Can We Stop a Coup With State of Emergency Declarations?

The founders built fifty state governments to protect us in crisis such as these.

Aug 15, 2026

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois. All have been eyed as potential presidential picks.Credit...Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times; Sarah Rice for The New York Times; Jim Vondruska for The New York Times; Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

Notes from the author: This article is very long, because believe it or not this subject is not nearly as persuasive or comprehensive when trimmed to the size of a Facebook post. You’re here because you are a problem solver, you want solutions, and this article explores those in depth. That drive to learn and act is how we get out of this mess, thank you for being that type of person. Additionally, if you aren’t already following my mother’s Substack, Glass Empires provides a complementary series of solution based journalism https://substack.com/@glassempires .

Every governor in the country can declare a state of emergency on their own authority, today. No other country on earth hands that power to fifty separate governments at once.

Before we get to whether governors should use those powers to fight back, we have three things to establish. First, whether what is happening in the United States qualifies as an emergency. Second, what a declaration actually authorizes a governor to do. Third, whether those authorities would be enough to rein in a federal coup.

Let’s begin.

The federal government is holding 65,765 people in immigration detention, more than 46,000 of them with no criminal conviction under a Homeland Security definition that counts driving without a license as a criminal conviction, and elected representatives who try to inspect these facilities are being barred and even arrested. Federal agents have killed American citizens on American streets and hidden their identities while doing it.

The administration froze $259.5 million in Minnesota’s Medicaid funding in February, deferred another $91 million in April, and froze more in July, pushing the total held back from Minnesota and California past a billion dollars. More than a million Minnesotans depend on that program. Judge Eric Tostrud, whom Trump appointed in 2018 and who now serves as chief judge of the District of Minnesota, declined to order the money released. He wrote in the same 42-page opinion that the deferral is historically unprecedented in its size and timing, and then held that Minnesota had sued too early because the administrative process was not finished. The state can come back later. The money stays frozen while it waits, and the clock on the federal review runs into October.

DOGE copied the personal data of 300 million Americans onto an unsecured server and signed a voter data agreement with a political advocacy group. The Justice Department has now sued thirty states and the District of Columbia for their unredacted voter rolls, though they’ve lost twenty-one of those cases. More than a dozen states have willingly handed the data over anyway.

The country has been at war with Iran since February 28, when the United States and Israel struck Tehran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. There was no congressional authorization. Eighteen American service members have been killed and more than 450 wounded, the war has cost $37.5 billion, and it is now in its sixth month with no end in sight.

Governors have declared states of emergency for far less than any single one of these. Together they represent the largest sustained assault on constitutional governance in American history.

None of these are separate crises. The Epstein files are the web we’re caught in. Many of the people starting these wars and funding the authoritarian takeover are in those files. That’s the key. The DOJ takeover, the firing of FBI agents, the smearing of survivors, the consolidation of power, the war: all of it traces back to people protecting themselves from what those files contain, while aiming to make permanent a world where a Jeffrey Epstein type would become President for life rather than appear before a jury.

The federal investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators is dead, and the Trump administration has spent over a year actively covering it up. SDNY had an active investigation. DOJ headquarters ordered the files transferred out of SDNY, and the investigation stopped. The FBI closed it in July 2025 with a two-page memo claiming no evidence existed. Director Kash Patel, went before Congress and attacked the credibility of the survivors. When Congress “forced” a release of the files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the DOJ produced roughly half of what it had collected, included the survivors’ personal information and intimate details of their abuse, and protected the names of the abusers.

Pam Bondi indicted zero co-conspirators in the fourteen months she ran the Justice Department. Trump fired her on April 2. Todd Blanche, his former personal defense lawyer and the man who personally conducted the Ghislaine Maxwell interview, took over as acting attorney general and was confirmed to the job on August 8 by a vote of 50 to 49.

Nearly fifty women gave federal prosecutors the names of roughly twenty co-conspirators, descriptions of how the operation worked, and details of how it was financed. Every bit of it went nowhere. The federal government will never investigate this because the investigation leads to the people running the federal government. So do we just sit on our hands and wait? Do we hope that elections clear all this up on their own? Do we give this admin 2.5 years to continue building a MAGA army, purging the military and federal government of non-loyalists, attacking elections, and covering up criminal activities?

So who stops this?

How does Congress stop him? They pass a law and he ignores it. They impeach him and the Senate won’t convict because Republicans hold more than the thirty-four seats needed to block it. They hold him in contempt and the DOJ, which works for him, refuses to enforce it. They issue subpoenas and he tells people not to show up.

How do the courts stop him? They issue rulings and there’s no one left to enforce them. He’s purged federal law enforcement of anyone who showed any independence and replaced them with loyalists who’ve made it clear they’ll cover up crimes, protect him and the Republican Party from accountability, and launch political investigations against his opponents. The FBI agents who investigated him are gone, they are not directed to attack his political enemies. The prosecutors who worked cases he wanted buried are gone.

And when a court does have one of these cases in front of it, look at what Minnesota got. A Trump-appointed judge with jurisdiction, the facts on the record, and his own written finding that the administration did something historically unprecedented, followed by a ruling that the state sued too early and the freeze continues. That is the federal judiciary functioning normally. It still ends with the money withheld and nobody stopped.

He told the Supreme Court he wouldn’t listen to them, and nobody came to make him. Because there’s nobody to come. Inside the federal government, the tools are broken. Between 2020 and 2024 the immune system of the federal government was carefully documented. Then 2025 began the Trump “Revenge Tour,” now armed with a to-do list for destroying American democracy.

If we accept that as the whole story, then yes, we’re in a dictatorship today. But accepting that premise means forgetting what this country actually is, what it was built to be, the robust and multi-layered defenses and checks on power that our founders crafted.

The United States isn’t one government. It’s hundreds of governments, and fifty of them are dual sovereigns with their own constitutions, their own criminal codes, their own courts, their own prosecutors, their own police, their own prisons. Just like you can choose civil disobedience, so too can your local, city, and state government.

Every one of our fifty governors has the power to declare a state of emergency. In 42 states the governor can suspend statutes and regulations that would otherwise slow the response down. Most state emergency acts go further than that. Georgia’s lets the governor use all available resources of state government and of every county and city, and transfer the direction, personnel, and functions of state departments. Oregon’s lets the governor direct any state agency to put its personnel, equipment, and facilities to work on the emergency. Washington’s lets the governor waive statutory obligations that would hinder necessary action. Nearly every state also waives the normal procurement process.

Read that list again with the economy in mind instead of a hurricane. A governor operating under those authorities can put people on a payroll immediately, start public works without waiting out the ordinary bidding calendar, and move money, staff, and functions between agencies to wherever they are needed. Franklin Roosevelt did that nationally in the Great Depression. The emergency statutes already on the books give a governor a state-sized version of it, available the day the declaration is signed.

The founders built the country this way because they knew this exact thing could happen. The answer they left us is not in Washington, where every federal check has already failed. It is in fifty state capitals, each with a governor who can act immediately and a criminal code no federal pardon can reach. That is why a captured federal government does not have to mean a captured country, even with a transnational criminal organization calling itself the Republican Party and its oligarch owners running the executive branch.

One state has already started without an emergency declaration, and what happened there tells you both that this works and why the emergency power matters.

New Mexico’s House of Representatives voted unanimously in February to create an investigative subcommittee into Epstein’s operation at Zorro Ranch in Santa Fe County. Attorney General Raúl Torrez reopened the state’s criminal investigation the same month. The subcommittee issued twenty subpoenas to state agencies, local law enforcement, federal agencies, and banks including J.P. Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. On August 5, it released a 119-page interim report documenting preliminary evidence of what happened to minors at the ranch.

That same day, Torrez sued the Justice Department in federal court, saying it is hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators and stonewalling a state criminal investigation. Federal agencies and United States Attorney’s offices did not respond to the subcommittee’s subpoenas at all. In six months and ten separate requests, Torrez’s office received 31 pages from the local United States Attorney.

New Mexico is doing this with ordinary tools on an ordinary timeline: a legislative subcommittee, a contracted law firm, an attorney general’s office running an investigation alongside everything else it does. Five months of work produced a report its own chair acknowledged contains no major findings yet. That is not a criticism of New Mexico. That is what this looks like at normal speed against a federal government that refuses to comply. An emergency declaration is what changes the speed, the resources, and the authority.

New Mexico is also not the only state with jurisdiction. Epstein’s operation ran through Manhattan, and the phrase “New York residence” appears 45 times in the SDNY prosecutors’ own 86-page memorandum on potential co-conspirators. Florida has its own record. The crimes were never confined to one state, and neither is the authority to charge them.

If states lay down, it’s over. But they haven’t laid down yet. They just haven’t picked up their strongest weapon.

The Epstein files are the web we’re caught in, and the people in those files are the people driving every crisis on that list. The oligarchs funding the takeover. The officials who buried the investigation and covered up the evidence to protect themselves. The people starting wars to change the subject.

A governor who declares a state of emergency can stand up a special investigative task force and go after them directly, because every state has its own criminal code, its own courts, its own grand juries, and the pardon power stops at the state line. This is how you cut the emergency off at its root. Not by fighting each crisis separately, but by going after the people causing all of them.

Twenty-six governors won’t ever do this, because they’re part of the same transnational criminal organization causing and profiting from the crisis. That leaves twenty-four. Twenty-four is enough.

One governor launching this investigation is the law working as designed. Every additional governor is a force multiplier. Two and the administration’s resources are split. Three and they’re split again. Every state that joins divides their attention further, multiplies the pressure, and makes every other participating state safer.

Is Trump going to arrest twenty-four governors for investigating child sex trafficking? Hell no. And if he tries, that makes the story bigger, not smaller.

But what if that launches us into a crisis? The crisis is already here. Maybe there is no conflict free way to get out of this mess. The difference is if the entire crisis is a nation controlled by monsters or the people actually standing up for themselves.

We wouldn’t even be a country today if “we don’t want to escalate things” was our attitude. Oppression never ends through acquiescence.

We fight back and the whole thing cascades. A line attorney who received the order to shut down the federal investigation sits in front of a state grand jury. That person, facing state felony charges no pardon can reach, names the person who gave the order. That same person gets subpoenaed in a different state. The people in the files start calculating whether cooperation is smarter than silence.

How many different states do you think Trump’s criminal behavior has intersected with? How many criminal prosecutions does it take to topple an oligarch? I’ll give you a hint, it’s somewhere between “we haven’t been charging them” and “dozens across multiple states.”

Evidence generated in California that points to crimes in North Carolina gets sent to North Carolina. For those states with Republican attorneys general, they’ll be getting forwarded evidence of child sex trafficking that another state handed them and they get to publicly explain that choice to their own constituents. The investigations don’t stay in blue states because the crimes didn’t stay in blue states. New Mexico’s own commission is bipartisan, with two Democratic and two Republican members, seated by a unanimous vote of the chamber.

Everyone in the chain faces accountability: the people in the files, the oligarchs who funded the operation, any Supreme Court justices implicated in those files, and every person in the FBI and DOJ who was willing to cover it up. Patel. Bondi. Blanche. All of them.

We don’t make decisions to investigate or prosecute criminal activity based on politics. It’s immoral to do that, and doing exactly that is how we ended up where we are today. Every person in the DOJ chain who shut down the Epstein investigation and participated in covering it up made a political decision to protect criminals. Governors who act aren’t being partisan. They’re doing what law enforcement does when the people responsible for investigating have been compromised.

What we get out of this is a democracy with a functioning justice system. That’s way better than saying “the pedophile in charge of the country just started a war, we better get out the vote in 3 months and hope they haven’t rigged the game too much!”

The war in Iran is the tail wagging the dog. They started it to keep us from looking at the files. Don’t let it work. Let one governor open the Epstein files. Let five. Let twenty-four. Maybe one or two Republican governors start getting referrals for the most horrific crimes they’ve ever seen and decide they’d rather help prosecute than explain why they didn’t. If actual Nazis could be flipped, so can some of these people.

The distraction loses its purpose the moment the thing it was designed to protect is under investigation. You want to end the war? Investigate the files. You want to save elections? Investigate the files. You want to open the internment camps? Investigate the files. You want to end the dictatorship? Investigate the files. It all leads to the same place because it all comes from the same place, and the people behind all of it belong behind bars.

Several months ago we published a piece on the above subject. At least 50,000 activists joined in the call to action. Since then New Mexico’s House seated its investigative commission by unanimous vote, its attorney general reopened the criminal case, and on August 5 that office took the Justice Department to federal court over its refusal to hand the files to a state prosecutor. That is the model, already running, already forcing the federal government to answer in court. A governor who adds emergency powers to it moves faster and reaches further, and that decision gets made in a building you can call today.

But just so you know, it’s 10 people like yourself, 10 activists per article who subscribe by clicking the button below, that fund all of this. All 3 free books, all 12 booklets, the model legislation, and the 20-40 articles per month.

Don’t let this be the reason you miss a meal or are late on rent.

But if this helps you and you can become a subscriber, you’re one of the 10 that makes it all possible.

Call To Action

Here’s how you fight back.

The federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators is closed. Nobody has been charged in over a year, the attorney general who buried it was replaced by the president’s former defense lawyer, and the people who shut it down are named in the files themselves. Congress can’t force it open and the courts have no one left to enforce their rulings. Every federal tool is broken.

But the states aren’t. Every governor can declare a state of emergency on their own authority, and every state has its own prosecutors, its own grand juries, and a criminal code no presidential pardon can reach. New Mexico has already reopened its investigation and taken the Justice Department to court over it. One governor with emergency powers behind them changes everything.

So contact your governor. Find the contact form at usa.gov/state-governor. Don’t copy anything word for word, because offices discard form letters. Write your own, covering the same points. Here’s the letter I sent Governor Ferguson as a model:

Governor Ferguson,
We are in a state of emergency. Please declare it as such. The threats to our national security, our elections, the economic stability of our state, and the safety of our residents are more than enough to justify the immediate, broad authority only an emergency declaration provides. Use it to aggressively investigate and criminally prosecute the crimes in the Epstein files, and to refer evidence out to other states when it intersects their criminal codes. This is the web connecting every crisis we’re facing, and pulling on it is how we restore democracy and protect the people of Washington state.
Please act on this today.