Coffee Break: Trump Loses in Indiana as the MAGA Civil War Rages On

The MAGA civil war intensified as POTUS Trump lost his battle to bully Indiana Republicans into redrawing their congressional districts. Are we seeing Trump 2.0’s mojo bleeding out?

Politico sees it that way:

Indeed, Trump’s lame duck status is on full display in almost every corner of his domestic agenda. The only place his call to end the filibuster has won approval so far is in Republican primaries. Congress rejected his health care plan before the Trump administration could fully roll it out. His boat strikes off the coasts of Central and South America face congressional scrutiny. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is in open rebellion. He caved on the release of the Epstein files after months of resistance. His $2,000 tariff checks for Americans seem as likely as his DOGE checks. His backed candidate for Miami mayor tanked, allowing a Democrat to win the office for the first time in nearly three decades. His handpicked Republican National Committee chair is predicting “a pending, looming disaster” in the midterms. (The caveat, of course, is that Joe Gruters said Trump is the only man who can save Republicans.) Just 31 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the economy; voters are expressing generational financial strain at a time he says the says the economy is “A+++++; and the expiration of the ACA subsidies threaten to hurt him.

All told, from the outside, Trump 2.0 appears at the nadir of its power.

Trump Took an Ugly Loss in Indiana

Indiana was on the frontlines of the MAGA civil war as Trump pushed for that state’s Republicans to help him stave off a 2026 midterm disaster by drawing new GOP districts.

Paul Blumenthal summed up the Indiana situation well for Huffington Post:

Twenty-one Republicans in the Indiana state Senate rejected President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign for new congressional maps that would have eliminated the state’s two House seats held by Democrats on Thursday.

The humiliating rejection for Trump came after he put the full weight of the White House and Republican Party apparatus to bear on the state Senate. Trump sent a dozen social media posts threatening GOP Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray and others for opposing redistricting with primary challenges. Vice President JD Vance made multiple trips to cajole lawmakers. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called individual state senators to push them to change their votes.

The pressure campaign peaked on Thursday shortly before the vote when Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, declared in a social media post on Thursday that Trump had threatened to cut off all funding to the state if the state Senate did not support redistricting. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, a Republican and staunch supporter of the redistricting effort, confirmed this in a since-deleted post on X.

This all-out push predictably led to acts of intimidation and threats and acts of violence targeting GOP state senators who opposed the effort.

CNN chronicled one particularly egregious example:

Jean Leising spoke at a breakfast this fall at her 8th grade grandson’s school. Hours later, when she was set to give him a ride home from basketball practice, he bashfully told her that his entire team had received text messages about her that day — “and they were all bad.”

Recounting the moment to CNN shortly after she joined 20 other Republican state senators in rejecting President Donald Trump’s redistricting push, Leising said she laughed the moment off with her grandson — but that it ultimately led to her opposing the president.

“Boy, when I got home that night, that’s when I decided,” said Leising, a 76-year-old grandmother of eight, first elected to the Senate in 1988. “I was angry. So the next day, I said, ‘I’ve got to talk about this.’ Because this is over the top. This shouldn’t be the way it was.”

“But that was the beginning,” she added. “It only got worse from there.”

This tweet from Vice-POTUS J.D. Vance, subtweeting Donald, Jr. gives the flavor of the MAGA Civil War, Indiana front:

Rod Bray, the Senate leader in Indiana, has consistently told us he wouldn’t fight redistricting while simultaneously whipping his members against it. That level of dishonesty cannot be rewarded, and the Indiana GOP needs to choose a side. https://t.co/63Vg7qkpDg

— JD Vance (@JDVance) December 11, 2025

The pressure campaign and the threats backfired. A majority of the 40 GOP state senators voted no. Given that Trump won Indiana in 2024 by 19 points, this is a huge loss for Trump.

And if it weren’t bad enough for Trump that he won’t get any extra GOP Congressional seats out of Indiana, there’s reason to believe he won’t get as many seats from Texas as he hoped.

Texas Redistricting Overreach?

The New York Times has the deets in their piece headlined, “Did Texas Republicans Overplay Their Hand on Redistricting?“:

When Texas Republicans redrew the state’s congressional map over the summer, they aimed to flip five districts held by Democrats and were guided by the 2024 presidential election results, which showed voters moving to the right.
…
With Hispanic voters showing signs of souring on President Trump in special elections this year and concerns mounting over the cost of living, Democrats believe they could hold on to as many as three of the redrawn seats in Texas, two in the Rio Grande Valley and possibly a third centered in and around San Antonio. The party is also looking at flipping a Republican seat in the Valley, little changed in its partisan makeup by the new map, where a popular Tejano music star is running as a moderate Democrat.

All told, the redistricting wars seem to be on pause, and at the moment appear to have been a net negative for Trump given their role in escalating the MAGA civil war and the fact that Trump no longer appears capable of redistricting his way out of losing the GOP House majority in 2026.

Meanwhile, we continue to learn more about the dysfunctional inside workings of Trump 2.0 and how they contribute to the MAGA civil war.

Barron Trump Saves the Tates

The New York Times had a piece last week describing a situation that could only happen under Trump 2.0.

For those who have been lucky enough to be oblivious of Andrew Tate, he’s a prominent member of the “manosphere” who has been under investigation in Romania for a panolopy of ugly charges including “coercing women into pornography. Andrew was also accused of rape and of having sex with and beating a 15-year-old.”

The Times piece details how he got Trump to help him out of that country:

The (Romanian) prosecutors were told to find a compromise with the Tates. Despite their misgivings, they lifted the travel restrictions, a move that Romania’s prime minister thought would appease the Trump administration.
…
Their arrival in the United States opened a rare rift among conservatives and raised suspicions over whether the White House had intervened.

The story details the Tates’ novel media and lobbying strategy:

As his notoriety grew, Andrew Tate shrewdly courted Tucker Carlson and other media stars of the right, who in turn tapped into the brothers’ loyal following to expand their own reach.

Andrew also nurtured relationships with Donald Trump Jr. and his younger brother Barron, who recognized the role that young male voters could play in their father’s return to power.

Barron, now 19, admired Andrew, and spoke with him over Zoom last year, according to Justin Waller, a mutual friend who was on the call. During the call, they discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates, he said.

After Mr. Trump’s re-election, some of the Tates’ supporters ascended into the new administration. One of them, the diplomatic envoy Richard Grenell, twice discussed their case with Romanian officials, The Times found.

Within days of the second conversation, the Romanian prosecutors received their marching orders and handed the Tates the freedom to travel…

The brothers’ liberation rattled many American diplomats, who feared a shadowy new era of foreign relations. And it prompted hostility from many traditional conservatives, from Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, to the commentator Megyn Kelly, who said, “This actually is toxic masculinity.” Some likened the Tates to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

This was the kind of thing Trump could get away with when he was riding high on his 2024 election but in retrospect it shows the fissures within his coalition were already forming in January.

Meanwhile another set of key Trump 2.0 insiders have been doing their part in Trump’s war on the financial establishment and federal bureaucracy.

Russell Vought’s Right Hand Man on the Frontlines vs the Federal Reserve

It’s been a while since I posted about Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the acting director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

As his ballooning portfolio implies, Vought is one Trumper who bears close scrutiny. As such Politico’s portrait of Mark Paoletta, Vought’s legal sidekick is a must read.

Trump stacked his second administration with a mix of loud bomb-throwers like Elon Musk and quiet types like Vought and Paoletta who have equally disruptive goals.

Given Musk’s flame out this summer, it’s clear that Vought and Paoletta are the more dangerous to the status quo long-term.

The Politico piece on Paoletta helps explain why.

It’s got gobs of detail on specific deeds Paoletta has undertaken while working under Vought but let’s focus on his role in the MAGA civil war:

Paoletta has advanced sweeping views of the president’s power over Congress, including authoring a memo one week after the inauguration that ordered a pause on all federal spending. Though the memo was quickly yanked back, it landed like a bombshell at virtually every agency and was a harbinger of spending fights to come.
…
When Trump turned up the pressure on the Federal Reserve over the summer, Paoletta wrote a letter from Vought to Jerome Powell, saying the federal reserve chair was not in compliance with the approved construction plan for renovations of the Federal Reserve’s Washington, DC headquarters.

Given Trump’s open disdain for Powell, whose 2017 appointment he is blaming on “bad advice” from then Treasury Secretary Steve Mnunchin in a new Wall Street Journal interview, I’m sure that made Paoletta’s bosses’ boss happy.

But let’s pull back a bit and look at some developments in the broader MAGA civil war, which is mostly being fought by media figures outside the administration.

MAGA vs MIGA Makes the MSM

I wrote a pair of posts in November on “America First vs. Israel First” and “TACO MIGA Breaks With MAGA Over the Epstein Files” and now the MSM is catching up.

The New York Times reports on Tucker Carlson’s latest broadsides against his enemies on the right.

Key nuggets:

In his appearance on “This Past Weekend with Theo Von,” posted on Tuesday, Mr. Carlson — a longtime ally of the president — offered searing personal attacks on Bari Weiss, the newly appointed head of CBS News, and the billionaire Bill Ackman, a major supporter of the president, denigrating their intelligence and qualifications, while also questioning the F.BI.’s investigation of Mr. Kirk’s murder.

Mr. Carlson pointedly suggested that the leadership of the country itself was mediocre and malignant.

“The most depressing thing about the United States in 2025 is that we’re led not just by bad people, but by unimpressive, dumb, totally noncreative people,” Mr. Carlson said.
…
On Mr. Von’s show, Mr. Carlson, whose own show has featured conspiracy theories about everything from 9/11 to chemtrails, also waded into this debate, expressing affection for Ms. Owens and said he didn’t “understand the official story at all.”

He cautioned that he wasn’t “alleging anything,” but added that “I just don’t have a ton of confidence in the F.B.I. or the men who run it,” noting, for instance, “leaders of the F.B.I. are on Twitter,” an apparent swipe at F.B.I. director Kash Patel, who is often online.

Tucker also went after Bari Weiss, the new head of CBS News, who was handpicked by Trump ally David Ellison immediately after he purchased the network:

Mr. Carlson’s comments about Ms. Weiss came after Mr. Von, a folksy host with a credulous demeanor, showed a clip of Ms. Weiss suggesting Mr. Carlson was “anti-American and anti-Jewish,” sentiments that have also been expressed by commentators in The Free Press, the “anti-woke” media company she founded.

Mr. Carlson shot back, calling Ms. Weiss “an idiot,” mendacious, and unqualified for her post.

“In no fair system, in no ‘meritocracy’ would Bari Weiss rise above secretary,” Mr. Carlson said, adding, “There is no world in which Bari Weiss would rise to the top of a news network except a rigged world.”

Carlson also took a side in Trump’s battle with MAGA congressional stalwarts Greene and Massie:

Mr. Carlson’s seeming alienation extended to praising several of Mr. Trump’s most avid Republican opponents in Congress — Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky — calling them two of the “very few honest members of Congress,” and lauding their sincerity.

Mr. Carlson also seemingly faulted the president for his approach to Israel and that country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu: “I love Trump personally. I still love Trump personally. But it was like that whole election was about ‘We’ve had enough of this.’”

Politico Sees the MAGA Civil War Impacting 2028

Politico’s Ian Ward has a mammoth piece purporting to dive into the origins of “the argument over the GOP’s support for Israel and its response to the rising tide of antisemitism” by interviewing (among others) Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Here’s how he introduces them:

The onset of this schism coincided with the war in Gaza, but it’s no mere accident of history. In fact, it’s the work of a specific group of conservative critics of Israel who have maneuvered — sometimes in unison and sometimes on their own — to push the debate to the center of the MAGA conversation. In their own telling, they are motivated by a desire to resolve a glaring contradiction between Trump’s “America First” philosophy and the U.S.’s ongoing support for Israel. In the eyes of their pro-Israel critics, these same figures are engaged in an ugly antisemitic exercise, cynically exploiting the fallout from the war to marginalize Jewish conservatives within MAGA. To varying degrees, the leading anti-Israel voices claim to have the sympathy of Trump himself who, despite repeatedly affirming his support for Israel and cracking down on pro-Palestinian figures on the left, has permitted even the most vocal Israel critics to remain in the MAGA fold.
…
Collectively, the various people I spent time with represent a genuinely novel force in the 21st-century American right: a bloc of anti-Israel conservatives who stand squarely within the Republican mainstream.

The piece leads with a long discourse about Pat Buchanan and the paleocons by way of introducing Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative.

The punchline isn’t long in coming:

…if Mills succeeds in turning Buchananism into the default ideology of MAGA’s young activist class, the same question that dogged Buchanan will dog them: Can the GOP become fully Buchananite without also becoming more hospitable to antisemitic figures like Fuentes?

Mounting evidence suggests that it cannot.

I shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the piece which is well-reported and not blatantly biased, but it’s the parts about 2028, Gen Z and the future of the GOP that are the most interesting.

Ward gets this quote from Majorie Taylor Greene about her political future:

Greene may not be off the scene for very long. Her feud with Trump and abrupt resignation have fueled rumors that she may run for president in 2028, which Greene has denied. But when we spoke, she hinted at a longer-term plan. When I asked if she had a plan for capitalizing on diminishing levels of support for Israel among Gen Z conservatives, she said she was looking beyond the horizons of the Republican Party.

“I don’t know that this generation is even going to support the two-party system at this point,” she replied. “I think I think Gen Z sees the two-party system as an utter failure, and I think they hate both sides for a variety of different reasons.” She added, “They are radically for America. I am one thousand percent for them.”

Ward also analyzes the 2028 GOP presidential field through the MAGA vs MIGA lens (without using the MIGA terminology):

By the next election, the anti-Israel right will be impossible to ignore. For his own part, Trump has responded to this new reality by standing behind his support for Israel while occasionally dropping the subtlest of hints that he senses a conflict between unconditional alliance and “America First.”

…that will be a difficult posture for Trump’s would-be successors to mimic, and the fight to stake out the true MAGA position on Israel is already shaping the nascent Republican field. Cruz, who is rumored to be laying the groundwork for a bid, leapt at the opportunity to criticize Carlson for the Fuentes interview, positioning himself as the leader of the GOP’s pro-Israel camp. Bannon, who has refused to rule out a run of his own, has planted a flag as the champion of the Israel skeptics, making improbable predictions like, “You’re going to see a huge move toxifying the money put in by AIPAC” ahead of the 2028 primary, as he put it to me. Caught in the middle is Vance, who has defended his support for Israel on “America First” grounds while remaining close to anti-Israel figures like Carlson and Bannon.

Regardless of what happens in 2028, almost all the conservatives I spoke with — including supporters of Israel — acknowledge that the rise of the anti-Israel right has fundamentally changed the right’s political landscape.

Was Elon Musk’s Epstein Tweet the Inflection Point?

To close I wanted to point out something that struck me looking at the latest Trump polling:

pic.twitter.com/ZfbdNwflXz

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) December 15, 2025

Note that the decline in Trump’s numbers coincides neatly with Elon Musk’s since-deleted June 5 tweet accusing the POTUS of being in the Epstein files.

Time to drop the really big bomb:@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.

Have a nice day, DJT!

Seems like Donald Trump’s second term might have been the first casualty of the MAGA civil wars.