One of the keys to the Republican Party’s strategy to hold on to its congressional majority is a radical mid-decade redistricting gambit, intended to hand the GOP a series of victories long before voters cast any ballots. At the heart of this gerrymandering initiative was a Texas scheme that redrew the state’s district map to deliver five additional seats to the Republicans.
Last week, the Lone Star State’s new map, approved at the insistence of Donald Trump and his team, was rejected by a federal three-judge panel led by a Trump appointee. That ruling is currently on hold, but if the map is ultimately struck down, the GOP’s odds of holding on to its House majority will fall.
Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves. Vox’s Ian Millhiser explained:
As Judge Jeffrey Brown, a Trump appointee, explains in the court’s opinion, Texas lawmakers initially ‘didn’t have much appetite to redistrict on purely partisan grounds’ — even as Trump urged them to do so. But Texas Republicans appear to have changed their mind after the Justice Department sent a letter last July to Texas’s top officials, which demanded that the state redraw several districts to change their racial makeup. That letter … misread a federal appeals court opinion to mean that the state was required to remake its maps.
It led Millhiser to conclude that there is “a very real chance that Texas’s gerrymander will fall entirely because of inept lawyering by Trump’s Justice Department.”
Such a development would carry dramatic consequences, but just as notable is the familiarity of the circumstances.
The Justice Department’s case against former FBI Director James Comey also appears to be in serious jeopardy of collapsing, in large part because the prosecution was put in the hands of a rookie who’s made rookie mistakes. This is just the start of a longer list. The White House has seen a variety of presidential nominees fail in recent weeks because of the officials’ incompetence. FBI Director Kash Patel has struggled through a series of embarrassing missteps resulting from his own incompetence. The White House’s trade tariffs have been executed in brazenly incompetent ways. The Kilmar Abrego Garica case has been hampered by prosecutorial incompetence. Elon Musk’s failed DOGE experiment was so incompetent that it repeatedly stepped on its own tail. Over the course of 2025, Trump and his inner circle made a series of decisions to strip the administration of competent professionals and qualified experts. The results weren’t just predictable, they were also inevitable.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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