Trump Threatened to Withhold Federal Funds From Indiana Unless it Approved His Plan to Gerrymander its Electoral Map

Initially, it was just a rumor that Donald Trump was threatening to withhold federal funds from Indiana if its legislature didn’t approve his gerrymandered map to ensure GOP control of the House after the midterm elections. Now, however, the lieutenant governor of Indiana has come out and confirmed it.

The Hill reports:

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith (R) said Thursday the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal funding if state lawmakers rejected a new GOP-favored congressional map.

“The Trump admin was VERY clear about this,” Beckwith wrote in a now-deleted post on the social platform X.

“They told many lawmakers, Cabinet members and [Gov. Mike Braun] and I that this would happen,” he continued. “The Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.”

His post followed a warning from the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action, a sister organization of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state,” the organization wrote earlier Thursday in a post on X, ahead of the state Senate’s vote on a measure to approve new congressional lines.

“Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop,” the group continued. “These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.”

To their credit, Indiana’s Senate ignored the threats, but this story reveals something fundamental about Donald Trump’s abuse of executive power: he consistently treats things that belong to the people as things that belong to him.

Federal funding that goes to the National Guard, to build and maintain roads, and to other infrastructure projects is the taxpayers’ money, to be used on behalf of the taxpayers’ interests. Yet Trump treats all federal funding as a campaign slush fund he can use to bribe or blackmail people for his own personal and political advantage.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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