By Nick Catoggio
Friday, December 12, 2025
Here’s something you don’t hear much in America 2025,
especially in politics and especially especially from the starboard side: “I’m
going to do what’s right and let the chips fall where they may.”
The quote comes from Indiana
state Sen. Dan Dernulc, fresh off a bomb threat he received at home on
Wednesday evening. Dernulc was one of many Republicans in the legislature’s
upper chamber skeptical of President Trump’s demand that Indiana redraw its
House map before the midterms to gerrymander Democrats out of safe seats.
Traditionally, redistricting happens at the start of each decade; Donald Trump wants
it to happen now because he enjoys governing quasi-autocratically, with no
oversight from the quisling GOP majority in Congress, and would like to
continue doing so over the final two years of his term.
So he’s spent the last few months lobbying Republican
lawmakers in Indiana, publicly and privately, to help him out. Two of the
state’s nine House seats belong to Democrats at the moment, but a bit of
creative line-drawing could easily turn all nine red. And those two extra seats
might be the difference between a House controlled by Trump’s left-wing
antagonists and one controlled by his right-wing turd polishers.
Indiana’s lower chamber dutifully approved
a new map last week, and Gov. Mike Braun signaled he
would sign it. All that was needed was passage by the reluctant state
Senate. Last Friday, in a Truth
Social post, the president identified eight hesitant Republican senators by
name—including Dernulc—and advised his fans that the eight “need encouragement
to make the right decision.” The brownshirt faction of his base understood what
that meant and undertook to encourage them. Boy,
did they ever.
The Senate voted Thursday and … rejected
the new map, 31-19. It was one of the most shocking legislative outcomes of
the Trump era, with more than half of the 40 Republicans in the chamber
opposing the president. Given the moral premium that postliberals place on
ruthlessness in pursuit of power, the Senate majority’s refusal to be ruthless
felt less like an act of political independence than a form of religious
apostasy.
How do we explain it?
“What happened is simple,” we might say. “Trump has
become a lame duck, and Hoosiers reacted accordingly.” Well, yes, the president
is more of a lame duck than he was a few months ago: Republicans have
gotten drubbed in one off-year election after another lately, and his job
approval on the economy is
in the toilet. But he still has enough juice on the right to have scared a
populist as beloved as Marjorie Taylor Greene into retirement by declaring his
intent to find a primary challenger to her. Every Republican in Indiana who
voted against the new map did so knowing they’d have considerably less job
security as a result. The lame duck ain’t that lame.
“Maybe Indiana Republicans feared their gerrymander would
become a ‘dummymander,’” you might speculate. “Dummymander” alludes to the fact
that, by redrawing House maps to dilute the Democratic vote in blue districts,
Republicans would also necessarily be diluting the GOP vote in red ones. If a
state has, say, five R+10 seats and a single D+10 seat and it carves up the
latter by redrawing liberal voters there into the five Republican districts,
the new map might end up with five R+6 seats and a single R+1 one. In a midterm
election in which the electorate shifted to the left by 7 points, Democrats
would win only one seat under the old map—but all six seats under the
new dummymandered one.
In theory, Dernulc and his colleagues recognized that
possibility, worried the blue wave that appears inbound might be truly
gargantuan, and resolved to protect the GOP’s House advantage in Indiana from
our dummy president. But no, it seems that’s unlikely: Lakshya Jain, the
head of political data at The Argument, estimates that Democrats would
have won only one seat in Indiana under the new map even in a best-case
scenario for the party next fall.
There’s no way to explain what happened in the state
Senate yesterday in terms of the usual selfish or nihilistic motives that have
driven cynical right-wing lawmakers during the Trump era, I think. The solution
to this mystery begins with the sighting of a political unicorn—honest-to-God
principled conservative leadership on the American right.
A good example.
Despite the paranoia of populist influencers,
there’s no evidence that MAGA black sheep Mike Pence was involved in tanking
the redistricting push. It was another former Indiana governor, Mitch
Daniels, who ended up fielding calls from state senators and urging them to
vote no.
But I don’t blame Trumpists for suspecting Pence’s
influence. For one thing, he, Daniels, and the Republican majority leader of
the state Senate, Rodric Bray, are politically simpatico. “I’m for small
government, personal accountability, and liberty, and I work toward that every
day,” Bray told Politico
last month. When asked about his hesitancy to redistrict on an irregular
timetable, in the middle of the decade, he replied that he wanted his state’s
residents “to have trust in the institution” of the Senate.
He’s a Reaganite refugee in a dystopian autocratic party.
Like Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence.
More than that, I find it impossible to believe that
Pence’s example on January 6 didn’t affect the calculations of Bray and his
caucus to some degree. “Imagine how different recent history would look if
elected Republicans in D.C. had taken this very simple approach,” our own Steve Hayes said
of Dernulc’s point about doing the right thing and letting the chips fall where
they may. But we don’t need to imagine it: That was Pence’s ethos precisely
when he refused to carry out Trump’s coup plot.
Some Republicans who voted against redistricting
yesterday surely know the former VP personally from his time as governor. Those
who don’t will nonetheless know him as the most prominent politician to come
out of Indiana since Benjamin Harrison. (No offense, Dan Quayle.) Five years
ago, they watched him pass a test of civic principle similar to the one they’ve
been taking but with the difficulty dialed up by an order of magnitude—Pence
was Trump’s right-hand man, the presidency itself was on the line, and responsibility
for the outcome fell squarely on him instead of being spread among a caucus of
40.
He did the right thing anyway, and my guess is that many
traditional Republicans in Indiana’s political circles admire him for it and
resent those who don’t. So when the same creep who allegedly thought
Pence deserved to be hanged came banging on their door, making demands
about a new House map, what were conservatives who are uncomfortable with
ruthless mid-decade redistricting supposed to do? Cower, despite their friend
Mike Pence having faced everything they’ve faced and
then some? Or follow his example?
The simple explanation for yesterday’s result is that it
was a product of strong, principled leadership, a species gone almost entirely
extinct among Republicans since 2015. By Bray, first and foremost, in refusing
to strong-arm his caucus into approving the new map after being demagogued
by the president; by Daniels, in lobbying against redistricting despite
knowing that doing so will make him a target of White House “retribution”; and
by Pence, in showing Hoosier lawmakers on January 6 that “no” is always an
option when the illiberal right demands some appalling new power grab that will
make American democracy more embittered and dysfunctional than it already is.
Leadership matters. And yet, that doesn’t explain
everything.
“Indiana so decisively failing to pass a 9-0 gerrymander
despite full pressure from Trump is something that was genuinely unthinkable
even six months ago,” Jain alleged yesterday.
It’s hard to disagree. If the president had leaned on Indiana lawmakers earlier
this year to pass a new map, back when he was steamrolling every opponent in
sight, I doubt that the courage Pence showed at the Capitol would have been as
contagious as it was in Thursday’s vote. Certainly, there’s no way a majority
of Senate Republicans would have voted to reject the new map.
Something has changed between then and now, but it’s not
Trump’s growing lame-duck status or his polling on the economy. I think it’s
the two S’s—statism and scumbaggery.
Statism.
The Indiana redistricting vote strikes me as a sort of
political gag reflex. The president’s first year back in office has been so
much more civically and ideologically disgusting than even I expected that
conservatives with a modicum of self-respect are beginning to vomit it up.
That’s why the usual thunderstorm of primary threats
against anti-redistricting lawmakers didn’t work this time. Why would any
Reaganite care at this point about being drummed out of a position of authority
in this garbage party, particularly a position as minor and unglamorous as
state legislator? If you’re a Republican in the Pence or Daniels mold who
believes in “small government, personal accountability, and liberty,” as Bray
put it, all you have to look forward to as a GOP official in 2025 is watching your
leader betray every value you cherish and potentially trying to get you killed
if you don’t help him do it.
The White House campaign to pressure Indiana’s
legislators is the problem in microcosm, with Trump once again imperiously
imposing his will on a part of society that the president has no business
meddling with. “It’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” GOP
state Sen. Spencer
Deery complained during Thursday’s floor debate. “It’s time to say no to
outsiders who are trying to run our state.” Being a Republican nowadays means
having to look the other way when Trump seizes control of trade, partly
nationalizes corporations, engineers bailouts
for favored constituencies hurt by his moronic agenda, and abuses antitrust
law to try to remake
the media in his image. His tariffs have delivered the
biggest tax increase as a percentage of GDP in more than 30 years, and his
spending has produced the fastest
accumulation of $1 trillion in new debt outside of the pandemic.
Big government has rarely been so big. Now Trump wants
red-state Republicans to ditch federalism and take dictation from him on
redistricting, too.
On Thursday, as the state Senate prepared to vote, the
lobbying arm of the Heritage
Foundation shocked political media when it claimed that “President Trump
has made it clear to Indiana leaders: If the Indiana Senate fails to pass the
map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be
paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes
and every NO vote will be to blame.” Despite what MAGA shoeshiners will tell
you, the White House has no constitutional power to withhold funding that
Congress has approved and no civic right to deprive a state of public services
because it declined to put a thumb on the electoral scale for the president’s
party—but never mind that. Did Trump really make this threat to Hoosier
lawmakers or was Heritage full of hot air?
It appears that he did. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith seemed
to confirm it last night, tweeting that “the Indiana Senate made it clear to
the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH
made it clear to them that they’d oblige.” As far back as mid-November, Politico
reported that Gov. Mike
Braun had begun “insinuating that Indiana could lose out on federal funding
for key projects if the Senate doesn’t deliver a gerrymander.” That doesn’t
sound to me like a scenario Braun came up with on his own; it sounds like one
that had been communicated to him and which he was relaying.
The more statist and domineering the White House gets,
the more reluctant to cooperate with it we should expect Pence-style
conservatives to become. Yesterday was perhaps the logical result of 11 months
of Trump trying to or-else Reaganites into embracing
banana-republicanism. “You wouldn’t change minds by being mean. And the efforts
were mean-spirited from the get-go,” Republican state Sen. Jean Leising told CNN
of the president’s pressure campaign. “If you were wanting to change votes, you
would probably try to explain why we should be doing this, in a positive way.
That never happened, so, you know, I think they get what they get.”
Scumbaggery.
Which brings us to the other factor. Trump, his deputies,
and much of his base are amoral scumbags, and as their amorality has gotten
more repulsive over time, it stands to reason that the gag reflex among decent
conservatives would grow stronger.
The barrage of threats Indiana lawmakers received during
the White House’s pressure campaign was a major subplot of the state’s
redistricting push. A number of Republican lawmakers were
swatted; Leising’s grandson, an eighth-grader, and a number of his
classmates received “bad”
text messages about her. “I fear for this institution,” GOP state Sen. Greg
Walker said yesterday during a hearing about the risk of giving into
coercion. “I fear for the state of Indiana. And I fear for all states if we
allow threats and intimidation to become the norm.”
Despite extensive media coverage of the harassment
campaign as this drama played out over months, Trump said not a word to deter
it, as far as I’m aware. As noted earlier, he seemed to wink at it when he
posted on Truth Social that certain Republicans needed more “encouragement to
make the right decision.” I’d bet every dollar I have that he privately
believes figures like Walker, Leising, and Dernulc deserved what they got for
opposing him, the same way Mike Pence did. In an era in which even Marjorie Taylor
Greene now has to fear
for her life from the MAGA mob, the urge to vomit is irrepressible.
It’s one of many signs that the president and his
movement are coming off the rails morally as his political strength slips. The New
Yorker’s Susan
Glasser pointed to one of his increasingly dark tirades about
immigrants from the third world recently as evidence of the trajectory:
“Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a
President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said ‘sh-thole countries’
to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.”
Corruption takes place in
plain sight. Indictments are sought against political enemies, are rejected
by grand juries, and then quickly
sought again. Predators are let
loose on society for no better reason than that they
support the president. The administration’s immigration
policy—and not
just its immigration
policy—seems to be following an
ethic of “whites
only.” Meanwhile, the most influential figures in populist media are eating
each other alive with insane,
accusatory conspiracy
theories, to the point where even people known
for pushing insane, accusatory conspiracy theories are alarmed.
The American right is a moral disaster. Day by day we’re
witnessing its utter civic ruination. Everyone knew going in that reelecting a
coup-plotting felon bent on “retribution” would lead to an ethical nightmare,
but even I’m surprised by how quickly Trump 2.0 has descended into brazen,
unapologetic depravity. We live under a government that’s nihilistic on good
days and deliberately immoral on bad ones, in many cases barely pretending to
rationalize its behavior as motivated by some virtuous public purpose.
Go figure that a person of character like Rodric Bray
would be less enthusiastic about further empowering the person who presides
over that disaster than he might have been six months ago, or that he might
even feel morally obliged to course-correct. “I hope that this is the beginning
of the country stepping back from the brink,” Republican state Sen. Eric
Bassler said after the new map failed yesterday in Indiana. He was talking
about the partisan redistricting wars, but the larger subtext of his point was
clear enough.
And so here’s where we land on why conservatives did what
they did on Thursday: Why not?
Those two Democratic seats in Indiana are unlikely to decide
the next House majority, but even if they do, it’s easy to believe that
conservatism would benefit more from divided government in the last two years
of Trump’s term than by letting him plow ahead with his statist, scumbag
authoritarian project unchecked by an obedient GOP Congress. It’s not like he’s
teeing up a Reaganite policy revival if his party retains the House. “He needs
to be more positive about what he needs to address for ’27 and ’28,” Leising
said to CNN
of the president. “Why does he need to have a Republican majority in ’27 and
’28? What is he going to do next?”
Her guess is as good as mine, but “more bad than good” is
a safe bet.
And if Trump, his
son, the
governor, and other White House lickspittles make good on their threats to
help primary Bray and his accomplices, who cares? They might not
succeed—Americans tend to dislike partisan
redistricting—but even if they do, the worst-case scenario for Indiana’s
Senate Republicans is that it’ll be some other group of chumps who have to deal
with it the next time the president instigates a wave of death threats.
Frankly, I think it’d be terrific if the Trump GOP wasted resources in a
midterm year trying to primary obscure Midwestern lawmakers from within the
party while a huge blue wave gathers force and bears down on them. That would
show other Reaganite voters whose gag reflex has been tested lately where their
leader’s priorities lie.
It’s long past time for conservatives to climb out of
this fetid moral sewer. If they need to be chased out by a wave of primaries
aimed at the latest poor slobs to fail a litmus test of autocratic
ruthlessness, bring it on.
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