Trump’s Insult to Tim Walz Costs Him Key Ally in Redistricting Scheme
The president’s crass mouth is losing him Republican support in Indiana.
State Senator Michael Bohacek announced Friday that he would no longer support Donald Trump’s efforts to redistrict the Hoosier State, claiming that the president’s recent decision to call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded” had put him off the MAGA leader’s plan.
“I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter,” Bohacek said in a statement. “Those of you that don’t know me or my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome.
“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences,” he continued. “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”
Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump has issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House.
The unprecedented long-shot effort would win Indiana just two more seats in the U.S. House—but state senators have already signaled that they have no intentions of reshaping the state to aid the president’s ambitions.
Indiana’s Senate announced late last month that it would not meet until January, indicating that redistricting will not be on the state’s legislative agenda this year.
Public GOP opposition to Trump’s offensive nature could be an indicator that his white-knuckled grip on the caucus is slipping. Trump has issued a litany of repugnant statements about women, people of color, and those with disabilities, though none of that seemed to seriously sway Republicans away from the MAGA politician before.
Trump infamously mocked a reporter with a disability while on the campaign trail in 2015, imitating the sporadic arm movements of Serge Kovaleski, an investigative reporter with The New York Times who suffers from a congenital joint condition.
FBI Director Kash Patel is so obsessed with maintaining the facade of power and authority that he wouldn’t even get off a plane to investigate the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk until someone got him a special FBI raid jacket—his specific size, and with all the right patches on it.
A new report from a “National Alliance of Retired and Active Duty FBI Special Agents and Analysts” has revealed that Patel—just a day after Kirk had been killed—landed in Utah and refused to exit the plane until someone got him a medium-size FBI raid jacket. He ended up taking a female agent’s jacket. He then began to complain that that jacket didn’t have the proper patches on it, and he refused to leave the plane once again until SWAT team members gave him their patches.
This report, which has yet to be independently corroborated, comes from someone the group calls ALPHA99, a “reliable, trustworthy, and competent” source.
The FBI director had just landed at the scene of the murder of someone he claimed was a close friend, and he chose to throw a tantrum because he didn’t have the exact right jacket with the exact right patches, rather than just get off the plane and do his job.
This is just one of many examples of the floundering FBI head’s misplaced priorities. Just last week, it was reported that President Trump was weighing firing Patel in the wake of his premature social media posts during ongoing cases, his use of a government jet for a date with his 27-year-old girlfriend, and giving said 27-year-old girlfriend a SWAT team for her security detail.
These sound like things a politician’s teenage son would do, not the head of the FBI. That, and this meltdown over a jacket in the midst of a high-profile assassination–with a suspect who had yet to be charged—only beg more questions about the fitness of the least qualified FBI director in U.S. history.
Read the full report here.
Donald Trump wants to take U.S. citizenship away from people he deems “criminals.”
Trump told reporters on Air Force One Sunday that “we have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through Biden or somebody that didn’t know what they were doing.
“If I have the power to do it, I’m not sure that I do, but if I do, I would denaturalize, absolutely,” Trump said. In a follow-up question, a reporter asked Trump what he meant when he posted in support of “reverse migration” on Truth Social on Thursday.
“It means ‘Get people out that are in our country, get ’em out of here. I want to get ’em out,’” Trump said.
Reporter: You said that you might denaturalize American citizens?
Trump: If we have criminals that came in and were naturalized through Biden or somebody that didn’t’ know what they were doing—if I have the power to do it… I would denaturalize pic.twitter.com/rRcz7e6MCS
Since the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., by an Afghan refugee on Wednesday, Trump has gone on an anti-immigration tirade, pausing all asylum decisions and saying that he wants to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” on Truth Social.
In another post, Trump falsely claimed that “most” foreign-born U.S. residents “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” Data from 2022 indicates that immigrants per capita consume 21 percent less in public assistance than native-born Americans.
But that’s not of interest to Trump, or his adviser Stephen Miller, a racist and anti-immigration hawk whose fingerprints are all over these new policies and Truth Social posts. It’s clear that the Trump administration just wants fewer immigrants in the U.S. and is willing to challenge long-standing laws and........© New Republic





















Toi Staff
Penny S. Tee
Gideon Levy
Sabine Sterk
Mark Travers Ph.d
Gilles Touboul
John Nosta
Daniel Orenstein