Convicted felon/adjudicated sexual abuser/President Trump isn’t even hiding it. He’s now openly working to rig elections by pressuring Republican governors to undertake highly unusual mid-term gerrymandering to add more safe Republican seats to the House of Representatives so he can permanently cement minority MAGA Republican rule nationwide.
As of September, 2024, there were 36 million registered Republicans and 45.1 million registered Democrats nationally, so Republicans are already over-represented in the House with the current 219-212 Republican/Democratic split.
But that’s not good enough for Trump and Republicans who together are openly working to cheat in the 2026 election.
This is the second time Trump has tried to cheat in an election. The first time was in 2020, when he phoned Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and told him to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Georgia’s results in the 2020 election. (Trump lost Georgia by 11,779 votes.) Trump also encouraged a mob of his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to block the certification of the election results for the winner, Joe Biden.
Trump is still working to rig elections, and this time he’s doing it with help from a Republican party that has completely abandoned its job as a check on executive overreach. Republicans can’t say “no” to Trump on anything. Trump is now also armed with a gift from the U.S. Supreme Court, a ruling that gives him immunity from committing crimes while in office. When you give a convicted criminal the gift of being able to commit crimes while holding the presidency, Americans get a president who commits a whole lot of crimes while in office.
But as polls show support cratering for Trump’s policies, chaotic governance, unceasing cruelty towards immigrants, use of government to bully individuals and institutions, rising prices due to tariffs and the unending Jeffrey Epstein/Trump pedophile scandal, Americans are growing weary of Republican rule and Republicans know they’re going to have to cheat in the ’26 election to have any chance of keeping even a slim majority in the House. All this is making Trump crack his circus whip over his boot-licking Republican sycophants and demanding that the governors of not just Texas, but Indiana, Missouri, Florida, Ohio and other states also engage in unprecedented mid-term redistricting to redraw the boundaries of their states’ voting districts to create more safe Republican seats in Congress so Trump can keep his power. The newly-gerrymandered districts will deprive Black and Latino voters of representation in violation of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in keeping with Trump’s overt racism, but Republicans don’t care, since all they know is that they must carry out whatever extreme, destructive actions Trump orders them to do, no matter how badly it destroys democracy.
The Constitution says states have to redraw their congressional district boundaries every 10 years based on data from the U.S. Census, which is conducted once a decade at the turn of the decade, and they have to draw districts with roughly the same number of people in each district. But under extraordinary pressure from Trump, Texas is moving ahead with redistricting just four years into this decade, instead of waiting for the results of the 2030 Census.
All this gerrymandering has the added benefit for Trump of further distracting Americans from the fact that he was close friends for 15 years with one of the country’s most prolific serial pedophiles, Jeffrey Epstein, and he’s been doing big sweetheart favors for Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for her part in facilitating Epstein’s pedophilia. It also distracts from the fact that Trump hasn’t even mentioned Epstein’s victims at all.
What a great moral example Republicans are setting for the nation’s children.