The Hoosier rebellion

As Garrett Graff explains, this has been a bad week for the authoritarian consolidation project:

Yesterday — Thursday — was one of the worst days of Donald Trump’s second term yet, one where Trumpism lost time and again at the state level, in courtrooms, and in the halls of Congress. Never this year has Donald Trump looked as weak as he did yesterday.

First, after launching a massive mid-year nationwide redistricting effort that could have locked in GOP minority rule in Congress for years to come, the GOP effort looks at best a wash ahead of the 2026 midterms — minor progress that has come at enormous political cost and rancor and that has fired up opposition across the country.

Yesterday, solidly red Indiana became the latest state to stop the effort in its tracks. The Indiana rebuke was remarkable: Trump’s team rolled out the most severe of threats, with the Heritage Foundation writing on X, “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. 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.” (Officially, the White House denied making such threats.) And yet in the end even a majority of the GOP senators in the legislature voted to oppose the redistricting effort.

Yesterday added more proof in two key areas that the rule-of-law continues to assert itself, despite the Trump administration’s attempts to weaponize the justice system and courts against its designated enemies. First, a second grand jury rejected indicting New York Attorney General Letitia James; the initial attempt by Lindsay Halligan was thrown out. A second attempt to indict her failed last week in Virginia — and now a third one has too.

Second, in one of the longest-running and most fraught legal showdowns of the year, a federal judge released Kilmar Abrego Garcia and prohibited ICE from detaining him again — concluding that across months and months of legal battles, the Trump administration never proved that it had a valid final deportation order for Abrego, who was wrongfully removed to a torture gulag in El Salvador in March and then returned, finally after much fighting, to the US in the summer. “His removal cannot be considered reasonably foreseeable, imminent, or consistent with due process,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis wrote. She continued, “Since Abrego Garcia’s wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been re-detained, again without lawful authority.”

Trump using his familiar extortion and cult leadership tactics on Indiana Republicans, and a critical mass refusing to be muscled, in particular seems like it could be a major inflection point:

In rejecting yesterday a redistricting plan backed by President Donald Trump, Indiana’s Republican-controlled senate did not merely deny Republicans two new U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. They also engaged in a mass revolt against the president. The stakes of their defiance reach far beyond the midterms. This vote was possibly the most significant blow yet against the authoritarian ambitions that have defined Trump’s second term.

The significance of Indiana’s noncompliance lies not in the specifics of what was refused—attempts to gerrymander electoral maps are hardly unprecedented, even though a mid-decade battle violates norms—but in the act of refusal itself. Trump’s authoritarian project relies on the cultlike hold he has over his party. Republicans have come to understand that the cost of defying Trump is the death of their political career. Trump has proved time and again that he will go to any lengths to destroy his intra-party critics, even if doing so harms the party.

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This kind of pressure typically bends targets to Trump’s will. What politician is willing to sacrifice their career or their family’s safety for a single act of defiance?

Yet the spines of Indiana Republicans stiffened where so many others snapped. One reason for this may be that the state contains an unusually strong concentration of Trump-skeptical former governors. Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence remain influential in the state, despite having given up national ambitions by failing to submit fully to Trump. Daniels praised the vote as an act of “principled courageous leadership.”

Indiana’s Republicans also demonstrated strength in numbers. Trump employs the psychology of a schoolyard bully who isolates and targets victims one by one. By engineering a 31–19 vote, Indiana’s Republicans worked together to ensure that no single legislator could be blamed for defying Trump.

There are obviously still a lot of very bad ways this can go. But a maximalist commitment to an extremely unpopular ideological project and authoritarian consolidation are practically incompatible even if marrying them is theoretically desirable. And is Trump becomes ever more unpopular and more mentally and physically decrepit, the possibility of his grip on the party loosening increases.