As the nation moves toward the inevitable catastrophe of a Donald Trump presidency, there is an overwhelming opinion about how the country is split and it is mostly concentrated on Congress and the two major parties.

But, the split is more than just that and it’s more serious than most observers want (or are able) to believe. So many think that the split in the nation is about Democrat and Republican and about crossing the aisle (or not) as Congress moves to do what damage it will attempt to do to the social fabric, when Trump becomes president on Jan. 20, 2017.

Just about every news outlet, including innumerable Internet news (real and fake) sites, has a variety of opinions about how Trump became the president-elect, and there’s a bit of validity in each of them. Some even studied the polls, which for some reason went awry and pollsters hardly got anything right. Even though he lost the popular vote, he swept the Electoral College and is set to become the next president. The widening split between the two major parties is a given, no matter how much some Democrats say that the party should work with Trump on the issues where there is agreement, if they can find any.

First after that big split might be some kind of universal health care: Trump has consistently threatened to dismantle Obamacare, insufficient as it is, but neither he nor his Republican colleagues have a plan in waiting and the fact is that they just don’t want universal health care…never did. Another fundamental economic issue is the minimum wage. The Democrats in their own pathetic way have tried to increase it, but the Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures don’t want to increase it from the current $7.25 an hour. Trump has said that wages are “too high” in the U.S. and that makes the country noncompetitive in the global economy. It could be assumed that this means that Trump agrees with his Right Wing fringe that there should be no minimum wage, that it should be set by “the market.”

Right up there with other economic issues is the right to form unions, as provided in U.S. labor law. Most studies of economic statistics show that, during the period of heavy union organizing, the middle class grew to substantial proportions and the working class was able to do well, even educating their children who moved into the middle class. But that was another time and it lasted about two decades, from 1935 to 1960. At that time, Corporate America decided that it did not like sharing the wealth with the workers who were producing that wealth and started their long-range war on those same workers and their unions. They are always careful to say that they are not against the workers, but only opposed the “union bosses,” who “wield too much power.”

Although for the most part, they don’t realize it, American workers are up against a much more heavily armed adversary in the nation’s big business interests. Also, they believe the rhetoric that comes out of the mouths of politicians and, incredibly, they have believed what Trump told them during both his primary campaign and his general election campaign. He promised to “Make America Great Again,” and that in doing so, he would bring back the jobs that have been taken in the tens of millions by global corporations to many other countries. The split between average workers (who voted for him) and Trump will come eventually and the feelings of betrayal of the working class and middle class will be monumental.

This particular split was what had the Republican hierarchy in panic mode and, then, despair. For years, they could count on a large percentage of workers to vote against their own interests, from about the time of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” a plan he carried out to bring right-wing Democrats to the GOP fold. It was effective, due in large part to racial bias and the beginnings of the decline of the American economy. Trump tapped into something that no one saw coming and brought in huge percentages of workers into the GOP column, no matter their station in life. That is, working class or middle class, people who work for wages are at the mercy of the employer in terms of their longevity in gainful employment. The fear of financial instability felt by those voters brought them to vote for Trump and the Republicans. And, it did not matter that he didn’t win the popular vote, because of the Electoral College vote, which he handily won.

There also is the split between the fast-growing numbers of people who are not only aware of how damage to the environment is affecting their lives and the lives of their children. In the coming years, they will be a force to be reckoned with, because they know that the health of their families, their nation, and the planet itself, depends on bringing the Earth back to health. Rather than deal with the problems of environmental degradation and climate change, Trump and his Republicans in Congress and the various state legislatures are doubling down on their denial of human-caused climate change and the destruction it has caused and continues to cause. One of his top advisors announced this week that the Trump Administration will cut funding to all of NASA’s climate change research. It’s a perfect example of a no-nothing attempting to recruit other no-nothings by fiat. It’s an old trick by dealmakers like Trump: keep them ignorant and they’ll believe what you tell them.

Other splits include those who want to privatize every government service versus those who want the government to provide the services, such as: education, Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, the U.S. Postal Service, prison systems, and the military.

Over several years, there has even been talk of secession from the U.S., mostly by red state politicians. Texas has been one of those states and the current governor, Greg Abbott, has called for a constitutional convention, the aim of which would be to return sovereignty to the states. He’s very concerned about Texas sovereignty and, he says, if there were a convention, it would be very limited in scope. Good luck with that.

There is a secession split, too, that is not new, but it’s seen a rapid rise in interest among (mostly) red staters, like those in Texas and those more likely to wave a Confederate battle flag. The increased interest has, not so strangely, come since President Barack Obama occupied the White House. During Obama’s first term, there were incessant calls to stop him from accomplishing anything, to show his birth certificate, and to make him a one-term president (Remember the statement of Senator Mitch McConnell, R-Ken.), and there was talk of secession and “taking the country back.” There was never a good explanation of how far back anti-Obama demonstrators wanted to take the country. Donald Trump could be considered the “chief birther” calling for Obama to prove himself a U.S. citizen for nearly all of Obama’s two terms.

Secession talk has largely revolved around natural resource protection issues, such as public lands in the West, where the states would like to get their hands on vast stretches of country owned by all of the people of America, to mine, drill, graze, and cut timber at will. In other words, to exploit the remaining lands and strip them of their value. It’s all wrapped up in a mish-mash of sovereignty and secession talk and it is done without much thought. This particular split involves those who would take and those who would preserve what is left of pristine landscapes. Some would go so far as to eliminate some national parkland and much of the land held for all of the people.

Underneath all of this is the mantra of most Republicans and those on the fringe right: cut taxes, cut social programs, and make government smaller, even to the point of eliminating it. With the election of Trump, all of this seems possible and his followers are looking forward to the time when it happens. They have not thought this out very far ahead.

Many, perhaps a majority, of Trump supporters are from the red states and those are the states which receive more from the federal government than they pay to the feds. For many, it is as much as $2 for every $1 they pay. Simply put, they are on a kind of welfare from the blue states’ taxpayers, who get a much smaller return from the federal government for the dollars they send to Washington. Yet, the “liberal” blue states are the ones that are fighting against massive tax cuts (mostly for the rich and corporations) and draconian cuts to social programs, which many in the red states depend upon for necessities.

According to a piece by Steven Pearlstein writing in the Washington Post this month, “Data compiled by the Pew Charitable Trust found that 10 states…receive less than a dollar back for every dollar they send to Washington: Delaware, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. And here are the states that get more than $2 back for every $1 in taxes paid: Mississippi, New Mexico, West Virginia, Hawaii, South Carolina, Alabama, Maine, Montana, Alaska, Virginia, Arizona, Idaho, Kentucky and Vermont. You don’t have to be a political scientist to see the blue state/red state pattern here. Red state voters may talk a good game about small government and low taxes, but in reality they are socialist moochers.”

As far as the secessionist rhetoric goes, they should hire someone good with numbers to get a more accurate picture of `just how much they receive from the federal government (the rest of us) in the way of military bases, defense industry contracts, as well as from programs such as Social Security (not just for retired citizens), Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and all manner of other programs that benefit people. To Texas: Try living your miracle jobs-rich economy without all that largesse from the blue states. That goes for all of the other secessionist-babble states, as well.

In the meantime, we will have a president that is another uncurious specimen, so quickly after George W. Bush. Neither of them are readers, students of anything, nor seekers of advice from people who possess some knowledge and wisdom. In other words, look for more of what we were burdened with in the Bush-Cheney Administration. Judging just by the most recent episode with Taiwan, Trump will be a blind bull in a China shop, trusting his “gut,” as he puts it, in dealing with even the most complicated foreign policy issues that have been generations in the making. His dangerous inexperience could lead to war, worse than the country sees now, even if that’s not what he intends.

The splits in the American body politic are numberless, nearly to the point of atomization. Donald Trump is not the one who will be able to bring together even a few of those elements, let alone the entire country, as he had pledged. His confusion is evident in most of his statements, which contradict each other on a continuing basis. The nation had better prepare for confusion and chaos as a way of life for the next four years.