Trump Tried to Personally Bully This State Into Gerrymandering Its Map

President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.

Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.

And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.

Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.

“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”

Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”

When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”

In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.

Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

President Donald Trump told the country that his federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. would focus on ridding the streets of violent crime, theft, and gang violence.

In reality, that effort has been an extension of his deportation campaign, as a whopping 40 percent of arrests made since the occupation have to do with immigration, according to recent data collected by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration says that it’s arrested more than 2,300 people: around 12 for homicide suspicion, 20 for alleged gang membership, and a few hundred for drug-related crimes. But more than 940 people have been arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, more than any of the aforementioned categories.

While the Trump administration claims that deportation and violent crime go hand in hand, it’s hard to see how snatching UberEats drivers off their scooters midroute, harassing anyone who looks Latino at checkpoints, and forcing street vendors to stay inside out of fear helps curtail violent crime.

The president said he was going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” after the Big Balls mugging. The results of his efforts have not reflected that.

In light of the immigration enforcement raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia last week, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday issued a warning to the United States.

The raid saw hundreds of South Korean workers shackled and detained, straining diplomatic relations between Washington and Seoul, a key U.S. ally. Currently, 316 South Korean nationals and 14 others are in the process of being transported back to their country.

At a press conference, Lee said South Korean companies may think twice before establishing factories in the United States going forward, unless Washington improves the visa process for South Koreans.

“Under the current circumstances, Korean companies will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States,” Lee said, according to United Press International. “Companies will have to worry about whether establishing a local factory in the United States will be subject to all sorts of disadvantages or difficulties,” which “could have a significant impact on future direct investment.”

“It’s not like these are long-term workers,” the South Korean president observed, per the Associated Press. “When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work.”

Earlier this week, South Korean businesses reportedly suspended at least 22 projects in the United States in reaction to the raid.

“Korean workers are being treated like criminals for building factories that Washington itself lobbied for,” one executive in Seoul told The Korea Economic Daily. “If this continues, investment in the U.S. could be reconsidered.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is jazzing up his song and dance to further distract from the cooling economy.

Speaking with CNBC Thursday, the trade official hypothesized that the real benefits of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs would be realized very soon—that is to say, next year.

“So now, everybody knows their tariff, right? So now you’re going to see factories getting built in America at a scale that you’ve never seen before,” Lutnick said. “More than $10 trillion of factory build coming. Alright? And so theres huge amount of construction jobs.”

“I would say the first quarter of next year will be the best quarter of construction jobs this country’s ever seen, and that’s going to roll all the way through ’26,” he continued. “So I think you’re gonna see GDP growth next year over four percent.”

“You do? Four percent? $10 trillion over what period of time, Secretary?” pressed one of the anchors.

But Lutnick’s perpetual growth promises have historically not panned out. Americans still weren’t feeling the boon of Trump’s plan by August, when the unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, up by more than 3 percent from the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Applications for unemployment benefits jumped to 263,000 last week alone, the biggest spike since the pandemic, and consumer inflation grew to 2.9 percent last month—the highest point so far this year.

In the same interview, Lutnick once again said that major trade deals were still on the way—albeit with some major hiccups. A deal with India is apparently forthcoming, so long as the country “stops buying Russian oil.” Lutnick also claimed that a “big deal with Taiwan” is on the horizon, that a deal with Switzerland is “probably” in the works, and that a trade arrangement had been struck with South Korea, though Lutnick suggested that the country’s officials were dragging their feet with the paperwork. (South Korea has also threatened to indefinitely pause multiple projects in the U.S. in light of a massive ICE raid at a Hyundai factory in Georgia that saw hundreds of Korean workers arrested.)

Lutnick also said that he believed a “deal is going to be struck” on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-sponsored enterprises to support American homeownership, before the end of the year.

“We are going to take the company public. We’re going to sell. It could potentially be the largest IPO in history,” he said.

Republican lawmakers have had enough of the First Amendment in the aftermath of the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Representative Clay Higgins said Thursday that he planned to use his congressional seat to convince tech platforms to go after anyone who “belittled” Kirk’s death.

Kirk was fatally shot during a “Prove Me Wrong” table event at Utah Valley University, where he’d invited college students to debate him. Kirk’s final words were in a debate about gun violence in the United States. 

“If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution … those profiles must come down,” Higgins wrote on X. 

“So, I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER,” he continued. “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked.

“I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” he said. “I’m starting that today. That is all.”

Ironically, Higgins was the subject of social media censorship in 2020 after he posted on Facebook threatening Black Lives Matter protesters, writing that he would shoot and “drop any 10 of you where you stand.” Higgins’s post was removed for inciting or facilitating “serious violence.” 

Kirk seemingly supported the free expression of political ideas—no matter how controversial.

Now lawmakers disturbed by his horrific death want not only to curb free speech on the internet but to punish it too. 

Already, the notorious hate account Libs of TikTok has launched a doxxing campaign targeting apparent Democrats who made callous comments celebrating Kirk’s death on the internet, as part of a newly declared “war” on liberals. 

Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna also called on social media platforms to remove the videos of the shooting, and Representative Lauren Boebert agreed. 

“He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online,” Luna wrote on X. “These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating—at some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity.”

Boebert replied, “Thank you!!! I agree completely! I NEVER want to see that again!! I hate that I saw it at all.”

Lily Tang Williams, a Republican congressional candidate from New Hampshire, also responded: “I respectively disagree. Freedom of speech includes content we don’t like or hate,” she said.  

“It hurts to watch the video, but we must defend free speech as the foundation of our Republic, no matter how horrible it is,” she wrote. “Where would you draw the line?  Who decides what people can see?  Censorship is one of the primary tools of authoritarians for a reason—always couched in terms of safety or sentiment. Censorship is not the answer.”

Williams wrote that Kirk “would want us to speak the truth, protect free speech and practice civil discourse which he did!”