Every chauvinistic bigot wants the thing they identify with to be the exception and they're always shocked and angered when they find that the wider world doesn't see things the way they demand that they do.  Chauvinism is an expression of retained mental habits, bad habits that people who grow up leave behind when they're about five. 

States do not have rights, states have no right to exist.  States are legitimate only to the extent they have the consent of those governed by them and the extent to which they equally respect real rights, the rights of People.  States that don't do that have no right to persist, they deserve to be dissolved.  There are no exceptions to that.  That it's hard to get rid of bad states is not to be mistaken as the state having a right to exist.   

With Trump it should be clear how easy it is for even a supposed democracy whose founding ideology opposes such stuff to fall under the control of a man who believes L'état, c'est moi, and to sucker a dangerous percentage of dupes into going with that.