Trump Admits He’s Trying to Rig the Midterm Elections

The president is gung-ho about gerrymandering ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews Tuesday evening, Donald Trump said there’s “about four” states besides Texas that he would like to redraw their congressional lines.

“In three cases, it’s one. And in one case, it’s two or three. And Texas would be five,” Trump said as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick nodded enthusiastically beside him. Trump had previously suggested that Texas could give Republicans five more House seats by flipping a handful of blue districts in the Lone Star State next year via “a very simple redrawing.”

But suggestions that California—the largest liberal contingent in the country—could do the same did not sit well with the MAGA leader.

“Are you concerned California will turn around and do the same thing?” asked a reporter.

“Well we’ll fight them,” Trump said. “You know they’re so corrupt in California, you never know what’s going to happen. But we’ve done pretty well in the courts in California, you see. We’re batting about 1,000, ultimately.”

Trump has made a volatile enemy out of Governor Gavin Newsom. California sued the federal government last month after Trump deployed thousands of National Guard members to manhandle Los Angeles’s anti-ICE protests. An appeals court later blocked a court decision that would have handed the authority of the National Guard back to Newsom.

Now, the vengeful governor is threatening to shift the state’s redistricting policy if Texas follows Trump’s orders. In an interview with The Tennessee Holler last week, Newsom accused Republicans of “playing by a totally different set of rules,” and warned that California’s liberally dominant legislature could “gerrymander like no other state.”

“We’ve been playing fair, but I saw what he just did, and it made me question that entire program,” Newsom said.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. But Texas’s decision to do so in the middle of the decade—at Trump’s direction—has raised alarms, with Democrats in the state labelling the effort a threat to democracy.

“The scheme of the Republicans has consistently been to make sure that they mute our voices so that they can go ahead and have an oversized say in this,” Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett said at a news conference Tuesday. “So I fully anticipate that’s exactly where they’re going with this map.”

Last year, the ideologically conservative majority on the Supreme Court made gerrymandering that much easier, ruling in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP that alleged racial gerrymandering in South Carolina (which is theoretically still illegal) was really just partisan gerrymandering, an apparently precious part of America’s democratic system.