The Trump II Consolidation of Power

From the racist redistricting rush across the South to the weaponization of the Justice Department to the criminalizing of opposition ideology, we’re witnessing Trump Republicans using the power of the state to consolidate and entrench their own political power and squeeze out Democrats’ ability to meaningfully contest that power.

It’s happening at the federal and state level simultaneously. In the long term, it’s an attempt to create permanent or near-permanent structural advantages for the GOP, with a big lift from the Roberts Court. In the short term, it’s aimed at hobbling Democrats with criminal investigations (or threat thereof) from the Trump DOJ and on-the-fly redistricting to keep them from effectively slowing down the Republican putsch.

Let’s start with the latest on the GOP’s anti-Black redistricting bonanza.

The Great Whitening: South Carolina Jumps Into the Fray

South Carolina

Under pressure from President Trump, the state House in South Carolina has kicked off the process of congressional redistricting before this year’s midterms, with the goal of eliminating the state’s sole majority-Black seat, held by Rep. James Clyburn (D).

The state House passed a resolution late last night on a 87-25 party-line vote that opens the door to redistricting even after the legislative session ends on May 14. It doesn’t guarantee redistricting will happen, but it keeps GOP lawmakers’ options open and allows the pressure from MAGA forces to build.

The state Senate, where a two-thirds vote is required, is expected to vote on the resolution as soon as today. Trump is aggressively lobbying Republican state Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, with phone calls on Monday and Tuesday, pushing him to fall in line, Politico reports. Massey has been a vocal opponent of redistricting, concerned it could actually cost the GOP seats in the House.

Qualifying for House races has already closed, and military ballots have already been mailed, but things have shifted dramatically in South Carolina since the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Furthermore, Trump allies are trying to leverage his successful primarying of anti-redistricting statehouse Republicans in Indiana this week to increase the pressure on reluctant GOP lawmakers in the South.

Mississippi

In an interview with the Daily Caller, Gov. Tate Reeves (R) exhibited quite a bit of wobbliness over whether he’ll push to redraw congressional maps before the midterms. In a sign of the pressure he’s under, Reeves left open the possibility of expanding an already-called special session of the legislature to include congressional redistricting, even though House primary elections have already been held.

“No final decisions have been made on congressional redistricting,” Reeves said. “We’re also looking at whether any new maps may or may not apply in 2026 or 2028.”

The state’s sole majority-Black district is held by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D).

Alabama

In an extraordinary move, the Alabama House passed a contingent measure that requires the governor to call a special session for House redistricting this summer if the Supreme Court lifts an injunction barring the state from using a 2023 map with only one majority-Black district.

What makes it extraordinary is that it would void the results of the upcoming May 19 primary and hold do-over primaries for four of the seven congressional districts where the map would change.

Tennessee

In a special session of the legislature, Tennessee Republicans unveiled a new congressional district map that would eliminate the state’s sole majority-Black district, represented by Steve Cohen (D), who is white. A vote on the new map could come as soon as today.

The Big Picture on Louisiana v. Callais

Still unspooling the many implications of what happened at the Supreme Court last month:

• A critical point from Duncan Hosie in The Atlantic on how Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion hamstrings Congress from ever reinvigorating the Voting Rights Act:

But to view Callais as merely the final hit in the Voting Rights Act’s destruction is to miss its deeper ambition. The bigger shift is that Callais also closes off the possibility that a future Congress could respond with new legislation combating racial discrimination in the electoral system. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by the other Republican appointees, rests on an interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment that effectively bars Congress from remedying the very inequities Callais unleashes—inequities the amendment itself was designed to eradicate and prevent.

• Gaby Goldstein in TPM on the the decision’s devastating impact on Black representation in state legislatures:

Most analysis since Callais has focused on Congress. But the devastation in state legislatures may be as bad or worse, and the consequences even more immediate for people’s daily lives. … Nearly half of all majority-minority state legislative districts in the South could simply disappear. 

A Second Redemption

The historical perspective on where Louisiana v. Callais fits into America’s fitful fight over its own racism:

• Thomas Zimmer:  

Because Louisiana v Callais is, in many ways, the culmination of a “backlash” against multiracial democracy, and because it will in turn fuel the escalating reactionary countermobilization, it signifies the end of a distinct phase in U.S. history. The Second Reconstruction is over; we are into the second “Redemption” now.

• David Cole:

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais may be the Roberts Court’s most radical and far-reaching yet, rivaled only by the 2022 elimination of the right to abortion. It will almost certainly usher in a bleaching of the nation’s legislative bodies—federal, state, and local—unlike anything this country has seen since the “Redemption” of 1873–1877 ended Reconstruction and returned white supremacists to power throughout the South.

Pay Attention to Virginia

The Trump DOJ launched two frontal attacks on elected Democrats in Virginia yesterday:

• The FBI raided the offices and business of Sen. L. Louise Lucas (D) of Portsmouth in what is reportedly a corruption probe that originated under the Biden administration but didn’t go anywhere in any public way until after it was reportedly pushed by then-acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan to boost Republicans before the midterm elections. Lucas, a Black woman, was one of the strongest, most outspoken proponents of Democrats’ recent mid-decade redistricting in Virginia.
• The Trump DOJ announced a civil rights probe of Steve Descano, the elected Democratic state prosecutor in Fairfax County, the state’s largest, over conservative complaints that he’s too lenient on criminal defendants who are undocumented immigrants. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon trumpeted the election-year investigation in typically MAGA terms: “This investigation will uncover whether this prosecutor is putting the community at risk in offering sweetheart deals to illegal immigrants charged with serious crimes.”

Quote of the Day

“We have a Department of Justice today that targets people for criminal prosecution simply because the president doesn’t like them. … We have a department that fails to move on cases because they might uncover facts that are inconvenient to narratives the president would like to press.”—former Special Counsel Jack Smith, in a video obtained by the NYT of remarks he made to a private gathering last month in D.C.

Criminalizing Political Opposition

As TPM’s Kosh Kovensky reported, MAGA goofball Sebastian Gorka finally rolled out a long-awaited Trumpified national counterterrorism strategy that ropes in purportedly left-wing ideologies as terroristic:

In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.

This is part of the MAGA long con of creating an amorphous shadowy oppositional strawman not just to repeatedly knock down but to justify using the powers of the state to stifle political opposition.

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Sword for Foes and Shield for Friends

It appears the Trump DOJ is 86-ing the campaign finance investigation into Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), Phil Williams of Newschannel 5 in Nashville reports.

There were already signs that the investigation, which began before Trump was re-elected, had stalled out since his second inauguration.

Then yesterday, Ogles notified the court that he was withdrawing his long-standing motions for the return of his phone and emails seized by the FBI because the Justice Department had agreed to give it back to him voluntarily without even examining it.

“In discussions with the Office of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice, the Government has advised defense counsel that it will promptly return or destroy the property and information obtained pursuant to the respective search warrants at issue,” Ogles’ attorneys said in the filing.

Ogles hailed the apparent end of the criminal probe.

“From the day the FBI showed up, I said this investigation should never have happened and that the Biden DOJ had no right to rummage through a sitting congressman’s legislative communications. Today, the Justice Department has effectively acknowledged I was right.”

Career prosecutors in Nashville withdrew from the case shortly after Trump re-took office, and the case was transferred to the Main Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which has since been decimated by the Trump II purges.

Ogles originally claimed that he’d personally loaned his 2022 congressional campaign $320,000. But in the wake of the fabulism and campaign finance fiasco surrounding the eventually expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), savvy investigative reporting from Newschannel 5’s Williams exposed a number of fabrications and exaggerations by Ogles and questioned whether Ogles had the financial resources to make such a loan, since his financial disclosure form didn’t even list a savings account.

Ogles later admitted the filing was in error and made an amended filing that reduced the personal loan amount to $20,000. The FBI executed a search warrant in the case in August 2024, seizing, among other things, Ogles’ cell phone. It also obtained a warrant to seize his personal email records from Google.

As is not uncommon in criminal investigations of sitting members of Congress, Ogles objected on constitutional grounds to the seizure of his phone and emails. The Justice Department agreed not to examine the seized material until a court ruling on the matter. The case has since languished, without a ruling from the court. The new agreement between Ogles and the Trump DOJ means the FBI will never review the materials, a sign the criminal case has or is about to be abandoned.

“This is a complete win for the responsible exercise of prosecutorial discretion and respect for the Constitution’s Separation of Powers,” Ogles said in his statement.

A separate but related House Ethics Committee investigation has also languished since January 2025.

Quote of the Day

“We can survive a lot: bad policies, funky elections. There’s a bunch of stuff we can overcome. We can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system — the awesome power of the state. You can’t have a situation in which whoever is in charge of the government starts using that to go after their political enemies or reward their friends.”—former President Barack Obama, in an interview with Stephen Colbert at the soon-to-open Obama Presidential Center in Chicago

Judge Refers DOJ Attorney for Possible Discipline

U.S. District Judge Melissa R. DuBose of Rhode Island said Tuesday she is referring a Trump DOJ attorney for possible discipline after he withheld from her the existence of an overseas arrest warrant for murder charges against a ICE detainee whom she ordered released.

Kevin M. Bolan, the head of the civil division of the Rhode Island U.S. Attorney’s Office, apologized to DuBose in court on Monday for failing to divulge the information to the court, saying ICE instructed him not to reveal it.

“It’s the candor and the lack of candor to this court that has to be addressed,” DuBose said Tuesday in making the referral of Bolan. “And it has to be fully investigated, so we don’t have anything like this happen again.”

DuBose was especially incensed because the Trump DHS issued a press release (the link is still live) titled “Activist Biden Judge Releases Violent Criminal Illegal Alien Wanted for Murder” even though the administration failed to inform her of the outstanding warrant.

Mass Deportation Watch

• Illinois: State police said Tuesday that they’re investigating the fatal ICE shooting of Mexican national Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez last summer in suburban Chicago.
• Minnesota: The Department of Veterans Affairs conducted internal investigations into employees who attended the vigil for VA ICU nurse Alex Pretti, who was shot and killed by federal immigration officers.
• Nationwide: The Trump administration is abandoning the accelerated training program it used to quickly deploy the thousands of recently hired ICE agents and will instead provide them with additional instruction in the field, Politico reports.

2026 Ephemera

• OH-09: Former ICE official Madison Sheahan lost the GOP primary to challenge Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D).
• OH-Guv: Vivek Ramaswamy won the GOP nomination for governor.
• MI: Democrats held onto a narrow majority in the state Senate on Tuesday by winning a special election in a closely divided district.
• IN: In the Republican primary, President Trump succeeded in ousting five incumbent GOP state senators who voted against his mid-decade redistricting proposal.

Lawless Boat Strike Campaign: 190 Deaths

Three people were killed Tuesday in a U.S. strike against an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the death toll to at least 190 in the lawless high-seas campaign.

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