'Mutually assured destruction': Trump’s 'noxious' ploy comes for his own MAGA base
President Donald Trump is not only entirely responsible for the "noxious" redistricting war in Texas and California, writes New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Cottle, but that war is coming for his own base.
“What we have right now — this domino effect or this redistricting war of mutually assured destruction — that’s just total chaos,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA), who represents California’s Third Congressional District, tells Cottle.
Governor Gavin Newsom's (D-CA) plan to put new congressional maps before voters is "retaliatory gerrymandering" against Texas Governor Gregg Abbott's (TX-R) own plans for redistricting, which Kiley condemned back in August.
"My district will be torn into six different pieces,” Kiley told Cottle, adding, “People think that’s crazy.”
Trying to "short circuit the madness," Cottle writes, Kiley introduced a bill in the U.S. House to outlaw mid decade redistricting nationwide.
“It definitely has a lot of support on both sides of the aisle,” he told her.
Kiley says he sees a rare opportunity for unity between Republicans and Democrats.
“Maybe the one thing that Democrats and Republicans can agree on these days is that having this kind of unscheduled upheaval to our representative government is a really bad thing,” he said.
Cottle scoffs at the idea, saying, "What happens is quite likely to be nothing. Nada. Bupkis. The odds that this speaker will move to thwart the electoral desires of this president are roughly the same as those of [attorney general] Pam Bondi posting all of the [Jeffrey] Epstein files on Bluesky."
Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) agrees with Cottle, saying, Kiley's bill “is not going to go anywhere, because you’re not going to get consensus" and believes they should shift their focus to Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" instead.
Cottle says no matter what they focus on, Trump shows no concern over the fact that his push for gerrymandering will also affect his own base.
"As the president presses for more red states to join the fray, it becomes all the more vivid just how expendable he considers the other members of his political team, no matter how loyal or useful they have been," she says, adding, "No one is safe."
Kiley cries foul, saying, “It fails the test of kindergarten logic that two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because we don’t like what’s happening in some other state, why should our own citizens pay the price for that?”
Cottle has no sympathy for Kiley or the Republicans and says that as reasonable as Kiley's argument may be, "it feels more than a little rich for Republicans to be grumbling about a partisan power grab."
Kiley is pessimistic, or delusional if you ask Cottle, telling the NYT, “It could get to the point where we have rolling redistricting every cycle. We need to say, ‘Enough is enough.’”
Cottle remains skeptical.
"Alas, for someone as hungry for control as Mr. Trump, enough is never enough," she says.
