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.