You Can’t Gerrymander the Future
How Trump’s Second Term Will Be the Next Dred Scott Decision — and the Beginning of the End for the GOP
Opinion by: Aisha K. Staggers, Editor-At-Large
In 2028, a new, highly gerrymandered America will wake up to the realization that re-electing Donald Trump for a second term was the biggest mistake since the Dred Scott decision.
Like the Dred Scott decision, Trump’s second term won’t just be a policy disaster — it will be a moral disgrace, the kind history teachers can’t describe without warning their students first. And like the Dred Scott decision, it will be born out of desperation: a last-ditch attempt to lock the country into a version of itself that is already dying.
Trump is the perfect casting choice for the role they’re trying to keep alive — the Pleasantville patriarch, selling a fantasy of America where white men set the rules, white women stay in their place, and everyone else is an outsider. That fantasy never existed outside the screen and the segregated suburb, but for his followers, he’s the last leading man of a story they refuse to admit was fiction all along.
Here’s the part his voters will never say out loud but everyone else can see: Trump’s base is built on white grievance. The GOP’s power depends on the illusion that America is, and must remain, a white nation. But the math is already against them — every year, the percentage of white conservatives in the electorate shrinks. By the time Gen Alpha is voting, people of color — including multiracial Americans — will outnumber white people for the first time in U.S. history.
And here’s what they refuse to face: the world has never been majority white. Globally, most people are Black, brown, Asian, Indigenous, or mixed-race. The idea of a “white world” exists only in the American imagination — a fantasy propped up by movies, media, redlining, and selective history books. The Pleasantville 1950s they idolize wasn’t real even in the 1950s. It was a curated lie built on segregation, exclusion, and violence against anyone who didn’t fit the picture.
The Republican Party is desperately trying to preserve that lie. They’re purging voter rolls, banning books, criminalizing abortion, demonizing immigrants, stripping affirmative action, erasing Black history from classrooms, and inventing moral panics about “critical race theory” and “wokeness.” They think if they can control the rules, they can freeze America in their preferred frame. But every one of these so-called “victories” is proof they’re losing.
Suppress the youth vote? You radicalize the most diverse, politically aware generation in history. Ban history? Kids find the truth online, without your filter. Strip reproductive rights? You guarantee that women and allies will never forgive or forget. Deport immigrants? Their families and communities show up at the polls in bigger numbers than ever.
It’s the same miscalculation the Dred Scott decision represented in 1857. The Supreme Court thought it could cement white dominance forever by declaring Black people could never be citizens. Instead, it poured gasoline on the abolitionist movement and pushed the nation toward a civil war that destroyed the very system the ruling was meant to protect.
History doesn’t whisper — it yells. And right now, it’s yelling that the America Trump and his followers are clinging to no longer exists, and never really did. Gen Alpha will be the first majority-minority generation in U.S. history. They won’t need permission to define America. They will be America. And they’ll do it in a world where whiteness is not the measure of humanity — because it never was.
By the time the post-2028 regret sets in, it won’t just be political. It’ll be economic, as the country finds itself globally isolated and hemorrhaging talent because young innovators and workers want no part of a reactionary regime. It’ll be cultural, as the U.S. clings to outdated values rooted in white supremacy while the rest of the world moves forward. And it’ll be moral, as the Trump generation of voters faces the reality that they gave the wheel to a man who drove the country into a wall to protect a fantasy that was never true.
And here’s the part they can’t stomach: when the shift is complete, they’ll be the minority. The rest of the country will remember them not as patriots, but as the last defenders of a delusion — a myth they mistook for reality. They’ll see that the “real America” they fought for was never America at all.
The GOP thinks it’s outrunning the future. In reality, they’re sprinting toward their own extinction.
The rest of us? We’re already building what comes next. And there’s no executive order in the world that can stop it.
The world doesn’t wait for cowards clinging to lies — it leaves them behind, remembered only for the fantasy they failed to save and the future they refused to survive.