1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

When Donald Trump looked at the Republican advantage in Indiana’s state legislature, 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. 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. According to Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s incumbent Republican lieutenant governor, Team Trump even floated an extortion threat of sorts, suggesting the administration was prepared to curtail federal resources for the state unless GOP legislators agreed to redraw its congressional map and eliminate the two Democratic districts. The severity of the presidential arm-twisting over the course of several months was extraordinary. It was so intense that at least 11 Indiana Republicans were targeted with threats or swatting attacks after Trump started calling out individual state lawmakers. One legislator told The Atlantic he was worried the president’s followers felt so strongly about this that his house might be “firebombed.” And yet, despite all of this, Trump’s power grab flopped. After months of White House arm-twisting, the gerrymandering plan mustered just 19 votes — with a majority of the Republicans in the state Senate voting with the Democratic minority against it. It was one of the most brutal and humiliating failures of the president’s second term. Except, to hear Trump tell it, this fiasco wasn’t that big of a deal. He says that because he wants to save face amidst another one of his constant failures, except it was a big deal. Indiana rejected Trump's BLATANT abuse of power and corruption. Just as you must. The only reason Trump is so emboldened to be so open about his corruption and cheating is because you are protecting him from us, the American people.