Trump’s Redistricting War Is Freaking Out His Party

Not all House Republicans are so keen on Donald Trump’s latest play to keep control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections.

House GOP leadership have reportedly advised rank-and-file party members to keep their concerns about Trump’s blatant mid-decade gerrymandering scheme in Texas to themselves, Politico reported Tuesday.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leadership won’t put any bill on the floor that would contradict the Trump-driven efforts, despite some urging from party members, two people with direct knowledge of the matter told Politico. Johnson has publicly said that redistricting should be left up to the states.

But some Republican lawmakers, particularly those from blue states, have been more open about their distaste for Trump’s gerrymandering scheme.

New York Representative Mike Lawler, a swing-district Republican, said earlier this month that Trump’s redistricting campaign in Texas was “wrong,” and that gerrymandering needed to be banned altogether. Another New York Republican, Nicole Malliotakis, said that she was “not somebody who’s supportive of any type of gerrymandering.”

California Representative Doug LaMalfa warned that redistricting in Texas would “start a grass fire across the country.” Republicans in vulnerable seats should be concerned that redistricting elsewhere could come back to bite them, as voters attempt to even the score.

California-based GOP strategist Rob Stutzman told Politico that among vulnerable Republicans, there was a “growing private sentiment of ‘is this really worth it?’”

Other Republicans appeared reluctant to get on board with redrawing the maps at this particular moment. House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris warned that Republicans should “shy away from mid-cycle redistricting,” and Florida’s newest Representative Randy Fine questioned whether it was even legal to redraw the maps in the Sunshine State (it’s not).

The world stage is not happy with Donald Trump.

European leaders reportedly torched the U.S. president during a virtual call ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Friday trip to Alaska, two sources familiar with the call told Axios.

Trump downplayed the historic contact between the two superpowers as a “feel-out” meeting, though the Europeans disagreed, claiming in the Wednesday call that Trump was leveraging his time with Putin to coordinate a ceasefire arrangement in Ukraine without that country’s leader, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, at the negotiating table.

The call lasted for more than an hour and featured several snipes at Trump from French President Emmanuel Macron, who took a “very tough” position on the meeting, according to a source on the call that spoke with Axios. Macron emphasized that “a meeting is a very big thing to give to Putin.” But Trump “didn’t like that,” the source said.

Zelenskiy offered his own blunt warning to Trump, underscoring to the U.S. leader that “Putin cannot be trusted.”

Polish President Karol Nawrocki “reminded Trump of the Battle of Warsaw, exactly 105 years ago, when Poland fought together with Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in Russia,” reported Axios.

Putin’s visit will be the first time that the Russian leader has stepped foot on U.S. soil in more than a decade—but what sort of new ground Trump will be able to gain is not clear. Putin has remained adamant that any peace deal would require “international legal recognition” of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, an internationally recognized portion of Ukraine, along with four regions it has claimed in the three years since it first invaded Ukraine.

After the call with Trump, Zelenskiy appeared alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, telling reporters in Berlin that the world needed to put more “pressure” on Russia. Zelenskiy said that he believed Russia was bluffing about the regional economic impact of more international sanctions.

At the same press conference, Merz claimed that Trump had “largely agreed” that Russia could not be granted legal recognition of the territories it had claimed during the war.

When pressed by reporters during a press conference later Wednesday as to whether he believed that he could use the meeting to convince Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump responded in the negative.

“I guess the answer to that is no,” he said, “because I’ve had this conversation [with Putin].”

A common left-wing slogan—which pithily summarizes the “imperial boomerang” thesis—is that fascism is imperialism “at home” or “turned inward.” This is typically stated with an implied negative view of both of those things.

In an appearance on Newsmax, Republican Representative James Comer of Kentucky advanced—and endorsed—his own positive twist on that concept. Following Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Comer said the military should be sent to Democratic-run cities to “reduce crime,” leveraging experiences from America’s numerous foreign entanglements since the 2000s.

“We’re gonna support doing this in other cities, if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” Comer said. “And, again, it’s unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that’s what the president is doing.”

“I think this is an experiment that’s probably needed in a lot of the Democrat-run cities in America,” Comer later added. The sentiment echoes Trump’s description of the capital as a testing ground for crackdowns on more cities.

Comer also expressed confidence that President Trump will garner the votes in Congress needed to extend the 30-day takeover. The president has vowed to do so with or without the legislative branch’s approval, but Comer dubiously predicted that Trump’s action in D.C. will be so popular that enough Senate Democrats will be swayed to extend it.

“I think people that represent big cities, which are the Democrats in Congress, they’re going to probably hear from their constituents: ‘Look, that worked in Washington, D.C. Why don’t you vote to allow President Trump to come into Chicago or New York City or Philadelphia and try to combat the criminal activity in their city?’”

On the eve of what President Trump calls a “feel-out meeting” in Alaska with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president seems well aware of a no-cost way to curry favor with Trump.

On Thursday, per the AFP, Putin said the United States is making “quite vigorous and sincere efforts to halt hostilities, end the crisis, and reach agreements that serve the interests of all parties involved in this conflict.” He also dangled the possibility of “long-term conditions for peace … if we reach agreements on strategic offensive arms control.”

Max Seddon of the Financial Times observed that, in buttering up Trump, Putin was seemingly appealing to the president’s long-standing yearning for a Nobel Peace Prize. Last month, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said a Trump Nobel Prize is “well past time,” while citing misleading claims about the president’s foreign policy. On Thursday, the influential Norwegian financial newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv reported that Trump recently called Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, “out of the blue” to say “he wanted the Nobel Prize—and to discuss tariffs.”

Lately, several world leaders have played to Trump’s apparent hankering for a Nobel. Leaders of countries such as Pakistan, Israel, Guinea-Bissau, Gabon, Azerbaijan, and Armenia have seemingly caught onto this easy route to the president’s heart.

At the Alaskan summit, Trump is hoping to set a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in motion—though he’s managed expectations, saying, “I think it’ll be good, but it might be bad.” (The president’s promise to end the war on “day one” is now broken by nearly seven months.)

While, as Seddon noted, Putin appears to be dangling a gold Nobel medal before the president, Trump reportedly may offer rare earth minerals in return.

The Telegraph reports that, among other economic incentives, the president is considering giving Russia access to mineral deposits in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, which houses a sizable portion of Europe’s lithium supply. He is also weighing giving Russia opportunities to exploit Alaska’s natural resources, namely in the oil- and gas-rich Bering Strait.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s targeting of immigrants attending immigration court violates their due process rights.

In a scathing opinion released Thursday, Judge Dale E. Ho wrote that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests in immigration court had turned the procedure into “detention roulette.”

Over the span of 31 pages, Ho wrote that Carlos Javier Lopez Benitez, a 27-year-old from Paraguay, had his constitutional rights violated when he attended court on July 16 in pursuit of asylum.

“Mr. Lopez Benitez appears to be far from alone,” Ho wrote. “His counsel assert that his treatment is part of a ‘nationwide campaign,’ as set forth in an ICE internal memo that has been described in various media reports, which suggests that millions could be swept up in the same way.”

Since May, ICE agents have been arresting immigrants immediately after their immigration court hearings. The strategy has gained nationwide attention in the wake of two high-profile consequences: the indictment of a judge in Wisconsin who allegedly helped an immigrant evade authorities outside her courtroom, and the detention of New York City Comptroller and then–mayoral hopeful Brad Lander, who was attempting to escort an immigrant out of the courthouse.

Ho noted that while the government could not confirm or deny the existence of that policy, they “appear to maintain that they must categorically detain all undocumented immigrants who they believe have entered the United States unlawfully—no matter how long they have been residing in the country since.”

Citing Velasco Lopez v. Decker, Ho further argued that the “suggestion that government agents may sweep up any person they wish” for no reason whatsoever, “so long as the person will, at some unknown point in time, be allowed to ask some other official for his or her release offends the ordered system of liberty that is the pillar of the Fifth Amendment.”

Lopez Benitez’s case may be the new normal in Trump’s America, but it is far from the historical standard. Immigration authorities used to stay away from courthouses, fearing that their presence could disengage people from following procedure and navigating the legal system. But White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s agenda has effectively unrooted that, tasking federal agents with arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—a quota so astronomical that it has forced the agency to find unconventional subjects of detention, including legal residents and even U.S. citizens.

Senator Markwayne Mullin revealed that he actually has no idea who the mayor of Washington even is.

During an interview on Fox News Wednesday, the Oklahoma Republican attempted to excoriate D.C.’s “very racist mayor” for making Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the nation’s capital about race.

“And people may get eyebrows when I raise that, but he is the one that brings in race into the conversation, so he’s the one that’s pointing the fingers at it, and when you point one finger you got three pointing back at ya,” Mullin said. “But for him to say that, and flat out lie to the American people, he knows exactly what’s happening.”

But Mayor Muriel Bowser isn’t a “he” or a “him.” She’s a woman. And she didn’t suggest Trump’s takeover was about race—she’s just Black.

Several people online, including CNN senior reporter Edward Isaac-Dovere, suggested that Mullin might be referring to comments from Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott after the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024. Scott accused his critics at the time of being racist. (Spoiler alert, calling someone the “DEI mayor” is racist.)

Clearly, not only do guests on Fox News not have to be experts on the people they want to complain about, but they don’t even have to know what city they’re talking about.

“Crime is not down, the lack of prosecution is down,” Mullin continued. “They don’t allow the prosecuting attorneys to actually prosecute, they’ve taken all the felonies, and they’ve dropped them down to dang near misdemeanors.”

On Monday, Bowser called Trump’s executive action “unsettling and unprecedented,” adding that she wasn’t surprised given Trump’s past rhetoric. It’s unclear whether she meant his echoing of racist narratives about urban areas, or his specific grievances about Washington, of which he has many.

On Tuesday, Bowser struck a stronger tone. “This is a time where community needs to jump in and we all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule, and get to the other side of this guy, and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push,” she said.

The most recent producer price index numbers directly contradict two of Trump’s favorite narratives: that his tariffs won’t lead to significant price increases and that other countries will foot the bill if they do. 

If that was true, the PPI numbers, which track inflation on the producer side, would be dropping. But Trump was lying. The U.S. economy just experienced its largest PPI rise in three years, with a 0.9 percent increase in July. Inflation is rising, and it’s Trump’s fault. 

“So much for foreigners paying tariffs. If they did, PPI would be falling,” RSM chief economist Joseph Brusuelas wrote Thursday on X. “Wholesale prices up 3.3% from a year ago & 3.7% in the core. The temperature is definitely rising in the core. This implies a hot PCE reading lies ahead.”

Prices on fresh and dry vegetables have also risen 38.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Prices on meats, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and eggs are also up. 

Last time Trump got a bad economic report, he fired the BLS commissioner. How will he hide the negative impacts this time? What will the spin be?

“The projected number was 0.2%,” wrote Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Virginia Representative Don Beyer, referring to the 0.9 percent rise. “This isn’t just a huge inflationary increase, it’s an order of magnitude larger than what was expected. And no question at all that it’s being driven by Trump’s tariffs.”

Companies won’t be volunteering to eat this price increase as Trump has wrongly suggested in the past, and other countries certainly won’t either. American consumers should expect the president to lie his way through this obvious economic failure.  

The U.S. president is still on his quest to cast doubt on crime and safety in the nation’s capital.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social Wednesday evening, Donald Trump attempted to further justify his total takeover of the city’s law enforcement by undermining the credibility of the city’s homicide statistics, which his own administration boasted Monday had hit a 30-year low.

“Washington, D.C., has one of the Highest Rates of Crime in the World, more than many of the most violent Third World Countries,” Trump wrote, claiming that the city’s homicide rate is higher than Mexico City, Bogota, Islamabad, Addis Ababa, and Fallujah, Iraq.

“If D.C. were a State, it would have the highest Homicide Rate of any State in America,” he continued. “The Violent Crime Rate in D.C. has worsened, and the Murder Rate has essentially DOUBLED in just over a decade—But these are only the ‘official’ statistics released by corrupt City Officials. The REAL numbers are many times worse.”

Washington doesn’t even place in the top 50 for the most dangerous cities in the world.

Violent crime has been on the decline in D.C. since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, reported The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the nation’s capital was down 35 percent from the previous year, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

But that hasn’t fit into Trump’s narrative. Instead, the commander in chief alleged that a precinct commander had been “suspended for allegedly manipulating the Violent Crime Statistics,” and quoted the D.C. police union as a source for the higher crime rates.

“Because the Democrat Government of D.C. has largely stopped investigating, arresting, and prosecuting most Crime, the published statistics don’t even capture a fraction of the actual Violence,” Trump wrote. He claimed that the city had stopped arresting people for shoplifting, derided schools as “dysfunctional” while describing youth gangs as out of control, and alleged that citizens no longer walked the streets, “essentially becoming captive prisoners in their own city.”

“Citizens are afraid to speak up or, call the Police, lest they be targeted,” Trump wrote. “The REAL Crime Rates are probably five to ten times what has been reported. D.C. has been under siege from thugs and killers, but now, D.C. is back under Federal Control where it belongs. The White House is in charge. The Military and our Great Police will liberate this City, scrape away the filth, and make it safe, clean, habitable and beautiful once more!”

Meanwhile, large crowds in Washington protested law enforcement checkpoints set up around the city Wednesday night, booing and jeering at the increased police presence.

Washington, D.C. residents are beginning to see the actual impact of Donald Trump’s National Guard invasion, and they’re already sick of it. 

Various photos and footage taken on 14th Street around 9:50 p.m. Wednesday night in Northwest D.C. show a large police checkpoint with officers from the Metropolitan Police Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in both marked and unmarked cars. Many of them were masked, and they pulled people over and out of their cars, reportedly arresting at least one person, a Black woman. 

In one clip, a crowd gathers around the officers at the checkpoint, booing loudly with a few “fuck you’s” in the mix. In another from the same checkpoint one incensed woman can be heard yelling “none of us want you here, go home!” at the officers. 

“You are surrounded by a mob of people that hate you!” yelled another. “Go home!” 

“Leave us alone!” said one more, before boos rained down again. 

This all comes just days after Trump announced his federalization of the MPD and his deployment of 800 National Guardsmen into the city, which began Wednesday morning. Residents have already seen an increased ICE and DEA presence in calm neighborhoods like Adams Morgan and Georgetown. On Monday night, U.S. Park Police were seen randomly harassing Black residents smoking cigarettes, that the officers reportedly mistook for weed, on the steps of their home, “Because Donald Trump’s tired of it.”  

Trump has suggested that this federal takeover will only grow lengthier and more intense, even as crime remains at a non-emergency level and citizens begin to grow angry. This upcoming weekend is likely to be busy, placing a city and its residents—who Trump swears he’s keeping safe—on edge.

E.J. Antoni, the MAGA partisan Trump tapped to replace Erika McEntarfer as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, reports NBC News. The Heritage Foundation economist and Project 2025 contributor can be seen among J6ers in footage archived by ProPublica.

One video, reportedly taken just about 10 minutes before the mob forced its way into the building, shows Antoni on the west side of the Capitol.

Tear gas is deployed in the air at the front of the crowd, causing people to shift. Shortly thereafter, a man NBC identified as Antoni, sporting what appears to be a University of Pennsylvania varsity jacket, gradually makes his way from around the center of the crowd toward the back. (According to The Guardian, Antoni seems to have familial ties to UPenn.) He can be seen visibly face-on starting at the 1:40 mark, as well as from behind at around 2:15, soon before the camera pans over to Alex Jones with bullhorn in hand.

NBC reports that additional footage depicts Antoni on the Capitol’s east side, walking away from the building.

A Trump administration official told NBC that Antoni was a “bystander” on January 6, who did not engage in “anything inappropriate or illegal.” Antoni was “in town for meetings” with his then employer, and had meandered to the Capitol from an office just blocks away after seeing the news, the White House claims.

Antoni’s LinkedIn indicates he was then a research fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. Although the White House did not specify the location of the meeting from which he allegedly “wandered,” the organization’s address is listed on its website as an over 40-minute walk (or a quick drive) from the Capitol building.