President Donald Trump's Indiana "power grab" turned out to be a "humiliating failure" rather than the slam dunk he was expecting from a loyal red state, MS Now's Steve Benen wrote Friday.
The president's demand that the state's Republicans redraw districts to favor the party failed Thursday when multiple party members sided with Democrats to kill it.
"When Donald Trump looked at the Republican advantage in Indiana's state legislature," Benen wrote, "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."
Benen added, "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…. And yet, despite all of this, Trump's power grab flopped."
The MS NOW columnist and "Rachel Maddow Show" producer noted that Trump's "arm-twisting" for his "gerrymandering plan mustered just 19 votes." And a "majority of the Republicans" in the Indiana State Senate voted "with the Democratic minority against it."
"It was one of the most brutal and humiliating failures of the president's second term," Benen observed. "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."
