Trump Held Secret Talks With Republican Leaders on Gerrymandering War

After weeks of resisting the White House’s gerrymandering efforts, Indiana lawmakers are starting to change their minds.

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance met privately with Indiana Republicans this week as part of a pressure campaign to maximize GOP House seats before the 2026 midterms.

While Indiana’s lawmakers remain divided on the issue, the president’s personal touch has started to make a difference, according to at least one person who attended the meetings.

Just weeks ago, state Representative Jim Lucas decried the nationwide MAGA effort as a political “stunt.” But Lucas has softened his stance on redistricting Indiana since he spoke with Vance on Tuesday, reported the Indianapolis Star.

“I’m not as opposed to it as I was,” Lucas told the paper.

Talk of redistricting occupied only a small portion of the discussions, but at least one Oval Office encounter did involve a quiet push by Trump to pressure Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston and Senate President Rodric Bray on the issue, according to White House officials who spoke with The Washington Post.

In a separate discussion with Indiana lawmakers, Vance spent the last 30 minutes of his meeting attempting to sway representatives.

The White House’s intense focus on this issue is emblematic of just how nervous the GOP is about maintaining their razor-thin majority in Congress: Indiana holds nine seats in the U.S. House, and seven of those are already held by Republicans.

Gerrymandering has become a nationwide fixation since Trump demanded in July that Texas Republicans create five more House seats by redrawing its congressional map, eliminating a handful of blue districts in the process. The order, and Texas’s subsequent obedience, elicited shock and contempt from two of the country’s most populous regions—California and New York. Both states launched their own redistricting wars in the wake of the vote.

Trump issued similar directives for four other states: Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida.

The Department of Homeland Security hired an election conspiracy theorist to work in election integrity.

Heather Honey, a right-wing activist who pushed false claims of fraud after the 2020 presidential election, was hired to serve as the deputy assistant secretary on election integrity at the DHS Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans, according to Democracy Docket. The role did not previously exist under the Biden administration. 

​​Honey is the founder of the Election Research Institute, a group behind a recent elections rule change in Georgia which would allow county boards to postpone certifying election tallies until officials can review any discrepancies between ballots cast and the total number of people who voted, which are typically considered to be minor issues that are not evidence of malfeasance.

Honey is also the founder of Pennsylvania Fair Elections, an election-denying activist group that spread misinformation about the 2020 presidential election in coordination with other activists, like Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell, it’s worth noting, is a far-right activist with the ear of the president who thinks Honey is a “wonderful person.”

The Trump administration has long peddled debunked conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen, and Honey’s hiring is just the latest sign that they plan to continue.

After the 2020 general election, Honey alleged widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania and attempted to access voter records to conduct her own independent review. Honey’s research organization Verity Vote claimed that Pennsylvania had a “voter deficit” which left more than 100,000 votes uncounted, and claimed that the state had sent ballots to unregistered voters. 

Trump made slightly different allegations about Pennsylvania’s 2020 general election, claiming that there had been more votes than voters, which also proved to be false. 

Honey also served as the star witness for Kari Lake’s failed case alleging that hundreds of thousands of phony ballots were cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. She tried to accuse the county of failing to respond to her public records request for paperwork about ballot drop-off,  to which an attorney for the county argued she had completely misunderstood what kind of document she needed. 

When pressed on how many illegal ballots Honey believed had been injected into the election, she said that it wasn’t an “answerable question.”

President Donald Trump has forced out nearly 10 percent of the federal workforce.

More than 199,000 federal workers were ousted from their jobs since January, according to a new analysis by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that has been tracking the cuts.

“We’re seeing the arson of our government,” Max Stier, president and CEO of Partnership for Public Service, told HuffPost. “The numbers are stunning. We can count 200,000, and the administration said 300,000, by the end of the year. That’s one in eight.”

Roughly two-thirds of the ex-employees left via Trump’s buyout—also known as his “Fork in the Road” deal—which offered furlough-threatened workers the opportunity to receive benefits and paid leave through September if they agreed to immediately resign.

Veterans have been disproportionately hurt by the mass layoffs: roughly one in four civilian employees previously served in the U.S. armed forces.

The Defense Department lost the most workers—more than 55,000 federal civilian employees were given the chop, HuffPost reported. The Treasury Department also suffered major cuts, losing more than 30,000 employees, as did the Department of Agriculture, which lost more than 21,000 people.

Those impacts have already been felt across the country. So far this year, the Social Security Administration has shuttered regional and field offices, minimizing access and creating longer wait times. Thousands of cuts at the Internal Revenue Service have also had an impact on taxpayer services. The near-total planned elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—which was formed in the wake of the 2008 recession—has left Americans at the mercy of corporate interests with little legal recourse.

The exact number of employees the Trump administration has forced out remains an enigma. The Partnership for Public Service’s statistics are much higher than previously reported figures: Last month, CNN tracked just a quarter of that progress, assessing that roughly 51,000 federal employees had lost their jobs.

“Huge numbers of very talented public servants are being forced out the door. That’s going to hurt,” said Stier. “The services that Americans have come to expect are not going to be there.”

The Breakfast Club host and armchair political analyst Charlamagne tha God has a new nickname for Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries: AIPAC Shakur. The name is a combination of rapper Tupac Shakur’s name and a reference to Jeffries’s deep ties to the wealthy pro-Israel lobbying organization.

“I love having Minority Speaker Hakeem Jeffries,” said radio host and CNN contributor Claudia Jordan, referring to her previous talks and interviews with the New York representative. “Because you know, I’m a political nerd, like I love talking politics—”

“Charlamagne hates him,” DJ Envy chimed in.

‘You do?” said Jordan.

“I don’t hate him, I just don’t think he stands for anything,” Charlamagne said. “I think that he’s—I call him AIPAC Shakur.”

“Well, well … we need to talk about messaging,” Jordan responded, stopping Charlamagne in his tracks. “I actually went to the Capitol and had a meeting with him, and we talked about messaging, and how I was like, the frustration with the party is, y’all have to get more gangsta. Like stop going by the politics of the late 2000s, you know, 2010. You have to like, rise to the occasion, and the messaging. And he did, I saw him do more afterwards.”

“Hakeem is a puppet,” Charlemagne responded bluntly. “Hakeem’s not doing anything if Chuck Schumer don’t tell him to do it. And it’s simple as that.”

AIPAC Shakur is a very apt, and pretty funny nickname for Jeffires. The representative has received nearly $1 million dollars from AIPAC (to say nothing of other pro-Israel lobbies), has gone on multiple trips to Israel on the organization’s dime, and has always been a staunch supporter of Israel’s genocidal efforts.

Hakeem also never “got gangsta” with his messaging. He has consistently quelled genuine opposition activity within his party, refusing to make strong, aggressive statements against Trump and the GOP when they’re entirely appropriate. In March, Democratic voters were begging him to fight just a bit harder for them. And last month he still refused to endorse mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, who won a massive victory for his party in the city he represents.

Jeffires is falling short in many regards, but his deep ties to AIPAC are perhaps chief among them. AIPAC funding and weapons to Israel are slowly but surely becoming stronger litmus tests for Democratic voters in 2026 and 2028. Jeffries is flailing badly on both counts. Hopefully the AIPAC Shakur nickname sticks.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Wednesday that the federal government will wrest control of Washington’s Union Station from Amtrak as part of President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the city.

The move comes a week after Vice President JD Vance, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the station to generate support for the president’s D.C. occupation—where they were heckled relentlessly by protesters.

Duffy’s Wednesday announcement of the extension of the takeover to Union Station came at an event celebrating various improvements to the station, such as the launch of Acela train cars. “This is all part of [Trump’s] vision to Make Travel Great again,” the transportation secretary wrote on X, touting increased “reliability,” “lower ticket costs,” and improved “Amtrak profitability.”

But while he attributed these wins to Trump, Duffy omitted to mention that they trace largely back to investments made under the presidency of Joe Biden, according to CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.

Amtrak’s website celebrates the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (a.k.a. Biden’s “Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) for allocating billions to rail, including more than $20 billion “over five years to repair or replace aging assets, modernize our fleet, improve station accessibility, and other capital projects and purposes defined under the law.”

“Sean Duffy, surprising absolutely no one, taking credit for something brought to you in large part by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden,” wrote former Biden administration official Chris Meagher on X.