The effort to overturn the 2020 election by organizing slates of alternate electors for President Donald Trump began in the swing state of Wisconsin. Now, the fitful attempt to hold those organizers accountable might hang on what happens there.

On Monday, three people charged in what became known as the “fake electors” plan are in court for a pretrial hearing in a case that is one of a vanishing few still moving forward.

Trump electors were central to the campaign’s attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent Joe Biden from being certified as winner of the 2020 election. Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to strong-arm Vice President Mike Pence into delaying the vote tally by Congress on the grounds that several states, including Wisconsin, had submitted “dual slates” of electors.

Why We Wrote This

Criminal cases against those accused of planning a “fake elector” scheme to keep President Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss have mostly run aground. In Wisconsin, a case involving three key figures in the effort might be headed for trial.

Those electors represent each state’s actual votes for president. If Mr. Pence, presiding over the vote tally in Congress, had agreed to Mr. Trump’s demand to count the alternate slates or to let Congress decide the winner, Mr. Trump could have remained in office despite Mr. Biden receiving more votes. After Mr. Pence refused, a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Nearly five years on, no campaign officials or advisers have been tried for organizing the fake electors in seven battleground states. A court in Georgia recently ended a criminal case in which Mr. Trump and 18 other defendants had been indicted in August 2023 for racketeering and other offenses. In September, a judge in Michigan dismissed a case against 15 Republicans charged with fraud for certifying Mr. Trump as the 2020 winner. Criminal prosecutions in other states have stalled or faced setbacks.

That makes Wisconsin a potential test case for accountability for what was considered a national crisis of democratic legitimacy, which continues to cast a shadow over how America’s elections are run.

Last year, Wisconsin charged three Trump allies over the fake-electors scheme. Two, James Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro, were attorneys for the Trump campaign; the third, Michael Roman, was Trump’s national director of Election Day operations. They each face 11 counts of alleged forgery, each carrying prison terms.

The three were among 77 people pardoned last month by Mr. Trump for all conduct relating to the scheme and “their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.” That pardon – largely symbolic because none face federal charges – doesn’t apply, however, to state courts. (Mr. Trump also has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.)

None of the 10 fake electors, who met secretly in Wisconsin’s statehouse on Dec. 14, 2020, as the state’s legitimate electors were casting their votes for Mr. Biden, has been charged. Instead, Wisconsin prosecutors are focusing on the people who developed the fake-elector strategy.

“It was these lawyers in Wisconsin who cooked up the whole scheme and exported it to the rest of the country,” says Jeff Mandell, the co-founder of Law Forward, a left-leaning law firm in Madison, Wisconsin.

In 2023, Wisconsin’s fake electors settled a civil lawsuit brought by Law Forward, admitting to their role in the scheme. Mr. Troupis, a retired judge who was Mr. Trump’s attorney in Wisconsin, and Mr. Chesebro, a New York attorney who has since been disbarred, were both part of the settlement. It included the release of emails, texts, and memos that detail how Mr. Chesebro’s legal theory of alternate electors was enthusiastically adopted by Mr. Troupis and shared with the Trump campaign. Mr. Chesebro then provided templates for other states to prepare slates of electors for Mr. Trump.

“They knew what they were doing, and now they’re trying to escape the consequences,” says Mr. Mandell, referring to defense motions to dismiss the case.

Joseph Bugni, a lawyer for Mr. Troupis, declined to comment on the felony charges. Lawyers for Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Roman didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.

Mr. Troupis criticized Wisconsin’s Attorney General Josh Kaul after his indictment, telling reporters at the courthouse that “this is a political case. This has nothing to do with the law.” He accused Mr. Kaul, a Democrat first elected in 2019, of hurting the cause of justice.

Last month, he told Steve Bannon’s “The War Room” show that Democrats wanted to put him on trial so that they could revive “the Jack Smith case,” referring to the federal indictment of Mr. Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 results, which was abandoned after the 2024 election. “They’re going to try the Jack Smith case in Dane County, Wisconsin, next summer on live television,” he said.

Scheme was “a fantasy” in Wisconsin

Mr. Troupis and others involved in the scheme have argued that Democrats did the same in 1960, when there was uncertainty about Hawaii’s presidential electors. Of the two slates of electors submitted to Congress, the votes ultimately went to John F. Kennedy.

But this analogy doesn’t hold water, says Michael Rosin, an independent legal scholar who has studied the 1960 election. Hawaii was holding a recount at the time, whereas Wisconsin had already held a recount that affirmed Mr. Biden’s narrow victory. The electors in Hawaii met openly in the same room with the state’s governor, who certified both sets of paperwork.

“In 1960, it was very important to the new state of Hawaii to do everything right,” he says.

The Republican electors in Wisconsin could have inserted legal language that made their votes conditional on the election result being reviewed by the Supreme Court, he says. But their slate would still not have been certified as alternate electors, as Hawaii’s was in 1960.

“This was just a fantasy on the part of Chesebro that they could change the path in Wisconsin and elsewhere,” Mr. Rosin says.

Mr. Chesebro was also among those indicted in Georgia’s election-interference case. He pleaded guilty in October 2023 to a single charge and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. By then, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had become a national political figure who seemed poised to bring Mr. Trump to trial. Mr. Chesebro’s inside knowledge of the fake-electors scheme, also pursued in Georgia, made him an important potential witness.

But Ms. Willis suffered a spectacular fall a few months later after it was revealed that she had hired a special prosecutor for the case with whom she was romantically involved. She was removed from the case last December. A judge ended the case last month after Ms. Willis’s replacement said it wasn’t feasible to proceed, as Mr. Trump’s presidential term would delay any trial for several years, depriving defendants of their right to a speedy trial.

“The legal question is really secondary to the practical questions,” says Anthony Michael Kreis, an associate professor of law at Georgia State University who has followed the case.

Mr. Trump’s criminal indictment in Georgia, where he had urged the state’s top election official in 2020 to “find” sufficient votes to flip the outcome, became fuel for his political comeback in 2024. Supporters rallied to defend him against what he called “lawfare” by Democratic prosecutors, and his campaign swept aside opponents in the Republican primary. His campaign sold branded items featuring Mr. Trump’s booking mugshot from Fulton County.

“A moment of potential reconciliation”

That the Georgia case has collapsed is regrettable, and not simply because justice had not run its course, says Professor Kreis. He says a trial would have served another purpose: setting the record straight about an election that Mr. Trump still falsely claims he won.

“It was fundamentally, in my view, a moment of potential reconciliation where people could see through evidence for their own selves that there was a group of people who were lying to the American public in order to keep themselves in power,” he says.

In 2022, Congress amended the Electoral Count Act to clarify the Vice President’s ceremonial role in the certification of votes in Congress.

After the presidential election in 2028, Vice President JD Vance, who is expected to seek the GOP nomination, would preside over that process. Mr. Vance said last year that had he been in Mr. Pence’s position, he would not have certified the 2020 election results and that states should have submitted “multiple slates” that Congress should “have fought over.”

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Mr. Mandell says he doesn’t expect a future presidential candidate to try another fake-electors scheme. But he argues that it’s still important to hold the Wisconsin masterminds of 2020 to account after Mr. Trump issued preemptive federal pardons.

“If the message is, ‘no harm no foul’ ... we create the incentives for something more extreme next time,” he says.

The effort to overturn the 2020 election by organizing slates of alternate electors for President Donald Trump began in the swing state of Wisconsin. Now, the fitful attempt to hold those organizers accountable might hang on what happens there.

On Monday, three people charged in what became known as the “fake electors” plan are in court for a pretrial hearing in a case that is one of a vanishing few still moving forward.

Trump electors were central to the campaign’s attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent Joe Biden from being certified as winner of the 2020 election. Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to strong-arm Vice President Mike Pence into delaying the vote tally by Congress on the grounds that several states, including Wisconsin, had submitted “dual slates” of electors.

Why We Wrote This

Criminal cases against those accused of planning a “fake elector” scheme to keep President Donald Trump in office after his 2020 election loss have mostly run aground. In Wisconsin, a case involving three key figures in the effort might be headed for trial.

Those electors represent each state’s actual votes for president. If Mr. Pence, presiding over the vote tally in Congress, had agreed to Mr. Trump’s demand to count the alternate slates or to let Congress decide the winner, Mr. Trump could have remained in office despite Mr. Biden receiving more votes. After Mr. Pence refused, a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Nearly five years on, no campaign officials or advisers have been tried for organizing the fake electors in seven battleground states. A court in Georgia recently ended a criminal case in which Mr. Trump and 18 other defendants had been indicted in August 2023 for racketeering and other offenses. In September, a judge in Michigan dismissed a case against 15 Republicans charged with fraud for certifying Mr. Trump as the 2020 winner. Criminal prosecutions in other states have stalled or faced setbacks.

That makes Wisconsin a potential test case for accountability for what was considered a national crisis of democratic legitimacy, which continues to cast a shadow over how America’s elections are run.

Last year, Wisconsin charged three Trump allies over the fake-electors scheme. Two, James Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro, were attorneys for the Trump campaign; the third, Michael Roman, was Trump’s national director of Election Day operations. They each face 11 counts of alleged forgery, each carrying prison terms.

The three were among 77 people pardoned last month by Mr. Trump for all conduct relating to the scheme and “their efforts to expose voting fraud and vulnerabilities in the 2020 Presidential Election.” That pardon – largely symbolic because none face federal charges – doesn’t apply, however, to state courts. (Mr. Trump also has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.)

None of the 10 fake electors, who met secretly in Wisconsin’s statehouse on Dec. 14, 2020, as the state’s legitimate electors were casting their votes for Mr. Biden, has been charged. Instead, Wisconsin prosecutors are focusing on the people who developed the fake-elector strategy.

“It was these lawyers in Wisconsin who cooked up the whole scheme and exported it to the rest of the country,” says Jeff Mandell, the co-founder of Law Forward, a left-leaning law firm in Madison, Wisconsin.

In 2023, Wisconsin’s fake electors settled a civil lawsuit brought by Law Forward, admitting to their role in the scheme. Mr. Troupis, a retired judge who was Mr. Trump’s attorney in Wisconsin, and Mr. Chesebro, a New York attorney who has since been disbarred, were both part of the settlement. It included the release of emails, texts, and memos that detail how Mr. Chesebro’s legal theory of alternate electors was enthusiastically adopted by Mr. Troupis and shared with the Trump campaign. Mr. Chesebro then provided templates for other states to prepare slates of electors for Mr. Trump.

“They knew what they were doing, and now they’re trying to escape the consequences,” says Mr. Mandell, referring to defense motions to dismiss the case.

Joseph Bugni, a lawyer for Mr. Troupis, declined to comment on the felony charges. Lawyers for Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Roman didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.

Mr. Troupis criticized Wisconsin’s Attorney General Josh Kaul after his indictment, telling reporters at the courthouse that “this is a political case. This has nothing to do with the law.” He accused Mr. Kaul, a Democrat first elected in 2019, of hurting the cause of justice.

Last month, he told Steve Bannon’s “The War Room” show that Democrats wanted to put him on trial so that they could revive “the Jack Smith case,” referring to the federal indictment of Mr. Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 results, which was abandoned after the 2024 election. “They’re going to try the Jack Smith case in Dane County, Wisconsin, next summer on live television,” he said.

Scheme was “a fantasy” in Wisconsin

Mr. Troupis and others involved in the scheme have argued that Democrats did the same in 1960, when there was uncertainty about Hawaii’s presidential electors. Of the two slates of electors submitted to Congress, the votes ultimately went to John F. Kennedy.

But this analogy doesn’t hold water, says Michael Rosin, an independent legal scholar who has studied the 1960 election. Hawaii was holding a recount at the time, whereas Wisconsin had already held a recount that affirmed Mr. Biden’s narrow victory. The electors in Hawaii met openly in the same room with the state’s governor, who certified both sets of paperwork.

“In 1960, it was very important to the new state of Hawaii to do everything right,” he says.

The Republican electors in Wisconsin could have inserted legal language that made their votes conditional on the election result being reviewed by the Supreme Court, he says. But their slate would still not have been certified as alternate electors, as Hawaii’s was in 1960.

“This was just a fantasy on the part of Chesebro that they could change the path in Wisconsin and elsewhere,” Mr. Rosin says.

Mr. Chesebro was also among those indicted in Georgia’s election-interference case. He pleaded guilty in October 2023 to a single charge and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. By then, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had become a national political figure who seemed poised to bring Mr. Trump to trial. Mr. Chesebro’s inside knowledge of the fake-electors scheme, also pursued in Georgia, made him an important potential witness.

But Ms. Willis suffered a spectacular fall a few months later after it was revealed that she had hired a special prosecutor for the case with whom she was romantically involved. She was removed from the case last December. A judge ended the case last month after Ms. Willis’s replacement said it wasn’t feasible to proceed, as Mr. Trump’s presidential term would delay any trial for several years, depriving defendants of their right to a speedy trial.

“The legal question is really secondary to the practical questions,” says Anthony Michael Kreis, an associate professor of law at Georgia State University who has followed the case.

Mr. Trump’s criminal indictment in Georgia, where he had urged the state’s top election official in 2020 to “find” sufficient votes to flip the outcome, became fuel for his political comeback in 2024. Supporters rallied to defend him against what he called “lawfare” by Democratic prosecutors, and his campaign swept aside opponents in the Republican primary. His campaign sold branded items featuring Mr. Trump’s booking mugshot from Fulton County.

“A moment of potential reconciliation”

That the Georgia case has collapsed is regrettable, and not simply because justice had not run its course, says Professor Kreis. He says a trial would have served another purpose: setting the record straight about an election that Mr. Trump still falsely claims he won.

“It was fundamentally, in my view, a moment of potential reconciliation where people could see through evidence for their own selves that there was a group of people who were lying to the American public in order to keep themselves in power,” he says.

In 2022, Congress amended the Electoral Count Act to clarify the Vice President’s ceremonial role in the certification of votes in Congress.

After the presidential election in 2028, Vice President JD Vance, who is expected to seek the GOP nomination, would preside over that process. Mr. Vance said last year that had he been in Mr. Pence’s position, he would not have certified the 2020 election results and that states should have submitted “multiple slates” that Congress should “have fought over.”

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with Monitor Highlights.

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Mr. Mandell says he doesn’t expect a future presidential candidate to try another fake-electors scheme. But he argues that it’s still important to hold the Wisconsin masterminds of 2020 to account after Mr. Trump issued preemptive federal pardons.

“If the message is, ‘no harm no foul’ ... we create the incentives for something more extreme next time,” he says.

It is a political challenge as tough as any in the modern era: inflation.

This week, President Donald Trump may have made the issue even more challenging for himself and his Republican Party as they gear up for next fall’s midterm congressional elections.

Almost 11 months into his second term, President Trump began the week by giving the economy a superlative grade: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

Why We Wrote This

With his approval rating for economic leadership dropping in polls, President Trump has tried to downplay voters’ concerns about affordability. The same problem that tripped up Joe Biden is now dogging Mr. Trump.

Then, in a speech Tuesday in rural Pennsylvania billed as the launch of an “affordability tour” aimed at reassuring voters about the economy, Mr. Trump mocked the idea of affordability.

Moments later, he reversed himself.

“I can’t say affordability is a hoax,” the president told a packed ballroom at a casino resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.

In real time, Mr. Trump is playing out the classic conundrum of a newly elected president seeking to forestall the fate of many a predecessor: a midterm election drubbing that severely limits his ability to pass his agenda through Congress.

For now, the president is trying to convince voters that their economic situation isn’t that bad, even if they’re struggling to make ends meet. Despite optimism rooted in lower interest rates and a strong stock market, inflation remains hard to tame. It continues to run relatively hot at 3% as of September, according to the most recent monthly report available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%.

The challenge for President Trump is to acknowledge reality while helping voters to still feel hopeful.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative-leaning American Action Forum think tank, says Mr. Trump needs to give voice to the reality that voters are living.

“It’s not effective to tell people they’re wrong about what they’re paying for things,” says Mr. Holtz-Eakin.

Falling poll numbers on economic leadership

The latest public opinion polls put Mr. Trump’s challenge in sharp relief. The AP-NORC survey released Dec. 11 puts the president’s approval rating on economic leadership at just 31%, down from 40% in March. The December figure is his lowest economic approval rating in that poll for either his first or second term. The RealClearPolitics polling average similarly shows the president underwater on the economy.

Mr. Trump’s overall job approval rating is now 36%, according to AP-NORC, down from 42% in March. Among Republicans, he’s still relatively strong at 69%.

But the overall numbers reflect the president’s challenge as voters square their personal circumstances with their voting preferences.

“Fundamentally, I think the problem is that voters are still [ticked] off at the fact that the prices are 25% to 30% higher than they were five years ago,” says Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Trump is frustrated with this, because there’s not a great deal that he can do to get them down dramatically across the board.”

Mr. Bourne adds that for most of this year, wages have been growing faster than prices, but “despite that, people are still annoyed.”

Another major factor that could play into voters’ calculations is health care. On Thursday, the Senate rejected proposals from both Republicans and Democrats to address health care subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. With Congress set to recess for the holidays, this effectively ensures more than 20 million Americans who get their health care through the Obamacare exchanges will see their premiums rise substantially on Jan. 1.

Managing expectations

For Mr. Trump, his administration, and the Republican Party, the challenge will be to manage expectations. At his Pennsylvania rally this week, the president delivered a 90-minute speech that was classic Trump: part prepared remarks, part greatest hits from his campaigns, part seeming stream of consciousness.

Whether that’s effective messaging is an open question. The MAGA faithful are happy he’s back doing rallies in the U.S., after a first year back in office dominated by foreign travels and diplomatic ventures. But presidential favorability ratings pivot heavily around the economy, fairly or not, and Mr. Trump is now trying to convince voters he’s on the case.

After his contradictory messaging at the Pennsylvania rally, it wasn’t clear how the president’s “affordability tour” would proceed.

On Friday, the White House announced that Vice President JD Vance will visit Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 16 to “deliver remarks celebrating President Trump’s economic success and the administration’s commitment to lower prices and bigger paychecks.”

The key is to make sure Trump supporters are motivated to turn out in the midterms next November, when Republicans are in serious danger of losing the House. Retaking the Senate, while a longer reach for Democrats, isn’t completely out of the question.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s second-term focus on glamming up the White House – building a large ballroom, gilding the Oval Office, transforming the Rose Garden into a garden café – and mingling with billionaires may not be helping his image with the swing voters he will need to win over.

Managing the message

The overarching message to voters needs to be realistic, says Mr. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

“If I were on the economic team in this White House, I would not be talking about prices at all or inflation at all,” he says. “I would be talking about the overall policies, taken as a whole, being there to guarantee that Americans have got good jobs with rising wages so they can afford the things that they value.”

Mr. Bourne, the Cato economist, sees opportunities for Democrats to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s mixed messaging on affordability – which, in Pennsylvania, included a repeat of his infamous comment that “you don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”

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with Monitor Highlights.

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Democrats can use the fact that “people are frustrated that Trump isn’t able to get the price level back down to where it was in 2019,” Mr. Bourne says.

“For certain people who are directly affected by the president’s tariffs, whether that’s households or businesses, it can feel like in some areas, Trump has made the situation worse, needlessly.”

It is a political challenge as tough as any in the modern era: inflation.

This week, President Donald Trump may have made the issue even more challenging for himself and his Republican Party as they gear up for next fall’s midterm congressional elections.

Almost 11 months into his second term, President Trump began the week by giving the economy a superlative grade: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

Why We Wrote This

With his approval rating for economic leadership dropping in polls, President Trump has tried to downplay voters’ concerns about affordability. The same problem that tripped up Joe Biden is now dogging Mr. Trump.

Then, in a speech Tuesday in rural Pennsylvania billed as the launch of an “affordability tour” aimed at reassuring voters about the economy, Mr. Trump mocked the idea of affordability.

Moments later, he reversed himself.

“I can’t say affordability is a hoax,” the president told a packed ballroom at a casino resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.

In real time, Mr. Trump is playing out the classic conundrum of a newly elected president seeking to forestall the fate of many a predecessor: a midterm election drubbing that severely limits his ability to pass his agenda through Congress.

For now, the president is trying to convince voters that their economic situation isn’t that bad, even if they’re struggling to make ends meet. Despite optimism rooted in lower interest rates and a strong stock market, inflation remains hard to tame. It continues to run relatively hot at 3% as of September, according to the most recent monthly report available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%.

The challenge for President Trump is to acknowledge reality while helping voters to still feel hopeful.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative-leaning American Action Forum think tank, says Mr. Trump needs to give voice to the reality that voters are living.

“It’s not effective to tell people they’re wrong about what they’re paying for things,” says Mr. Holtz-Eakin.

Falling poll numbers on economic leadership

The latest public opinion polls put Mr. Trump’s challenge in sharp relief. The AP-NORC survey released Dec. 11 puts the president’s approval rating on economic leadership at just 31%, down from 40% in March. The December figure is his lowest economic approval rating in that poll for either his first or second term. The RealClearPolitics polling average similarly shows the president underwater on the economy.

Mr. Trump’s overall job approval rating is now 36%, according to AP-NORC, down from 42% in March. Among Republicans, he’s still relatively strong at 69%.

But the overall numbers reflect the president’s challenge as voters square their personal circumstances with their voting preferences.

“Fundamentally, I think the problem is that voters are still [ticked] off at the fact that the prices are 25% to 30% higher than they were five years ago,” says Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Trump is frustrated with this, because there’s not a great deal that he can do to get them down dramatically across the board.”

Mr. Bourne adds that for most of this year, wages have been growing faster than prices, but “despite that, people are still annoyed.”

Another major factor that could play into voters’ calculations is health care. On Thursday, the Senate rejected proposals from both Republicans and Democrats to address health care subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year with the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. With Congress set to recess for the holidays, this effectively ensures more than 20 million Americans who get their health care through the Obamacare exchanges will see their premiums rise substantially on Jan. 1.

Managing expectations

For Mr. Trump, his administration, and the Republican Party, the challenge will be to manage expectations. At his Pennsylvania rally this week, the president delivered a 90-minute speech that was classic Trump: part prepared remarks, part greatest hits from his campaigns, part seeming stream of consciousness.

Whether that’s effective messaging is an open question. The MAGA faithful are happy he’s back doing rallies in the U.S., after a first year back in office dominated by foreign travels and diplomatic ventures. But presidential favorability ratings pivot heavily around the economy, fairly or not, and Mr. Trump is now trying to convince voters he’s on the case.

After his contradictory messaging at the Pennsylvania rally, it wasn’t clear how the president’s “affordability tour” would proceed.

On Friday, the White House announced that Vice President JD Vance will visit Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 16 to “deliver remarks celebrating President Trump’s economic success and the administration’s commitment to lower prices and bigger paychecks.”

The key is to make sure Trump supporters are motivated to turn out in the midterms next November, when Republicans are in serious danger of losing the House. Retaking the Senate, while a longer reach for Democrats, isn’t completely out of the question.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s second-term focus on glamming up the White House – building a large ballroom, gilding the Oval Office, transforming the Rose Garden into a garden café – and mingling with billionaires may not be helping his image with the swing voters he will need to win over.

Managing the message

The overarching message to voters needs to be realistic, says Mr. Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

“If I were on the economic team in this White House, I would not be talking about prices at all or inflation at all,” he says. “I would be talking about the overall policies, taken as a whole, being there to guarantee that Americans have got good jobs with rising wages so they can afford the things that they value.”

Mr. Bourne, the Cato economist, sees opportunities for Democrats to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s mixed messaging on affordability – which, in Pennsylvania, included a repeat of his infamous comment that “you don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

Already a subscriber? Log in to hide ads.

Democrats can use the fact that “people are frustrated that Trump isn’t able to get the price level back down to where it was in 2019,” Mr. Bourne says.

“For certain people who are directly affected by the president’s tariffs, whether that’s households or businesses, it can feel like in some areas, Trump has made the situation worse, needlessly.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the U.S. government spent an unprecedented amount of money to prop up the economy and aid Americans whose daily lives had come to a sudden halt. Between 2020 and 2021, President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden signed a combined six laws shelling out over $5 trillion – helping small businesses guarantee paychecks and paying for COVID-19 tests. The money also went toward health care and housing support, and to things like emergency food programs for children going without free school lunches.

A lot of the money, it turns out, went to fraudsters.

Five years on, the total amount of pandemic relief fraud remains unknown, with estimates ranging from hundreds of billions of dollars to $1 trillion. While federal investigators, private experts, and even citizen sleuths continue to uncover new schemes, they say much of the stolen money may never be identified, much less recovered.

Why We Wrote This

A high-profile fraud case in Minnesota has spotlighted the lack of safeguards during the COVID-19 pandemic surrounding funds intended to prop up vulnerable Americans. The looting of taxpayer dollars holds lessons about the social safety net and the federal bureaucracy that oversees it.

The latest high-profile example has come out of Minnesota, where a local nonprofit obtained more than $240 million to feed hungry children but instead spent the money on luxury cars and real estate. Prosecutors say the sprawling Minnesota case, which continues to expand (a 78th defendant was charged late last month), is linked to a web of other “massive fraud schemes,” including some involving the state’s housing support program, that together could exceed $1 billion. The state’s acting U.S. attorney said in announcing charges this fall that the depth of the fraud “feels never ending,” adding, it “takes my breath away.”

Many of the Minnesota defendants are of Somali descent, which has added fuel to debates over immigration policies as well as the state’s social safety net, which ranks among the most generous in the country. Conservatives have excoriated Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and his administration for mismanagement of taxpayer dollars, and point to the state as an example of the unintended consequences of big government spending. Governor Walz, who is running for a third term next year, has defended the state’s Somali community while signing an executive order to combat fraud within state programs and moving to shut down the housing program altogether.

Yet while the Trump administration has made targeting government waste, fraud, and abuse a stated priority of the president’s second term, experts say little is being done at the federal level to correct the systematic problems and lack of oversight that allowed so much taxpayer money to be pillaged.

Lessons about pandemic spending and fraud remain relevant today, as Washington debates the merits and efficacy of the welfare state and the federal bureaucracy that manages it. This month, members of Congress are considering whether to extend tens of billions of dollars in enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that were enacted as part of one pandemic spending bill. Many congressional Republicans have been citing a recent watchdog report that found a high percentage of fraudulent accounts as a reason to let them expire.

“There are examples based on hard experiences from the pandemic that should be built into any response to a recession going forward,” says Matt Weidinger, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who previously worked on the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee, which oversees unemployment benefits. “One of my roles in life now is to make this argument: Don’t do the stuff that was so objectively wrong during the pandemic again.”

“We operated in a trust system”

Many experts say they expected some fraud during the pandemic, given the vast sums of money being spent in a hurry. The CARES Act alone, signed by President Trump in late March 2020, sent out more than $2 trillion, making it the largest stimulus package in U.S. history. Just one part of the CARES Act, the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program, also known as PPP, was equivalent in size to the entire stimulus package that Congress passed in response to the 2008 recession.

Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, a company that works with governments to detect fraud, estimates that roughly 8% of government funds are routinely stolen due to fraud. That’s in line with an April 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimating government-wide fraud between 2018 and 2022 to be between 3% and 7%. But Mr. Talcove estimates this percentage went up to 20% for pandemic spending, with $1 trillion of the $5 trillion spent going to fraud.

Other estimates put the fraud total in the hundreds of billions, such as a 2023 analysis by The Associated Press that suggested 10% of pandemic relief funding went to fraud, with $280 billion stolen and $123 billion misspent. Government agencies have been slow to update pandemic fraud estimates in recent years, which Mr. Weidinger attributes to “embarrassment and desire to move on,” given how unlikely it is the government will get much of this money back.

Experts agree that three programs in particular accounted for much of the pandemic-era fraud: the Small Business Association’s COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program and PPP, as well as the expanded unemployment insurance program. In many ways, these new or expanded programs were unique to that moment in time. Government officials – both Republicans and Democrats – believed speed was of the essence to prevent economic catastrophe. Some guardrails were removed either intentionally or as a result of changed circumstances (most field offices that typically verify identities for benefits were closed).

The Small Business Association (SBA), for example, distributed $343 billion in partially or fully forgiven PPP loans to small businesses to cover payrolls and other expenses in just the first two weeks. This allowed many businesses to forgo immediate layoffs amid stay-at-home orders. But in the name of speed, the government let prospective borrowers “self-certify” that their information was valid and that their businesses actually existed.

“We operated in a trust system,” says Mr. Talcove. He and other experts say that speed shouldn’t have come at the cost of basic identification requirements.

A 2023 report from the SBA found that of the $1.2 trillion in PPP and EIDL spending, $200 billion, or 17%, was disbursed to fraudsters. A 2023 GAO report flagged 3.7 million of the 13.4 million PPP and EIDL recipients, or 27%, as potentially fraudulent.

Self-certification also contributed to high levels of unemployment insurance fraud. Mr. Weidinger describes this as a one-two punch: The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program offered benefits to workers previously not covered by unemployment insurance programs, such as independent contractors and the self-employed, who were then allowed to claim retroactive benefits. Essentially, says Blake Hall, co-founder of ID.me, which partnered with some states during the pandemic to help with identification, the government allowed applicants to “pinky promise” that they were newly out of work.

Mr. Hall cites an example out of Arizona, where his company was hired to help with identity verification for PUA claims. Half a year into the pandemic, there were hundreds of thousands of initial claims filed in a single week alone – an improbable number for a state of roughly 7 million (including children), says Mr. Hall. After ID.me services were implemented, such spikes didn't recur.

The government also added hundreds of dollars onto typical unemployment checks. As a result, “the reward for being a bad guy went up by record amounts,” says Mr. Weidinger. “Astonishing amounts of money were sent through this system that had very little in the way of identity verification, much less work verification. ... The bad guys quickly figured this out.”

The GAO has estimated that $100 billion to $135 billion of unemployment insurance, or between 11% and 15%, went to fraudsters. Mr. Hall puts the estimate closer to $400 billion, a number Mr. Weidinger agrees is likely closer to the actual number than the government’s calculations. Mr. Talcove thinks the amount is somewhere in the middle, around $250 billion.

“The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it exists,” says Mr. Hall. But fraud on this scale can be a hard thing for governments to admit to. “No government wants to be known as the administration that lost all this money to fraud.”

Efforts to recover stolen funds

Some of the stolen money has actually been clawed back. But not much.

As of April 2024, the Department of Justice had criminally charged more than 3,500 defendants and recovered more than $1.4 billion in seized or forfeited CARES Act funds. That’s less than 1% of what was stolen from just the two SBA programs alone.

A congressional report from earlier this year says that the Department of Labor has recovered $5 billion in stolen unemployment insurance funds – roughly 4% of what was lost, according to the government’s estimate. Since April 1, 2020, the Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General (DOL-OIG) has opened more than 200,000 investigations into the unemployment insurance program – a thousandfold increase compared with before the pandemic, when unemployment insurance made up 11% of its case inventory (as of 2025, it is 96%). With fewer than 130 criminal investigators, the DOL-OIG has focused on large-scale theft schemes that “pose the greatest risk” to the unemployment insurance program.

And there is a larger question of whether more can now legally be recovered. The Senate failed to vote on the Pandemic Unemployment Fraud Enforcement Act, which passed the House earlier this year, and which would have extended the statute of limitations on pandemic unemployment insurance fraud from five to 10 years. President Biden did sign laws in 2022 that extended the statute of limitations for tracking down fraud within the SBA’s pandemic programs; a 2023 update said that almost $30 billion in EIDL and PPP funds were seized or returned, or about 15% of what was stolen.

But as prosecutors continue to hunt down stolen PPP funds, experts say Washington needs to be looking forward. Even if another pandemic is unlikely, a recession may well come at some point, and many of the enhanced benefit structures that the federal government uses to prop up the economy in those circumstances are similar.

Rather than the federal government just throwing additional dollars at states to distribute through their unemployment insurance programs, there should be a “shared partnership,” says Mr. Weidinger, with “clearer lines of responsibility.” Getting money to people quickly doesn’t need to come at the expense of basic verifications, such as running applicants’ names through the Treasury Department’s “Do Not Pay” database or confirming that the same individuals are not receiving unemployment benefits from multiple states.

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As former SBA Inspector General Hannibal Ware told The Associated Press, an extra few days of checking applications during the pandemic would not have upended the program or forced businesses to shutter.

“You have to have some oversight,” says Mr. Talcove. “And it doesn’t mean that you are trying to deny a benefit.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the U.S. government spent an unprecedented amount of money to prop up the economy and aid Americans whose daily lives had come to a sudden halt. Between 2020 and 2021, President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden signed a combined six laws shelling out over $5 trillion – helping small businesses guarantee paychecks and paying for COVID-19 tests. The money also went toward health care and housing support, and to things like emergency food programs for children going without free school lunches.

A lot of the money, it turns out, went to fraudsters.

Five years on, the total amount of pandemic relief fraud remains unknown, with estimates ranging from hundreds of billions of dollars to $1 trillion. While federal investigators, private experts, and even citizen sleuths continue to uncover new schemes, they say much of the stolen money may never be identified, much less recovered.

Why We Wrote This

A high-profile fraud case in Minnesota has spotlighted the lack of safeguards during the COVID-19 pandemic surrounding funds intended to prop up vulnerable Americans. The looting of taxpayer dollars holds lessons about the social safety net and the federal bureaucracy that oversees it.

The latest high-profile example has come out of Minnesota, where a local nonprofit obtained more than $240 million to feed hungry children but instead spent the money on luxury cars and real estate. Prosecutors say the sprawling Minnesota case, which continues to expand (a 78th defendant was charged late last month), is linked to a web of other “massive fraud schemes,” including some involving the state’s housing support program, that together could exceed $1 billion. The state’s acting U.S. attorney said in announcing charges this fall that the depth of the fraud “feels never ending,” adding, it “takes my breath away.”

Many of the Minnesota defendants are of Somali descent, which has added fuel to debates over immigration policies as well as the state’s social safety net, which ranks among the most generous in the country. Conservatives have excoriated Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and his administration for mismanagement of taxpayer dollars, and point to the state as an example of the unintended consequences of big government spending. Governor Walz, who is running for a third term next year, has defended the state’s Somali community while signing an executive order to combat fraud within state programs and moving to shut down the housing program altogether.

Yet while the Trump administration has made targeting government waste, fraud, and abuse a stated priority of the president’s second term, experts say little is being done at the federal level to correct the systematic problems and lack of oversight that allowed so much taxpayer money to be pillaged.

Lessons about pandemic spending and fraud remain relevant today, as Washington debates the merits and efficacy of the welfare state and the federal bureaucracy that manages it. This month, members of Congress are considering whether to extend tens of billions of dollars in enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that were enacted as part of one pandemic spending bill. Many congressional Republicans have been citing a recent watchdog report that found a high percentage of fraudulent accounts as a reason to let them expire.

“There are examples based on hard experiences from the pandemic that should be built into any response to a recession going forward,” says Matt Weidinger, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who previously worked on the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means Committee, which oversees unemployment benefits. “One of my roles in life now is to make this argument: Don’t do the stuff that was so objectively wrong during the pandemic again.”

“We operated in a trust system”

Many experts say they expected some fraud during the pandemic, given the vast sums of money being spent in a hurry. The CARES Act alone, signed by President Trump in late March 2020, sent out more than $2 trillion, making it the largest stimulus package in U.S. history. Just one part of the CARES Act, the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program, also known as PPP, was equivalent in size to the entire stimulus package that Congress passed in response to the 2008 recession.

Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions for Government, a company that works with governments to detect fraud, estimates that roughly 8% of government funds are routinely stolen due to fraud. That’s in line with an April 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimating government-wide fraud between 2018 and 2022 to be between 3% and 7%. But Mr. Talcove estimates this percentage went up to 20% for pandemic spending, with $1 trillion of the $5 trillion spent going to fraud.

Other estimates put the fraud total in the hundreds of billions, such as a 2023 analysis by The Associated Press that suggested 10% of pandemic relief funding went to fraud, with $280 billion stolen and $123 billion misspent. Government agencies have been slow to update pandemic fraud estimates in recent years, which Mr. Weidinger attributes to “embarrassment and desire to move on,” given how unlikely it is the government will get much of this money back.

Experts agree that three programs in particular accounted for much of the pandemic-era fraud: the Small Business Association’s COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program and PPP, as well as the expanded unemployment insurance program. In many ways, these new or expanded programs were unique to that moment in time. Government officials – both Republicans and Democrats – believed speed was of the essence to prevent economic catastrophe. Some guardrails were removed either intentionally or as a result of changed circumstances (most field offices that typically verify identities for benefits were closed).

The Small Business Association (SBA), for example, distributed $343 billion in partially or fully forgiven PPP loans to small businesses to cover payrolls and other expenses in just the first two weeks. This allowed many businesses to forgo immediate layoffs amid stay-at-home orders. But in the name of speed, the government let prospective borrowers “self-certify” that their information was valid and that their businesses actually existed.

“We operated in a trust system,” says Mr. Talcove. He and other experts say that speed shouldn’t have come at the cost of basic identification requirements.

A 2023 report from the SBA found that of the $1.2 trillion in PPP and EIDL spending, $200 billion, or 17%, was disbursed to fraudsters. A 2023 GAO report flagged 3.7 million of the 13.4 million PPP and EIDL recipients, or 27%, as potentially fraudulent.

Self-certification also contributed to high levels of unemployment insurance fraud. Mr. Weidinger describes this as a one-two punch: The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program offered benefits to workers previously not covered by unemployment insurance programs, such as independent contractors and the self-employed, who were then allowed to claim retroactive benefits. Essentially, says Blake Hall, co-founder of ID.me, which partnered with some states during the pandemic to help with identification, the government allowed applicants to “pinky promise” that they were newly out of work.

Mr. Hall cites an example out of Arizona, where his company was hired to help with identity verification for PUA claims. Half a year into the pandemic, there were hundreds of thousands of initial claims filed in a single week alone – an improbable number for a state of roughly 7 million (including children), says Mr. Hall. After ID.me services were implemented, such spikes didn't recur.

The government also added hundreds of dollars onto typical unemployment checks. As a result, “the reward for being a bad guy went up by record amounts,” says Mr. Weidinger. “Astonishing amounts of money were sent through this system that had very little in the way of identity verification, much less work verification. ... The bad guys quickly figured this out.”

The GAO has estimated that $100 billion to $135 billion of unemployment insurance, or between 11% and 15%, went to fraudsters. Mr. Hall puts the estimate closer to $400 billion, a number Mr. Weidinger agrees is likely closer to the actual number than the government’s calculations. Mr. Talcove thinks the amount is somewhere in the middle, around $250 billion.

“The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it exists,” says Mr. Hall. But fraud on this scale can be a hard thing for governments to admit to. “No government wants to be known as the administration that lost all this money to fraud.”

Efforts to recover stolen funds

Some of the stolen money has actually been clawed back. But not much.

As of April 2024, the Department of Justice had criminally charged more than 3,500 defendants and recovered more than $1.4 billion in seized or forfeited CARES Act funds. That’s less than 1% of what was stolen from just the two SBA programs alone.

A congressional report from earlier this year says that the Department of Labor has recovered $5 billion in stolen unemployment insurance funds – roughly 4% of what was lost, according to the government’s estimate. Since April 1, 2020, the Department of Labor’s Office of the Inspector General (DOL-OIG) has opened more than 200,000 investigations into the unemployment insurance program – a thousandfold increase compared with before the pandemic, when unemployment insurance made up 11% of its case inventory (as of 2025, it is 96%). With fewer than 130 criminal investigators, the DOL-OIG has focused on large-scale theft schemes that “pose the greatest risk” to the unemployment insurance program.

And there is a larger question of whether more can now legally be recovered. The Senate failed to vote on the Pandemic Unemployment Fraud Enforcement Act, which passed the House earlier this year, and which would have extended the statute of limitations on pandemic unemployment insurance fraud from five to 10 years. President Biden did sign laws in 2022 that extended the statute of limitations for tracking down fraud within the SBA’s pandemic programs; a 2023 update said that almost $30 billion in EIDL and PPP funds were seized or returned, or about 15% of what was stolen.

But as prosecutors continue to hunt down stolen PPP funds, experts say Washington needs to be looking forward. Even if another pandemic is unlikely, a recession may well come at some point, and many of the enhanced benefit structures that the federal government uses to prop up the economy in those circumstances are similar.

Rather than the federal government just throwing additional dollars at states to distribute through their unemployment insurance programs, there should be a “shared partnership,” says Mr. Weidinger, with “clearer lines of responsibility.” Getting money to people quickly doesn’t need to come at the expense of basic verifications, such as running applicants’ names through the Treasury Department’s “Do Not Pay” database or confirming that the same individuals are not receiving unemployment benefits from multiple states.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

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As former SBA Inspector General Hannibal Ware told The Associated Press, an extra few days of checking applications during the pandemic would not have upended the program or forced businesses to shutter.

“You have to have some oversight,” says Mr. Talcove. “And it doesn’t mean that you are trying to deny a benefit.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar apparently didn’t follow the playbook.

Last week, President Donald Trump, a Republican, sent ripples across Capitol Hill when he unexpectedly pardoned the conservative Texas Democrat and his wife, who were indicted in 2024 on corruption charges. Some observers speculated that a party switch – which could boost Republicans’ chances of holding on to their slim House majority – might be in the offing. Instead, Representative Cuellar promptly turned around and filed to run again in his southern border district ... as a Democrat.

On Sunday, President Trump decried Mr. Cuellar’s “lack of LOYALTY” on social media, ending his lengthy post with a flourish of frustration: “Next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”

Why We Wrote This

Historians say presidential pardons have been used in ways that range from serving the chief executive’s own family interests to uniting a torn nation after a war. When the power is abused, it can pose a direct threat to democracy, say some critics of actions by President Donald Trump.

It’s the latest example of how Mr. Trump has made presidential pardon power a high-profile feature of his second term, far more than in his first. This ramped-up use of clemency reflects Mr. Trump’s wider, more assertive claim to executive power since retaking office. His comments when issuing pardons often reflect sympathy for supporters – as well as Mr. Trump’s own grievance toward the justice system, following his four criminal indictments, one of which resulted in a conviction (which he is appealing).

Critics see a “pay to play” mentality behind some of Mr. Trump’s pardons. The October pardon of billionaire Changpeng Zhao – founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange – was followed by an expanded partnership between Binance and the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. The White House denies any connection. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, lambasted the pardon as “corruption.”

Some pardons even appear to contradict administration goals. On Dec. 2, Mr. Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, freeing him from a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for helping drug traffickers transport cocaine to the U.S. The pardon came as the U.S. has ramped up its military campaign against drug trafficking, blowing up boats suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

Still, many of the pardons Mr. Trump has issued this year appear personal, coming after his own legal troubles. Between his first and second terms, Mr. Trump faced multiple major legal cases. At times, he has spoken of others’ entanglements with the justice system in language similar to how he has described his own.

In his Truth Social post on Sunday about the Cuellars, Mr. Trump said he had “felt very good about fighting for a family that was tormented by very sick and deranged people – They were treated sooo BADLY!” Similarly, in the Hernández case, Mr. Trump stated on social media that Mr. Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

The former Honduran president, his lawyer, and his wife all actively lobbied for clemency. Trump allies Roger Stone and former Rep. Matt Gaetz also reportedly lobbied on Mr. Hernández’s behalf, though not for pay. Paying lobbyists to get Mr. Trump’s attention in the hopes of receiving a pardon has become big business in Washington.

“Trump seems to have entered into a period of special enthusiasm” for pardons, says Walter Olson, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Critics, however, see a power that is being abused in ways that pose a direct threat to democracy. When pardons are granted on the basis of personal sympathy or loyalty, as well as potential quid pro quos, it undermines the integrity of the system – and ultimately, Americans’ faith in the rule of law.

Justin Levitt, a constitutional scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says Mr. Trump has been particularly prolific in issuing pardons either for “crimes against the democratic process or crimes involving public corruption, which are very much related to the democratic process.”

The health of the American system itself is at stake, Professor Levitt says. “Democracy depends on knowing that politicians work for the public, not themselves.”

Why the pardon power exists

The presidential pardon power is as old as the republic. The Founding Fathers carried over the practice from the English monarchy, known previously as the “prerogative of mercy.” It was, and is, limited to federal crimes, and in the early days of the United States, when there were few federal laws, it was seldom used. The first presidential pardon came in 1795, when George Washington granted clemency to figures involved in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion over taxes.

Throughout American history, pardons have at times been granted in an effort to promote national reconciliation. Examples include the presidential pardons of ex-Confederates by Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson; the 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford; and Jimmy Carter’s 1977 pardon of more than 200,000 evaders of the Vietnam War draft.

During his first term, Mr. Trump issued some 237 pardons and commutations, a low number compared with other modern-era presidents. Less than a year into his second term, he has issued more than 1,600 – the vast majority to people involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Jan. 6 pardons, issued on Inauguration Day this year and fulfilling an oft-repeated 2024 campaign promise, came as no surprise. They set the tone for an administration that rewards loyalty, and they remain controversial.

But the more recent acts of clemency have also grabbed headlines as, one by one, Mr. Trump pardons public figures and associates, tech and business leaders, celebrities and athletes, and political activists.

In late November, the president commuted the seven-year sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, who was convicted of defrauding investors of $1.6 billion. The grant of clemency also stipulated that he would not have to pay restitution, which had been set at $15.5 million.

In some instances, Mr. Trump’s rationale might not be anything more complicated than commiseration for a colorful public figure embroiled in legal trouble. Take George Santos, the former GOP congressman from New York sentenced in April to 87 months in prison for wire fraud and identity theft, who was freed in October after the president commuted his sentence.

“George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social explaining the commutation.

Yet, ethics experts say these acts of clemency also send a signal to other elected officials who might be worried about potential legal action against them.

The message is, “if you are involved in any corruption, you could be pardoned during this administration – as long as you stay loyal to the president,” says Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.

Mr. Payne notes that Mr. Trump has long been an equal-opportunity granter of clemency. On the last day of his first term, the president commuted the 28-year sentence of Kwame Kilpatrick, the Democratic former mayor of Detroit, who was found guilty of multiple criminal counts, including extortion. Mr. Kilpatrick went on to campaign for Mr. Trump in the 2024 election.

Early in Mr. Trump’s second term, he commuted the sentence of the Democratic former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who had served eight years of a 14-year sentence for corruption. Mr. Blagojevich also became a strong Trump ally.

Mr. Trump has also taken care of those who have stayed loyal to him during high-stakes periods. Last month, he pardoned key figures in the effort to challenge his 2020 election loss, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and lawyer Sidney Powell. Late in his first term, Mr. Trump pardoned former aides Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn, and his friend, Mr. Stone.

Past presidents’ controversial pardons

To be sure, Mr. Trump is not the only recent president to issue controversial pardons.

Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter late in his term, after insisting he wouldn’t. And in the waning hours of his presidency, he preemptively pardoned five other family members, including his brothers, insulating them against potential future charges.

Bill Clinton also pardoned a family member on his way out the door – half-brother Roger Clinton, convicted of cocaine possession and drug trafficking. But President Clinton’s most infamous pardon went to fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife had contributed to the Clinton Presidential Center and then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.

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Ultimately, there’s little check on the pardon power. In theory, a president could be impeached for inappropriate pardons – though in the currently divided Congress, impeachment and conviction are well nigh impossible to achieve. Or the U.S. Constitution itself could be amended to eliminate pardon power or add a check, such as a requirement for congressional approval. That’s an even taller order, though.

Mr. Olson, the Cato scholar, notes that the Founding Fathers had “some very definite concerns” about the potential for abuse in the granting of pardons, in that it comes close to absolute power. But they went ahead and embedded the pardon power in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. One question that remains untested is whether presidents can pardon themselves.

Rep. Henry Cuellar apparently didn’t follow the playbook.

Last week, President Donald Trump, a Republican, sent ripples across Capitol Hill when he unexpectedly pardoned the conservative Texas Democrat and his wife, who were indicted in 2024 on corruption charges. Some observers speculated that a party switch – which could boost Republicans’ chances of holding on to their slim House majority – might be in the offing. Instead, Representative Cuellar promptly turned around and filed to run again in his southern border district ... as a Democrat.

On Sunday, President Trump decried Mr. Cuellar’s “lack of LOYALTY” on social media, ending his lengthy post with a flourish of frustration: “Next time, no more Mr. Nice guy!”

Why We Wrote This

Historians say presidential pardons have been used in ways that range from serving the chief executive’s own family interests to uniting a torn nation after a war. When the power is abused, it can pose a direct threat to democracy, say some critics of actions by President Donald Trump.

It’s the latest example of how Mr. Trump has made presidential pardon power a high-profile feature of his second term, far more than in his first. This ramped-up use of clemency reflects Mr. Trump’s wider, more assertive claim to executive power since retaking office. His comments when issuing pardons often reflect sympathy for supporters – as well as Mr. Trump’s own grievance toward the justice system, following his four criminal indictments, one of which resulted in a conviction (which he is appealing).

Critics see a “pay to play” mentality behind some of Mr. Trump’s pardons. The October pardon of billionaire Changpeng Zhao – founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange – was followed by an expanded partnership between Binance and the Trump family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial. The White House denies any connection. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, lambasted the pardon as “corruption.”

Some pardons even appear to contradict administration goals. On Dec. 2, Mr. Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, freeing him from a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for helping drug traffickers transport cocaine to the U.S. The pardon came as the U.S. has ramped up its military campaign against drug trafficking, blowing up boats suspected of transporting drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

Still, many of the pardons Mr. Trump has issued this year appear personal, coming after his own legal troubles. Between his first and second terms, Mr. Trump faced multiple major legal cases. At times, he has spoken of others’ entanglements with the justice system in language similar to how he has described his own.

In his Truth Social post on Sunday about the Cuellars, Mr. Trump said he had “felt very good about fighting for a family that was tormented by very sick and deranged people – They were treated sooo BADLY!” Similarly, in the Hernández case, Mr. Trump stated on social media that Mr. Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”

The former Honduran president, his lawyer, and his wife all actively lobbied for clemency. Trump allies Roger Stone and former Rep. Matt Gaetz also reportedly lobbied on Mr. Hernández’s behalf, though not for pay. Paying lobbyists to get Mr. Trump’s attention in the hopes of receiving a pardon has become big business in Washington.

“Trump seems to have entered into a period of special enthusiasm” for pardons, says Walter Olson, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Critics, however, see a power that is being abused in ways that pose a direct threat to democracy. When pardons are granted on the basis of personal sympathy or loyalty, as well as potential quid pro quos, it undermines the integrity of the system – and ultimately, Americans’ faith in the rule of law.

Justin Levitt, a constitutional scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says Mr. Trump has been particularly prolific in issuing pardons either for “crimes against the democratic process or crimes involving public corruption, which are very much related to the democratic process.”

The health of the American system itself is at stake, Professor Levitt says. “Democracy depends on knowing that politicians work for the public, not themselves.”

Why the pardon power exists

The presidential pardon power is as old as the republic. The Founding Fathers carried over the practice from the English monarchy, known previously as the “prerogative of mercy.” It was, and is, limited to federal crimes, and in the early days of the United States, when there were few federal laws, it was seldom used. The first presidential pardon came in 1795, when George Washington granted clemency to figures involved in the so-called Whiskey Rebellion over taxes.

Throughout American history, pardons have at times been granted in an effort to promote national reconciliation. Examples include the presidential pardons of ex-Confederates by Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson; the 1974 pardon of Richard Nixon by Gerald Ford; and Jimmy Carter’s 1977 pardon of more than 200,000 evaders of the Vietnam War draft.

During his first term, Mr. Trump issued some 237 pardons and commutations, a low number compared with other modern-era presidents. Less than a year into his second term, he has issued more than 1,600 – the vast majority to people involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Jan. 6 pardons, issued on Inauguration Day this year and fulfilling an oft-repeated 2024 campaign promise, came as no surprise. They set the tone for an administration that rewards loyalty, and they remain controversial.

But the more recent acts of clemency have also grabbed headlines as, one by one, Mr. Trump pardons public figures and associates, tech and business leaders, celebrities and athletes, and political activists.

In late November, the president commuted the seven-year sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, who was convicted of defrauding investors of $1.6 billion. The grant of clemency also stipulated that he would not have to pay restitution, which had been set at $15.5 million.

In some instances, Mr. Trump’s rationale might not be anything more complicated than commiseration for a colorful public figure embroiled in legal trouble. Take George Santos, the former GOP congressman from New York sentenced in April to 87 months in prison for wire fraud and identity theft, who was freed in October after the president commuted his sentence.

“George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social explaining the commutation.

Yet, ethics experts say these acts of clemency also send a signal to other elected officials who might be worried about potential legal action against them.

The message is, “if you are involved in any corruption, you could be pardoned during this administration – as long as you stay loyal to the president,” says Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.

Mr. Payne notes that Mr. Trump has long been an equal-opportunity granter of clemency. On the last day of his first term, the president commuted the 28-year sentence of Kwame Kilpatrick, the Democratic former mayor of Detroit, who was found guilty of multiple criminal counts, including extortion. Mr. Kilpatrick went on to campaign for Mr. Trump in the 2024 election.

Early in Mr. Trump’s second term, he commuted the sentence of the Democratic former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, who had served eight years of a 14-year sentence for corruption. Mr. Blagojevich also became a strong Trump ally.

Mr. Trump has also taken care of those who have stayed loyal to him during high-stakes periods. Last month, he pardoned key figures in the effort to challenge his 2020 election loss, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and lawyer Sidney Powell. Late in his first term, Mr. Trump pardoned former aides Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn, and his friend, Mr. Stone.

Past presidents’ controversial pardons

To be sure, Mr. Trump is not the only recent president to issue controversial pardons.

Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter late in his term, after insisting he wouldn’t. And in the waning hours of his presidency, he preemptively pardoned five other family members, including his brothers, insulating them against potential future charges.

Bill Clinton also pardoned a family member on his way out the door – half-brother Roger Clinton, convicted of cocaine possession and drug trafficking. But President Clinton’s most infamous pardon went to fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose ex-wife had contributed to the Clinton Presidential Center and then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

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Ultimately, there’s little check on the pardon power. In theory, a president could be impeached for inappropriate pardons – though in the currently divided Congress, impeachment and conviction are well nigh impossible to achieve. Or the U.S. Constitution itself could be amended to eliminate pardon power or add a check, such as a requirement for congressional approval. That’s an even taller order, though.

Mr. Olson, the Cato scholar, notes that the Founding Fathers had “some very definite concerns” about the potential for abuse in the granting of pardons, in that it comes close to absolute power. But they went ahead and embedded the pardon power in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. One question that remains untested is whether presidents can pardon themselves.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday’s “heinous assault” on two National Guard members near the White House proves that lax migration policies are “the single greatest national security threat facing our nation.”

“No country can tolerate such a risk to our very survival,” he said.

President Trump’s remarks, released in a video on social media, underscores his intention to reshape the country’s immigration system and increase scrutiny of migrants who are already here. With aggressive deportation efforts already underway, his response to the shooting showed that his focus will not waver.

The suspect in the shooting is believed to be an Afghan national, according to Mr. Trump and two law enforcement officials. He entered the United States in September 2021, after the chaotic collapse of the government in Kabul, when Americans were frantically evacuating people as the Taliban took control.

The 29-year-old suspect was part of Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden-era program that resettled tens of thousands of Afghans after the U.S. withdrawal from the country, officials said. The initiative brought roughly 76,000 Afghans to the United States, many of whom had worked alongside American troops and diplomats as interpreters and translators.

It has since faced intense scrutiny from Mr. Trump and his allies, congressional Republicans and some government watchdogs over gaps in the vetting process and the speed of admissions, even as advocates say it offered a lifeline to people at risk of Taliban reprisals.

Mr. Trump described Afghanistan as “a hellhole on earth,” and he said his administration would review everyone who entered from the country under President Joe Biden — a measure his administration had already been planning before the incident.

During his remarks, Mr. Trump also swung his focus to Minnesota, where he complained about “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” who are “ripping apart that once-great state.”

Minnesota has the country’s largest Somali community, roughly 87,000 people. Many came as refugees over the years.

The reference to immigrants with no connection to Wednesday’s developments was a reminder of the scope of Mr. Trump’s ambitions to rein in migration.

Administration officials have been ramping up deportations of people in the country illegally, as well as clamping down on refugee admissions. The focus has involved the realignment of resources at federal agencies, stirring concern about potentially undermining other law enforcement priorities.

However, Mr. Trump’s remarks were a signal that scrutiny of migrants and the nation’s borders will only increase. He said he wants to remove anyone “who does not belong here or does not add benefit to our country.”

“If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” Mr. Trump added.

Afterward, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it would indefinitely stop processing all immigration requests for Afghan nationals pending a review of security and vetting protocols.

Supporters of Afghan evacuees said they feared that people who escaped danger from the Taliban would now face renewed suspicion and scrutiny.

“I don’t want people to leverage this tragedy into a political ploy,” said Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac.

He said Wednesday’s shooting should not shed a negative light on the tens of thousands of Afghan nationals who have gone through the various legal pathways to resettling in the U.S. and those who await in the pipeline.

Under Operation Allies Welcome, tens of thousands of Afghans were first brought to U.S. military bases around the country, where they completed immigration processing and medical evaluations before settling into the country. Four years later, there are still scores of Afghans who were evacuated at transit points in the Middle East and Europe as part of the program.

Those in countries like Qatar and Albania, who have undergone the rigorous process, have been left in limbo since Mr. Trump entered his second term and paused the program as part of his series of executive actions cracking down on immigration.

Vice President JD Vance, writing on social media, criticized former President Biden for “opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees,” adding that “they shouldn’t have been in our country.”

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“Already some voices in corporate media chirp that our immigration policies are too harsh,” he said. “Tonight is a reminder of why they’re wrong.”

This article is by The Associated Press. Farnoush Amiri reported from New York. AP writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday’s “heinous assault” on two National Guard members near the White House proves that lax migration policies are “the single greatest national security threat facing our nation.”

“No country can tolerate such a risk to our very survival,” he said.

President Trump’s remarks, released in a video on social media, underscores his intention to reshape the country’s immigration system and increase scrutiny of migrants who are already here. With aggressive deportation efforts already underway, his response to the shooting showed that his focus will not waver.

The suspect in the shooting is believed to be an Afghan national, according to Mr. Trump and two law enforcement officials. He entered the United States in September 2021, after the chaotic collapse of the government in Kabul, when Americans were frantically evacuating people as the Taliban took control.

The 29-year-old suspect was part of Operation Allies Welcome, the Biden-era program that resettled tens of thousands of Afghans after the U.S. withdrawal from the country, officials said. The initiative brought roughly 76,000 Afghans to the United States, many of whom had worked alongside American troops and diplomats as interpreters and translators.

It has since faced intense scrutiny from Mr. Trump and his allies, congressional Republicans and some government watchdogs over gaps in the vetting process and the speed of admissions, even as advocates say it offered a lifeline to people at risk of Taliban reprisals.

Mr. Trump described Afghanistan as “a hellhole on earth,” and he said his administration would review everyone who entered from the country under President Joe Biden — a measure his administration had already been planning before the incident.

During his remarks, Mr. Trump also swung his focus to Minnesota, where he complained about “hundreds of thousands of Somalians” who are “ripping apart that once-great state.”

Minnesota has the country’s largest Somali community, roughly 87,000 people. Many came as refugees over the years.

The reference to immigrants with no connection to Wednesday’s developments was a reminder of the scope of Mr. Trump’s ambitions to rein in migration.

Administration officials have been ramping up deportations of people in the country illegally, as well as clamping down on refugee admissions. The focus has involved the realignment of resources at federal agencies, stirring concern about potentially undermining other law enforcement priorities.

However, Mr. Trump’s remarks were a signal that scrutiny of migrants and the nation’s borders will only increase. He said he wants to remove anyone “who does not belong here or does not add benefit to our country.”

“If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” Mr. Trump added.

Afterward, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced it would indefinitely stop processing all immigration requests for Afghan nationals pending a review of security and vetting protocols.

Supporters of Afghan evacuees said they feared that people who escaped danger from the Taliban would now face renewed suspicion and scrutiny.

“I don’t want people to leverage this tragedy into a political ploy,” said Shawn VanDiver, president of #AfghanEvac.

He said Wednesday’s shooting should not shed a negative light on the tens of thousands of Afghan nationals who have gone through the various legal pathways to resettling in the U.S. and those who await in the pipeline.

Under Operation Allies Welcome, tens of thousands of Afghans were first brought to U.S. military bases around the country, where they completed immigration processing and medical evaluations before settling into the country. Four years later, there are still scores of Afghans who were evacuated at transit points in the Middle East and Europe as part of the program.

Those in countries like Qatar and Albania, who have undergone the rigorous process, have been left in limbo since Mr. Trump entered his second term and paused the program as part of his series of executive actions cracking down on immigration.

Vice President JD Vance, writing on social media, criticized former President Biden for “opening the floodgate to unvetted Afghan refugees,” adding that “they shouldn’t have been in our country.”

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“Already some voices in corporate media chirp that our immigration policies are too harsh,” he said. “Tonight is a reminder of why they’re wrong.”

This article is by The Associated Press. Farnoush Amiri reported from New York. AP writer Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.

When Spencer Deery first decided to run for his state Senate seat in western Indiana four years ago, he knew he would face hard moments. Senator Deery admits, however, that he never expected anything like this past week, which has included attacks from leaders in his own party – such as the Indiana governor and President of the United States – and a swatting attack on his family’s home Thursday morning.

But as difficult as this past week has been, Mr. Deery says his vote that triggered it all was not.

After President Donald Trump called for Texas to redraw its congressional maps this summer to create a more advantageous map for the GOP ahead of next year’s midterm elections, focus quickly turned to Indiana in search of more GOP seats. Republicans saw an opportunity here, in a state that President Trump won by double digits in the past three elections. With a Republican governor and Republican supermajorities in both state legislative chambers, the party could pick up two House seats and create a 9-0 GOP district map.

Why We Wrote This

Republican state lawmakers from Indiana have rejected pressure from the White House to conduct a mid-cycle redrawing of their congressional maps. One state senator describes why his conservative values led him to oppose the effort.

The White House has spent significant political capital over the past few months to make that happen. Vice President JD Vance flew to Indiana twice to lobby legislative leaders, and Indiana lawmakers, including statehouse leaders, met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in August. But last Friday, Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray announced there were not enough votes in his chamber to move forward on redistricting. With 19 Republicans joining the 10 Democrats, senators voted 29-19 to adjourn and not hold the December special session on redistricting as requested by Gov. Mike Braun – an unprecedented move in state history and a proxy vote for where senate Republicans stood on redistricting.

“To me, it really goes to what is the most basic principle in the Constitution? And that is the idea of popular sovereignty, or the idea that the people select their rulers. Anything that undermines that violates my oath of office,” says Mr. Deery, who was one of the first senators to come out against mid-cycle redistricting. He knows that gerrymandering already happens, but it’s “especially egregious,” he says, to do it “whenever we want” in fear of election results.

“I’m not taking this position because I’m opposing conservative values,” he says, pointing to his own conservative voting record and his 100% rating from right-leaning groups such as the Indiana Family Institute and Americans for Prosperity-Indiana. “I’m taking it because of my conservative values.”

At a time when Republican opposition to Mr. Trump’s wishes are rare and often futile, it’s state lawmakers in a ruby red state who have initiated one of the most notable intraparty pushbacks of the president’s second term, coming on the heels of the Congressional vote to release the Justice Department files on convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. And while many of these GOP legislators say they share the president’s goals for a Republican majority in the U.S. House following the 2026 midterms, they worry that redistricting could undermine that effort and create rifts at a moment when the party should be united.

“I want us to be focused on winning the midterms,” says Mr. Deery, “and instead we are fracturing the party at just the wrong time.”

GOP redistricting caution emerges

Hoosier legislators aren’t the only ones to push back on mid-cycle redistricting. Republicans in Nebraska and Kansas, as well as Democrats in Maryland, have all declined to move on new maps, some of them citing similar reasons as their peers in Indiana. 

“It looked like simply a party maneuver,” Republican state Sen. Merv Riepe of Nebraska told Politico. “I represent my district and I think that’s what democracy is supposed to be about.”

“I would rather just stand on principle and stand on my morals and ethics,” Republican state Rep. Brett Fairchild of Kansas told the New York Times. “That way I can actually look at myself in the mirror and sleep at night. It’s not all just about getting re-elected.”

But arguably no state legislators have faced more White House pressure than those in Indiana, who Mr. Trump has taken to publicly shaming on his Truth Social account over the past week. Between Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Trump posted about Indiana Republicans four times, calling Sen. Bray a “RINO,” or a Republican In Name Only, who would soon face a “Primary Problem” as would “any other politician who supports him in this stupidity.”

And on Tuesday, Mr. Deery got just that. Paula Copenhaver, chair of the Fountain County Republican Party and a government affairs director for Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, announced  that she was launching a primary re-challenge (she ran against him in 2022). In her press release, Ms. Copenhaver said Hoosiers have “watched weak leadership in the state senate fail to deliver the redistricting plan.” The lieutenant governor has backed her campaign and endorsed the White House’s redistricting plans.

Gov. Braun said in a local television interview Wednesday that he would “definitely” support a change in senate leadership. “We can’t have a senate that’s constantly a wet blanket,” he added. The governor has warned of “long-term political consequences” for senate holdouts, and said he is exploring ways to “compel” them to act, while also condemning an earlier swatting attack on another senator. (So far this week there have been four swatting calls on GOP state senators, including Mr. Deery, with anonymous callers falsely reporting emergencies designed to bring a large police presence.) 

Although the state House has also adjourned until January, Republican House Speaker Todd Huston has said his chamber has the votes necessary to redistrict and told his members to stay prepared for a special session in December.

“I’ve been a little taken aback because I just don't see why this is not fair to do,” says James Bopp, a former deputy attorney general of Indiana who also served as the Republican National Committee vice chairman from 2008 to 2012. He says that senate Republicans in Indiana need to think about the national implications of a Democrat-controlled House in 2026. 

“The consequences are so dire… We’re just a part of the puzzle of the whole nation,” says Mr. Bopp. “I would never ask any politician or any person to do something that is unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, or unethical. Gerrymandering is not any of those things. It’s politics.”

Could gerrymandering backfire?

Indiana’s pushback comes at a difficult moment for Republicans’ redistricting efforts, with the GOP facing setbacks in several states. Earlier this month, California passed a ballot measure that allows the state to redraw its congressional map and add as many as five Democrat-leaning districts, an effort to counteract the GOP in Texas. On Tuesday, however, a federal court blocked Texas from using its new plus-five Republican district map, ruling it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The state filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. 

This follows an early November court ruling in Utah that threw out a GOP-favored map for one that adds a Democratic-leaning district. Now, after the GOP started a redistricting battle to bolster their efforts next year, Republicans have potentially added four seats nationwide compared to Democrats’ six.

This is one thing Mr. Deery has been worried about – that GOP mid-cycle redistricting efforts could “backfire.” He’s taken to posting videos on Facebook that show him talking to constituents, and during one recent walk in the woods he explained some of his redistricting concerns. By “changing the math and spreading Republican voters” across the two current Democratic-held districts, Republicans could make themselves vulnerable (a process known as “dummymandering”). “Without Trump on the ballot,” he says, “it’s not a clear win.” 

Mr. Bray echoed these sentiments in an interview with Politico this week. Instead, both Mr. Bray and Mr. Deery say Republicans should focus on finding a qualified candidate to run in Indiana’s 1st Congressional District, which Democrats have won the past two cycles by single digits.

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Mr. Deery says “no small amount of money” was spent on robo calls and text messages to his Republican constituents, telling them to contact him and tell him to change his mind. But the majority of the voters who called him after these messages offered their support for his efforts instead. 

“Most of the noise has not been coming from constituents,” he says. “It goes to Hoosier culture, which is that we are a state that has a strong sense of fairness.”

When Spencer Deery first decided to run for his state Senate seat in western Indiana four years ago, he knew he would face hard moments. Senator Deery admits, however, that he never expected anything like this past week, which has included attacks from leaders in his own party – such as the Indiana governor and President of the United States – and a swatting attack on his family’s home Thursday morning.

But as difficult as this past week has been, Mr. Deery says his vote that triggered it all was not.

After President Donald Trump called for Texas to redraw its congressional maps this summer to create a more advantageous map for the GOP ahead of next year’s midterm elections, focus quickly turned to Indiana in search of more GOP seats. Republicans saw an opportunity here, in a state that President Trump won by double digits in the past three elections. With a Republican governor and Republican supermajorities in both state legislative chambers, the party could pick up two House seats and create a 9-0 GOP district map.

Why We Wrote This

Republican state lawmakers from Indiana have rejected pressure from the White House to conduct a mid-cycle redrawing of their congressional maps. One state senator describes why his conservative values led him to oppose the effort.

The White House has spent significant political capital over the past few months to make that happen. Vice President JD Vance flew to Indiana twice to lobby legislative leaders, and Indiana lawmakers, including statehouse leaders, met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in August. But last Friday, Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray announced there were not enough votes in his chamber to move forward on redistricting. With 19 Republicans joining the 10 Democrats, senators voted 29-19 to adjourn and not hold the December special session on redistricting as requested by Gov. Mike Braun – an unprecedented move in state history and a proxy vote for where senate Republicans stood on redistricting.

“To me, it really goes to what is the most basic principle in the Constitution? And that is the idea of popular sovereignty, or the idea that the people select their rulers. Anything that undermines that violates my oath of office,” says Mr. Deery, who was one of the first senators to come out against mid-cycle redistricting. He knows that gerrymandering already happens, but it’s “especially egregious,” he says, to do it “whenever we want” in fear of election results.

“I’m not taking this position because I’m opposing conservative values,” he says, pointing to his own conservative voting record and his 100% rating from right-leaning groups such as the Indiana Family Institute and Americans for Prosperity-Indiana. “I’m taking it because of my conservative values.”

At a time when Republican opposition to Mr. Trump’s wishes are rare and often futile, it’s state lawmakers in a ruby red state who have initiated one of the most notable intraparty pushbacks of the president’s second term, coming on the heels of the Congressional vote to release the Justice Department files on convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. And while many of these GOP legislators say they share the president’s goals for a Republican majority in the U.S. House following the 2026 midterms, they worry that redistricting could undermine that effort and create rifts at a moment when the party should be united.

“I want us to be focused on winning the midterms,” says Mr. Deery, “and instead we are fracturing the party at just the wrong time.”

GOP redistricting caution emerges

Hoosier legislators aren’t the only ones to push back on mid-cycle redistricting. Republicans in Nebraska and Kansas, as well as Democrats in Maryland, have all declined to move on new maps, some of them citing similar reasons as their peers in Indiana. 

“It looked like simply a party maneuver,” Republican state Sen. Merv Riepe of Nebraska told Politico. “I represent my district and I think that’s what democracy is supposed to be about.”

“I would rather just stand on principle and stand on my morals and ethics,” Republican state Rep. Brett Fairchild of Kansas told the New York Times. “That way I can actually look at myself in the mirror and sleep at night. It’s not all just about getting re-elected.”

But arguably no state legislators have faced more White House pressure than those in Indiana, who Mr. Trump has taken to publicly shaming on his Truth Social account over the past week. Between Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Trump posted about Indiana Republicans four times, calling Sen. Bray a “RINO,” or a Republican In Name Only, who would soon face a “Primary Problem” as would “any other politician who supports him in this stupidity.”

And on Tuesday, Mr. Deery got just that. Paula Copenhaver, chair of the Fountain County Republican Party and a government affairs director for Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, announced  that she was launching a primary re-challenge (she ran against him in 2022). In her press release, Ms. Copenhaver said Hoosiers have “watched weak leadership in the state senate fail to deliver the redistricting plan.” The lieutenant governor has backed her campaign and endorsed the White House’s redistricting plans.

Gov. Braun said in a local television interview Wednesday that he would “definitely” support a change in senate leadership. “We can’t have a senate that’s constantly a wet blanket,” he added. The governor has warned of “long-term political consequences” for senate holdouts, and said he is exploring ways to “compel” them to act, while also condemning an earlier swatting attack on another senator. (So far this week there have been four swatting calls on GOP state senators, including Mr. Deery, with anonymous callers falsely reporting emergencies designed to bring a large police presence.) 

Although the state House has also adjourned until January, Republican House Speaker Todd Huston has said his chamber has the votes necessary to redistrict and told his members to stay prepared for a special session in December.

“I’ve been a little taken aback because I just don't see why this is not fair to do,” says James Bopp, a former deputy attorney general of Indiana who also served as the Republican National Committee vice chairman from 2008 to 2012. He says that senate Republicans in Indiana need to think about the national implications of a Democrat-controlled House in 2026. 

“The consequences are so dire… We’re just a part of the puzzle of the whole nation,” says Mr. Bopp. “I would never ask any politician or any person to do something that is unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, or unethical. Gerrymandering is not any of those things. It’s politics.”

Could gerrymandering backfire?

Indiana’s pushback comes at a difficult moment for Republicans’ redistricting efforts, with the GOP facing setbacks in several states. Earlier this month, California passed a ballot measure that allows the state to redraw its congressional map and add as many as five Democrat-leaning districts, an effort to counteract the GOP in Texas. On Tuesday, however, a federal court blocked Texas from using its new plus-five Republican district map, ruling it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The state filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. 

This follows an early November court ruling in Utah that threw out a GOP-favored map for one that adds a Democratic-leaning district. Now, after the GOP started a redistricting battle to bolster their efforts next year, Republicans have potentially added four seats nationwide compared to Democrats’ six.

This is one thing Mr. Deery has been worried about – that GOP mid-cycle redistricting efforts could “backfire.” He’s taken to posting videos on Facebook that show him talking to constituents, and during one recent walk in the woods he explained some of his redistricting concerns. By “changing the math and spreading Republican voters” across the two current Democratic-held districts, Republicans could make themselves vulnerable (a process known as “dummymandering”). “Without Trump on the ballot,” he says, “it’s not a clear win.” 

Mr. Bray echoed these sentiments in an interview with Politico this week. Instead, both Mr. Bray and Mr. Deery say Republicans should focus on finding a qualified candidate to run in Indiana’s 1st Congressional District, which Democrats have won the past two cycles by single digits.

Deepen your worldview

with Monitor Highlights.

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Mr. Deery says “no small amount of money” was spent on robo calls and text messages to his Republican constituents, telling them to contact him and tell him to change his mind. But the majority of the voters who called him after these messages offered their support for his efforts instead. 

“Most of the noise has not been coming from constituents,” he says. “It goes to Hoosier culture, which is that we are a state that has a strong sense of fairness.”

When Bill Newton gathers with his buddies at Doug’s Diner in downtown Rome, Georgia, it is a politically diverse crew: Two staunch Democrats, of which he is one; two moderate Republicans; and one wealthy Republican who backs Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Amid the breakfast bustle, the group talks politics and local gossip. It is the kind of coffee klatsch that may seem elusive in a polarized, scorched-earth era, one which Ms. Greene, a MAGA firebrand first elected to Congress in 2020, has come to personify. Here in this Atlanta exurb, home to middle-class dreams and working-class struggles, is Ms. Greene’s world, studded with modest housing developments, strip malls, and roadside gyms – all wedged into the Appalachian foothills.

In her ruby-red district, support for President Donald Trump runs deep, which is why their highly publicized spat is the talk of this diner counter. In recent weeks, Ms. Greene has broken with Mr. Trump on Israel policy, healthcare premiums, inflation, and, most notably, the release of the Department of Justice’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. She was one of four GOP lawmakers who sided with Democrats over the Epstein files, ultimately forcing Mr. Trump to reverse course and sign a bill on Wednesday to release the files.

Why We Wrote This

The public falling-out between U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and President Donald Trump has brought splits in the MAGA movement into the open. In Ms. Greene’s solidly Republican district, voters are weighing their populist allegiances.

In return, Mr. Trump has ridiculed Ms. Greene, who had been among his most ardent and outspoken supporters, and labelled her a traitor. None of which has cowed her. “I’ve never owed him anything,” she told a press conference on Tuesday held with some of Mr. Epstein’s victims. She said she fought for President Trump and “for America first,” and then he called her a traitor “for standing with these women.”

“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America, and Americans like the women standing behind me,” she said.

Her refusal to back down has fueled talk of a split within the MAGA coalition and of a possible dilution of Mr. Trump’s near-absolute sway over the Republican base. It has also raised questions about Ms. Greene’s political future and whether she will moderate her caustic political style, and, if so, to what end. On Sunday, she told CNN’s “State of the Union” that she regretted taking part in “toxic politics,” saying that the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk had prompted her to reflect on her combative rhetoric.

Among Republicans going about their daily lives in Ms. Greene’s district, there is respect for her policy positions and a degree of frustration with the president they voted for. Many cast their votes in hopes of better economic times.

Greg Ledbetter works for a company in Rome that makes styrofoam bait coolers. He reckons America “has her bounce back” under Mr. Trump and that inflation is under control. But he’s also a fan of Ms. Greene, who he says “looks out for the lower and middle classes, which is where I fit in.” He wants to uncover all the facts about Mr. Epstein and thinks that Mr. Trump is too focused on foreign policy and not on “America First.”

“In some ways, Trump is not doing everything he could be doing for the people, and I think she is, or is trying,” he says.

Most Trump supporters in northeast Georgia don’t pay close attention to Washington politics, says David Pennington, the former mayor of Dalton, a carpet-making city north of Rome. But they certainly feel the pinch of a slowing economy and “mindboggling” rises in healthcare premiums. While he’s not been a supporter of Ms. Greene, Mr. Pennington says he is happy to see GOP lawmakers like Ms. Greene buck Mr. Trump and refocus on the economy.

But it’s hard to be a Trump critic inside the party, he warns. “It’s a balancing act. A lot of her voters are Trump voters, and they support him regardless of what he does.”

“She’s a central character of our age”

By calling Ms. Greene a traitor, Mr. Trump is turning a policy disagreement into a personal feud that is hard to square with her record, says Amy Steigerwalt, a political science professor at Georgia State University. Her criticisms over healthcare and grocery prices are “channeling the interests of her constituents,” while the release of the Epstein files was a campaign promise to the MAGA base. “It seems so farcical to say this person who has been such a bastion of support can’t express a differing view on a couple of things,” she says.

Mr. Trump has vowed to support a primary challenger to Ms. Greene, who was unopposed in her last primary and won reelection by nearly 30 points.

“There are a lot of folks in town who stand behind Trump who are questioning her,” says Ansley, a real estate agent who didn’t want to give her last name for fear of alienating potential clients. A Democrat, Ansley hasn’t voted for Ms. Greene, but that could change. “I always thought she was too radical, but it seems like she’s had an epiphany. It seems she’s trying to do the right thing.”

Back at the diner, Mr. Newton, a retired lawyer, says he’s not a fan of Ms. Greene’s politics or her firebrand style. But it’s different when she stops by the diner to talk, as she sometimes does. “In person, she is very affable and pleasant, and interestingly, she never talks politics,” he says. “I do think she’s a central character of our age. In that way, I hope the change in her is sincere.”

A former gym-owner, Ms. Greene won her first election in 2020 as an outsider. She quickly plunged into controversy in Congress over her spreading of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election, COVID-19 vaccines, and other topics. She has also made controversial remarks critical of Jews, Muslims, and Black Americans. Even Republican lawmakers kept their distance. When Mr. Trump faced legal jeopardy over efforts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost, Ms. Greene never wavered in her support and her fierce partisanship.

That makes her an unlikely voice of reason in Washington. But her willingness to defy the White House and to advocate for pocketbook policies on CNN and other outlets “gives her national prominence and a lot of flexibility,” says Matt Wylie, a GOP strategist based in South Carolina.

For example, Ms. Greene says her constituents are worried about grocery costs and that while Mr. Trump has lowered inflation since taking office, it’s still a pressing issue. “So gaslighting the people and trying to tell them that prices have come down is not helping. It’s actually infuriating people,” she told the Sean Spicer Show. (Mr. Trump has repeatedly said prices “are way down” and that inflation “is almost nonexistent.”)

What matters to voters in Georgia’s 14th District

Analysts say any primary challenger will struggle to unseat Ms. Greene, given her MAGA credentials and fundraising skills. She also has support from state and local Republicans in Georgia, whose governor, Brian Kemp, has carved out his own political lane and easily defeated a Trump-endorsed challenger in 2022.

“Recent national criticism directed at Congresswoman Greene does not change the fundamental truth that she serves at the direction of the people of this district,” Jim Tully, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party for the 14th District, posted on social media. “We remain confident in her ability to represent our district with honor and conviction.”

Mr. Wylie says the White House should be more focused on the midterm threat from Democrats and on the cost-of-living issues that Ms. Greene has surfaced. And at a time when Republicans in Congress have been beholden to Mr. Trump, Ms. Greene could now have “the leverage to come out and assert the leadership that’s missing.”

Whether her shift in tone and priorities is a political calculation or a Damascene conversion is not yet clear. But to some in her district, it’s a welcome departure, perhaps a first step towards a more inviting public square, the kind still found in places like Mr. Newton’s coffee gatherings. Down the street from the diner, public works employees are decorating a Christmas tree; one worker nimbly tosses up fragile ornaments to a colleague in a cherry picker.

In Mr. Ledbetter’s view, Ms. Greene’s “apology wasn’t a sign of weakness. Apologies can make you look strong. It shows you care and that you want to do better.”

Steve Morgan, a farmer gassing up his faded GMC truck just outside Rome, is more skeptical. On one hand, the split from Trump suggests that Ms. Greene’s ear is tuned to the ground in her district, given that she is willing to risk so much – including what she has said are threats to her life. But that doesn’t mean Mr. Morgan would vote for her come election time.

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“They tell you what they want you to hear,’’ he says of politicians. “And then they do what they want to do.’’

Patrik Jonsson reported from Rome, Georgia, and Simon Montlake from Boston.