Donald Trump wanted a big win out of Texas — five new GOP House seats carved out of Democratic strongholds.Instead, the whole thing has blown up in the party’s face — and Republicans are now turning their fire on each other.
The 2–1 ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas tossed the new GOP-drawn lines as illegal, and the political blowback has been immediate. According to Politico, some Republicans say the entire scheme never should have been allowed to get off the ground.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) aimed straight at House Speaker Mike Johnson, calling his unwillingness to reject Trump’s redistricting push a “total failure of leadership.” Others say they warned party leaders not to touch the map in the first place.
“I was never in favor of doing all this redistricting stuff anyway,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) told Politico. “Should not have opened that box.”
The irony? Kiley himself is likely to lose his California seat next year thanks to Prop 50 — a voter-approved reset of the state’s maps that overwhelmingly benefits Democrats. While the Texas ruling doesn’t affect California, it underscores just how chaotic Trump’s multi-state redistricting blitz has become.
Republican strategist Rob Stutzman summed up the disaster plainly, calling the Texas play a “possible debacle” if the Supreme Court ends up siding with the lower court.
“This will have been a ready, shoot, aim exercise by Trump,” Stutzman said — a line that now feels like the epitaph for the entire effort.
If the ruling holds, Texas will revert to its 2021 maps. That means Reps. Greg Casar and Lloyd Doggett — who were being forced into the same district — won’t have to face off. Doggett seemed more amused than rattled, dropping a Mark Twain classic: “the reports of my death, politically, are greatly exaggerated.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, who’s been weighing a Senate run, would also return to her current district without the GOP’s engineered obstacles.
Texas isn’t the only state where Trump’s pressure campaign has veered off the rails. Indiana Senate president pro tempore Rodric Bray admitted he doesn’t have the votes to ram new gerrymandered maps through. And in New Hampshire — a state where Republicans control the government — Gov. Kelly Ayotte has brushed off Trump’s demands entirely, saying redistricting is “not on the top of [voters’] priority list.”
Trump imagined a redistricting offensive that would pad the GOP’s House margins ahead of 2026. Instead, the party is now locked in a circular firing squad — furious at the courts, furious at their leaders, and increasingly furious at Trump for dragging them into a political mess they didn’t need.
