When Donald Trump looked at the Republican advantage in Indiana’s state legislature, the president probably felt a degree of optimism about his mid-decade redistricting scheme. After all, in the 50-member state Senate, there are only 10 Democrats. Success surely seemed inevitable.
Over the summer, as the partisan gambit faced some resistance, Trump started pulling out the stops. GOP legislators were welcomed to the White House. He deployed Vice President JD Vance to Indiana to give Republicans the hard sell, in person, twice. The president made repeated phone calls to specific legislators, hoping to persuade them to do his bidding. He published a seemingly endless stream of electoral threats and vituperative rants directed at GOP holdouts to his social media platform.
According to Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, Team Trump even floated an extortion threat of sorts, suggesting the administration was prepared to curtail federal resources for the state unless GOP legislators agreed to redraw its congressional map and eliminate the two Democratic districts. (Beckwith later deleted his claim from his social media account, and the White House denied making the threat.)
The severity of the presidential arm-twisting over the course of several months was extraordinary. It was so intense that at least 11 Indiana Republicans were targeted with threats or swatting attacks after Trump started calling out individual state lawmakers. One legislator told The Atlantic he was worried the president’s followers felt so strongly about this that his house might be “firebombed.”
And yet, despite all of this, Trump’s power grab flopped. After months of White House arm-twisting, the gerrymandering plan mustered just 19 votes — with a majority of the Republicans in the state Senate voting with the Democratic minority against it.
It was one of the most brutal and humiliating failures of the president’s second term.
Except, to hear Trump tell it, this fiasco wasn’t that big of a deal.
“I wasn’t working on it very hard,” the president said. “I wasn’t very much involved.”
I wrote a book about Republicans trying to rewrite recent history, so I’m rather accustomed to this style of gaslighting, but even I couldn’t help but laugh out loud watching Trump pretend he hadn’t invested months of time, effort and resources into this debacle.
As for the big picture, it would be an overstatement to suggest the White House’s broader endeavor has failed. GOP policymakers in Texas redrew their map to give Republicans five additional seats; Missouri Republicans rigged their map to deliver one additional seat to the party; and GOP legislators in North Carolina delivered another seat to Republicans soon afterward.
But this unprecedented initiative has racked up some big losses, too. The scheme obviously fell far short in Indiana, and related efforts were rejected by Republicans in Kansas, New Hampshire and Nebraska, at least for now.
What’s more, Democrats are pushing back in ways the White House apparently didn’t anticipate, with California poised to add five additional Democratic seats next year and officials in other blue states eyeing related plans of their own.
Meanwhile, a state court ruling in Utah has created a near-certain win for Democrats, and progressive activists have collected more than enough signatures to force a fight over the future of Missouri’s map.
To put it mildly, this isn’t what Trump had in mind when he picked this fight several months ago.
