Trump Is Tightening His Grip on State Republicans
As recently as the autumn of 2022, anti–Donald Trump (or at least non-Trump) Republicanism was alive and well in a good part of the country. Plenty of Republican politicians had deplored his conduct after losing the 2020 election and lived to tell the tale. Many blamed the former president for damaging the party’s prospects in the 2022 midterm elections with ill-advised interventions in GOP primaries. Twelve significant rivals decided to take on Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, with one of them (Ron DeSantis) actually becoming the early front-runner.
By the time he completed his audacious comeback, Trump had crushed his national GOP opponents and consolidated the party behind him. His MAGA base was not only larger than ever; it held him in what could be described only as messianic awe, particularly after he survived two assassination attempts and his first national-popular-vote win. Former Republican skeptics and critics crowded into his second administration, and a Congress led by Trump loyalists eagerly ceded the many powers he sought to take away from them. And while his job-approval ratings began to decline almost immediately after he took office, his standing among self-identified Republicans has remained firm and even fervid.
But the depth of Trump’s party takeover didn’t become completely clear until he suddenly decided the GOP needed a better midterms landscape, if he was to maintain his governing trifecta, and set out on a program of unprecedented mid-decade gerrymanders to boost the low odds that Republicans could hang on to their slim margin of control in the U.S. House. It began with Texas, where Trump publicly demanded and immediately got a redistricting that could net the GOP as many as five new House seats in 2026. Once California Democrats retaliated with their own scheme to flip an equal number of GOP-held House seats (though it will require voter approval this November), Trump upped the ante, instructing Republican-controlled legislatures in other states (including Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina) to get in on the power grab. The president’s personal investment in this rigging of the midterms was made clear when he demanded that Indiana legislative leaders come to the White House to be harangued, and they complied. But as Politico explains, he’s now mobilizing MAGA folks to get a maximum gerrymandering blitz:
President Donald Trump is ratcheting up pressure on Republicans to redraw congressional maps across the country, going as far as weighing a primary challenge to New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte if she continues avoiding a remapping effort in her state.
The warning — first divulged to POLITICO by a top national Republican familiar with the White House’s thinking — marks the latest example of Trump’s team threatening consequences for politicians hesitant to engage in the party’s aggressive push to redesign the makeup of the House ahead of next year’s midterms. …
“The base is onto this. If you are a Republican perceived to be in the way of Republicans, there could very well be consequences,” said the national Republican official, granted anonymity to discuss ongoing conversations, adding that the White House expects every GOP state that could redraw its map to do so.
This is an unprecedented White House intervention in a function that has long been a prized prerogative of state legislators. And it comes with risks for the state parties Trump is bullying, since GOP underperformance in 2026 and/or demographic changes soon thereafter could makes some if not all these gerrymanders backfire sooner or later. But it’s a sign of a trend that was underway even before Trump came along: an ideological sorting out of the two major parties that has increased both polarization and intraparty unity. Add in the 47th president’s cultlike hold on both the party base and national leaders and you get a White House grip on elected officials sharing the party brand that even the most powerful presidents of the past — FDR, LBJ, Ronald Reagan — never had. It’s just our luck as Americans that this powerful centripetal pressure has worked to the benefit of a narcissist-in-chief, who doesn’t need much encouragement to lord it over his serfs.