U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a "One Big Beautiful" event at the White House in Washington, DC., U.S., June 26, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

In the United States' 2024 presidential election, Indiana was an even better state for Donald Trump than Texas. Trump defeated Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by around 13.5 percent in Texas, but he carried Indiana by roughly 19 percent.

Given how much of a red state it is, Trump zeroed in on Indiana for an aggressive gerrymandering push. But MS NOW's Steve Benen, in his December 12 column, argues that Trump's Indiana "power grab" turned out to be a "humiliating failure" rather than the slam dunk he was expecting.

"When Donald Trump looked at the Republican advantage in Indiana's state legislature," Benen explains, "the president probably felt a degree of optimism about his mid-decade redistricting scheme. After all, in the 50-member state Senate, there are only 10 Democrats. Success surely seemed inevitable. Over the summer, as the partisan gambit faced some resistance, Trump started pulling out the stops. GOP legislators were welcomed to the White House. He deployed Vice President JD Vance to Indiana to give Republicans the hard sell, in person, twice."

Benen adds, "The president made repeated phone calls to specific legislators, hoping to persuade them to do his bidding. He published a seemingly endless stream of electoral threats and vituperative rants directed at GOP holdouts to his social media platform…. And yet, despite all of this, Trump's power grab flopped."

The MS NOW columnist and "Rachel Maddow Show" producer notes that Trump's "arm twisting" for his "gerrymandering plan mustered just 19 votes." And a "majority of the Republicans" in the Indiana State Senate voted "with the Democratic minority against it."

"It was one of the most brutal and humiliating failures of the president's second term," Benen observes. "Except, to hear Trump tell it, this fiasco wasn't that big of a deal. 'I wasn't working on it very hard,' the president said. 'I wasn't very much involved.' I wrote a book about Republicans trying to rewrite recent history, so I'm rather accustomed to this style of gaslighting. But even I couldn't help but laugh out loud watching Trump pretend he hadn't invested months of time, effort and resources into this debacle."

Steve Benen's full MS NOW column is available at this link.