official for three-and-a-half years, should have known not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And I don’t mean strolling an Atlantic beach with his phone camera right after someone arranged some dump-Donald-Trump protest art, seashells that spelled out “8647″ — although that wasn’t great timing, either. No, the place I’m talking about is the former Confederacy.

More specifically for legal purposes, the federal Eastern District of North Carolina.

Trump returned to the White House in 2025 filled with revenge fantasies against Comey, who was fired during his first term for not killing a probe into Russian influence in the 2016 election and then wrote a book criticizing the president. But Trump 47 and his MAGA minions at the Justice Department have found out it’s still hard in America to jail someone for something when they’ve done nothing.

A 2025 effort to indict and try Comey for congressional perjury in the increasingly blue state of Virginia collapsed under balky prosecutors, a partial grand jury failure, and dubious legal tactics.

Then things went south — literally.

The Justice Department and the FBI were also probing the seashell picture, which Comey very briefly posted to his Instagram account based on an understanding of “86″ matched by anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant, that it means to toss something out. Prosecutors instead alleged this was a death threat.

It’s not hard to imagine the ridiculously overblown and vindictive charges would have never garnered an indictment in a place like Washington, D.C., where so many other efforts to prosecute anti-Trump protesters or political enemies have been rejected by grand juries, or through acquittals, or by holdover attorneys with actual ethics. But this case was brought in North Carolina, a Southern state that Trump carried all three times he was on the ballot.

The MAGA-led Justice Department learned that it can indict a ham sandwich, if it’s slathered in Trump-fried Southern barbecue sauce. And it wasn’t the only time last week that the president leaned hard into his new Southern strategy for reviving the Lost Cause of his presidency.

In Montgomery — the historic first capital of the Confederacy, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turbocharged the civil rights movement while George Wallace pledged “segregation forever” — a separate grand jury brought felony charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a longtime leader in the fight against right-wing extremism.

Here, the charges ginned up against an outfit that’s labelled Trump allies as hate groups — a convoluted argument that pretends that SPLC’s use of paid informants for intel on groups like the Ku Klux Klan is some kind of fraud — were arguably as absurd as the Comey indictment. But in a state that voted 64.5% for Trump in 2024, a Montgomery grand jury also had a hankering for ham, apparently.

The indictments from south of the Mason-Dixon Line came at a moment when the 47th president flew to his Florida refuge with the original Lost Cause — the military defeat of the Confederacy — in the frontal lobes of his rapidly decaying brain.

“The Civil War was brutal...“ Trump told a Friday night event near his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Springs. “I always said, ‘Why couldn’t that have been settled?’ And maybe it could have been.” He said the 1861-1865 conflict was prolonged “because Robert E. Lee was an amazing general...With the exception of Gettysburg... That was not a good day for him, but if that didn’t happen, he would have actually won.”

There a reason Trump has Gettysburg on his mind. He just had one of his own, when he sent his own ragtag immoral army on a northern offensive and suffered a crushing defeat. This happened on the snow-covered battlefields of urban Minnesota, where a bunch of Yankees with whistles and courage forced the masked invaders of Trump’s immigration raids to slink away in retreat, much as happened in Chicago months earlier.

Trump’s delusion that his narrow plurality win in 2024 was some kind of national mandate for a monarchy has been beaten back again and again, in grand jury rooms and from principled judges who’ve rejected the regime’s trumped-up prosecutions, as Democrats win special elections from New Hampshire to Texas.

So here comes Plan B: Trump’s Southern strategy. This is not a new idea. The phrase was coined in 1968 by the poli-sci genius Kevin Phillips to describe how incoming president Richard Nixon and the GOP could undo an unbroken century of Democratic rule across the former Confederacy — with a race-coded law-and-order appeal on issues such as urban crime and opposing school busing for integration.

The deal was sealed a decade later when Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 fall campaign with a plea in Mississippi for “states rights” just a stone’s throw from where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. But historians might argue that the dictatorial dreams of Trump and an ever anti-democratic South was always a marriage waiting to happen.

“Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country,” Alan Elrod, who heads an Arkansas think-tank, wrote in a must-read 2025 piece for The Bulwark. “The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era.”

Elrod’s conclusion — that America’s crisis of democracy is “partly the result of a refusal to reckon deeply and profoundly with the traumas, shocks, and violence of Southern history” — went viral again last weekend after our ever-reactionary U.S. Supreme Court completed its 21st century crusade to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act by tossing out a Louisiana congressional map that enabled Black representation.

The past is never past. The white-supremacy-enabling panel who gave America a Civil War with its 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford abomination and Jim Crow segregation with its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling just gave the former Confederacy a new permission slip to disenfranchise voters on a scale not seen since Selma’s “Bloody Sunday.”

» READ MORE: SCOTUS gutting 1965 Voting Rights Act is a wake-up call from a dream | Will Bunch

Within hours of the High Court’s 6-3 ruling in the Callais v. Louisiana case, plans for new whites-only (or, mostly) congressional maps, most of them in time for the November midterms, were announced in Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Liberals who’ve been posting for months their fears that a cornered Trump will find some way to cancel or nullify the November election might want to take a closer look at Louisiana. There, an authoritarian carceral state under right-wing extremist Gov. Jeff Landry is already making those nightmares come true.

Last week, the Landry regime used the Supreme Court ruling as an excuse to arbitrarily suspend the primary election long scheduled for later this month, which is something that could never happen in a functioning democracy. In case the Bayou State’s Jim Crow Jr. ambitions were unclear, Landry and legislative Republicans also raced to eliminate an elected clerk of courts post in New Orleans, just days before a Black man who’d been exonerated of wrongful murder charges was to take office.

Trump’s new strategy is to make America look like Louisiana, without the cool stuff like crawfish or zydeco. His Hail Mary Project for saving what looks like a disastrous midterm balloting is to take a Selma-caliber bludgeon to most of the 23 current Black Southern House members, even if that means stalling an election or two.

Meanwhile, the Comey and SPLC indictments appear to have created a new blueprint for prosecutorial oppression, by jury shopping across Trumpland to avoid these pesky citizens in blue cities. And the worst is yet to come.

The new Justice Department scheme for pursuing Trump’s fantasy of a “grand conspiracy” to deny him the 2016 election (which, it should be noted, he won) — a theory that would indict Comey and former top intelligence officials in the Barack Obama administration — has been assigned to a pitbull Trump loyalist special prosecutor before a grand jury in...you guessed it, another former Confederate state.

An extremely absurd case requires extreme measures, so the grand jury is under the supervision of Fort Pierce, Fla. U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, the same pro-Trump zealot who 86’ed the open-and-shut case around the president’s taking of highly classified documents.

No wonder Trump has been musing how Robert E. Lee could have defeated the North. A privileged white aristocracy was defeated at Appomattox in 1865 and on the road from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, but dictatorship might just work for him.

Thankfully, we can also look to history to learn how this persistent virus can be defeated by real leaders like flawed legislative master Lyndon Johnson, who won approval for that 1965 Voting Rights Act by telling Congress and the nation: “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

Again.