Indiana Republican Deletes Post Exposing Trump Gerrymandering Threat

Unfortunately for Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, what he posts on the internet stays forever.

Beckwith deleted a Thursday post that confirmed the Trump administration had threatened to pull federal funding from Indiana if state legislators refused to bend to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.

“The Trump admin was VERY clear about this,” Beckwith wrote in the since-deleted post. “They told many lawmakers, cabinet members and the Gov and I that this would happen. 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.”

He was responding to another post by the Heritage Foundation, which claimed that Trump would withhold national funding from Indiana if it refused to draw new congressional lines, just five years after approving the last batch of maps.

“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,” the official account for the Heritage Foundation wrote.

But Indiana’s Senate did reject the White House’s pressure campaign late Thursday, with 21 Republican senators voting against the scheme. Their rationale for doing so ranged from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort.

Why Beckwith would have felt pressured to delete his post—within hours of making it—is not clear.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would have won the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.

But so far, bullying lawmakers and barking demands has not been a successful midterm strategy for the Republican leader. Redistricting efforts have crumbled in other red states where Trump issued gerrymandering directives, though not always due to the same ferocious local pushback.

President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and other prominent figures can be spotted in a new collection of photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

At least three of the photographs showed Trump, who has come under immense scrutiny for his reported ties to Epstein and his efforts to prevent the release of the government’s files on the alleged sex trafficker.

One black-and-white photograph featuring Trump shows the president smiling as he posed with six women wearing leis, whose faces have all been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump sitting on a plane next to a blonde woman whose face has been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump listening to a glamorous-looking woman, as Epstein stood, smirking beside him.

Yet another photo showed a pile of Trump-branded condoms.

These photographs, plucked from a trove of 95,000 images and redacted at the discretion of members of the committee, are just the beginning. “Committee Democrats are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release photos to the public in the days and weeks ahead,” the release said. Representative Robert Garcia told reporters Friday that some of the photos that were not released were “incredibly disturbing.”

MAGA architect Steve Bannon also made multiple appearances in the photographs released Friday—including one that was particularly disturbing.

One photograph showed Epstein sitting behind a desk, while Bannon sat opposite him talking. On the desk between them sat a framed photograph that appeared to show an at least partially naked woman lying limp on a sofa or bed.

Bannon had reportedly assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life, conducting a series of interviews with the alleged sex trafficker between 2018 and early 2019, totaling about 15 hours of unreleased footage.

Another photograph showed Epstein and Bannon taking a mirror selfie, and another photograph showed Bannon speaking with director Woody Allen, who has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

Former President Bill Clinton appeared to have signed one photograph, which showed him smiling beside Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

Other prominent figures who appeared in photos were Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Three of the photographs showed sex toys, including a “jawbreaker gag.”

This story has been updated.

The White House’s propaganda is getting sketchier.

The official X account for the executive mansion released new figures about the economy Thursday, proclaiming that 91 percent of Americans noticed “gas prices were dropping.” The source of that information, however, was from a White House email survey.

Meanwhile, practically every American has felt the ramifications of Donald Trump’s rattling economic policies. The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, topped its site Friday with the headline: “POLL: ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR INFLATION.”

The AP-NORC poll found that large shares of American shoppers are dipping into their savings to afford buying presents this holiday season, with half of polled Americans reporting that it’s harder than usual to afford the things they would typically try to buy.

Roughly the same percentage of U.S.-based shoppers said they were cutting back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs, according to the poll.

The findings make sense: An analysis by the Groundwork Collective of popular holiday gifts found that prices skyrocketed by a whopping 26 percent this holiday season.

The disparity between the White House’s messaging and what’s actually happening boils down to the president, who has repeatedly insisted without evidence that there is “no” inflation, that the word “groceries” is an “old fashioned” term, and that the issue of affordability is a “con job” and a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats to trick the public into not supporting him.

“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening?” Trump whined Thursday on Truth Social. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Inflation has been accelerating since April, when Trump first announced his “liberation day” tariffs. Eight months later, practically everything on the U.S. market is more expensive than it used to be, as companies pass off the cost of the president’s tariffs onto consumers. Food and energy costs are up compared to figures from last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even American-made goods have taken a hit by the tariffs, since more often than not they are created with parts sourced from other areas of the world.

But the commander-in-chief seems to be completely out of touch with that reality. In an interview earlier this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump remarked that he would rate the current state of the economy “A+++++.”

President Donald Trump still can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that the United States is a democracy. 

While signing an executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence, Trump whined that states needed to be “unified” on his approach to AI, in order for the country to win global dominance over China. 

“We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote, that’s President Xi [Jinping]. He says ‘do it,’ and that’s the end of that. You know, we have a different system,” Trump said. “But we have a system that’s good—but we only have a system that’s good if it’s smart.”

As the president spoke, sitting behind his desk, he covered his right hand, where a massive, mysterious bruise has formed. 

Meanwhile, the folks watching at home weren’t impressed by Trump’s longing for a unitary government and his dismissal of his own country’s so-called “different system.”  

“Yes, it’s called DEMOCRACY,” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom on X. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has longed for another form of government. After visiting China earlier this year, the president said he wished his Cabinet secretaries would greet him with stoic compliance (even though their meetings are already a well-documented spectacle of sycophancy).

With just six legislative days left before she plans to resign, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly working on one last long-shot bid to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The recent MAGA defector has been quietly taking the temperature on a motion to vacate the chair, three sources familiar with her efforts told MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. 

In order to remove Johnson, Greene would need the support of eight other Republicans. “Marjorie is approaching members to get to nine who will oust the speaker,” one of the sources told MS NOW. “And if we don’t get to work on codifying Trump’s agenda, anything can happen.”

But Greene, who has spent the last few weeks publicly criticizing Johnson, denied the reporting. The Georgia Republican told MS Now that it was “not true” and that she was “not interested in participating in” their story. 

While a bid to unseat Johnson would likely fail, these reports come amid mounting complaints about his leadership.   

Last week, Representative Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that Johnson wouldn’t have the votes if there was a roll call vote. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership,” Stefanik said. “It’s that widespread.” Representative Nancy Mace also shared in Greene’s frustration, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna recently sidestepped the speaker to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from stock trading.

On Tuesday, Greene told CNN that Republican women specifically were starting to lash out at Johnson because “he sidelines us and doesn’t take us seriously.”

Greene has stated that she’ll resign from her seat on January 5, giving her limited time to find support for her measure. She had previously attempted to remove Johnson last May, but that attempt failed after a majority of Democrats stepped in to save the speaker.