The White House had two major events on the schedule Tuesday. The first was important to President Donald Trump’s ego: a televised Cabinet meeting at which various secretaries lavished him with praise for several hours. The second was important to the rest of the country: administration officials meeting with Indiana lawmakers, as the White House pressures them to redraw the state’s congressional maps ahead of next fall’s midterms.
The contrast was telling: Though Trump and his acolytes claim to the cameras that he is the most successful and most popular president ever, their fears of voters’ upcoming verdicts suggest they don’t believe their own hype.
Formally, the White House invitation to the Indiana lawmakers did “not include redistricting as a topic of discussion,” according to The Indianapolis Star. However, the Star notes, “the visit comes just weeks after Vice President JD Vance visited the Indiana Statehouse to speak with Gov. Mike Braun and Republican legislative leaders about redrawing the Hoosier State’s congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.” And Politico reported last week that both Trump’s political operation and MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk have floated primarying Indiana Republicans who don’t go along with drawing new maps.
With Republicans already controlling seven of Indiana’s nine congressional districts, the GOP most likely would net one seat, two at most. That’s not a huge haul when House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has only a handful of seats to spare for his majority, but it’s just one part of a nationwide effort. While Democrats believe California’s new maps will neuter the GOP’s efforts in Texas, the White House and its allies are also hoping to net a few seats in states like Florida and Ohio. Court cases in several states could affect the partisan balance, as well. On Tuesday, for instance, a Utah judge ordered state lawmakers to redraw the state’s map, which could lead to a new Democratic district around Salt Lake City.
If this doesn’t seem normal, that’s because it isn’t — mid-decade redistricting is incredibly rare, especially across multiple states. Which raises a simple question: If Trump is as popular as he claims, why so much effort to change the maps?
Yes, the president predicts that nefarious Democrats will “CHEAT AT LEVELS NOT SEEN BEFORE,” but he said that in 2024 and won the popular vote. And according to the president himself, as my colleague Zeeshan Aleem noted Tuesday, he’s even more popular now. So why force GOP lawmakers to call special sessions and use up valuable legislative time for a redistricting effort that no party has ever undertaken before?
This scramble to tilt the maps as much as possible in the president’s favor makes far more sense if, privately, Trump is acknowledging what voters really think of him. Polling analyst G. Elliott Morris estimates Democrats would need to win the national vote by 2% to overcome the GOP’s biggest gerrymander; his polling average gives Democrats a lead of over 3% in the generic ballot for control of the House. In special elections, Democrats are overperforming Kamala Harris’ 2024 results by 16 points, according to analysis by The Downballot. Last November, Trump carried Iowa’s State Senate District 1 by a margin of 55% to 44% for Harris. On Tuesday, Democratic candidate Caitlin Drey flipped that seat with 55% of the vote – a swing of more than 20 percentage points.
And the president isn’t helping his party. In multiple polling averages, over 50% of voters disapprove of Trump, with his handling of the economy receiving particularly poor marks. And his signature “big, beautiful bill” is polling so badly that, less than two months after Trump signed it, the president admits he wants to rebrand it.
Whether it’s polls or jobs numbers, though, if Trump doesn’t like the numbers, he tries to change the rules. Furthermore, the president is desperate to avoid any hint of accountability that would come from Democrats’ taking the House and regaining the power to hold hearings. Besides the gerrymandering, the president has also taken aim at voting by mail and even demanded a new census that changes how we count immigrants, all to stoke suspicion when the ballots are counted.
Who knows how much further Trump will go between now and November 2026? What kinds of pressure will he attempt to impose on election officials? What obstacles will he seek to throw up — perhaps on false grounds of “safety” or “security” — in the way of people casting their ballots? After all, as Trump said at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”
And the 2020 election reminds us that if Trump loses, the danger only increases. As historian Kevin Kruse noted, the gerrymandering and other efforts are just the pretext to rerunning his 2020 playbook: If Democrats win, the president and the Republicans can simply claim fraud. The sycophancy and self-promotion at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting is key to that strategy — if the MAGA base hears ahead of the midterms only that voters support Trump, it’s easier for him to claim fraud after.
“A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator,’” Trump said Monday. That is not true of “a lot of people,” But it is true of Trump — and he has laid more groundwork than ever to make it happen.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
