This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 11 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Thursday was a brutal day for President Donald Trump, with the president suffering one humiliating political defeat after another.
For much of his second term, Trump — and those around him — have projected an air of invincibility and omnipotence. But those days seem very much in the past, as the president’s political power and capital disappear before his very eyes.
It is hard to overstate how rare it used to be for a federal grand jury to refuse an indictment. It has now happened twice in two weeks in the same case.
It started earlier on Thursday, when a federal grand jury refused to rubber-stamp the Justice Department’s attempt to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on obviously pretextual charges.
Now, if that story sounds familiar, it’s because just last week, a different federal grand jury also refused to indict James.
It is hard to overstate how rare it used to be for a federal grand jury to refuse an indictment. It has now happened twice in two weeks in the same case — all because the Trump administration overplayed its hand.
Of course, this comes after the first case Trump’s Justice Department made against James collapsed last month. So, if you’re keeping track at home, they are now zero for 3.
But then on Thursday afternoon, things got worse for Trump. In Indiana, we saw a dramatic — and frankly shocking — rebuke of this president by the state’s Republican legislators in a state he carried by almost 20 points last year.
In the Indiana Senate, where Republicans hold a 40-to-10 supermajority, Trump’s scheme to redraw the state’s congressional maps to eliminate the last two Democratic districts in the state was defeated overwhelmingly, 31 to 19.
But Trump wants you to know he’s totally fine with it. After that failed vote, he told reporters in the Oval Office, “It’s funny, ’cause I won Indiana all three times by a landslide. And I wasn’t working on it very hard. Would’ve been nice. I think we would’ve picked up two seats if we did that.”
Despite the president’s claim that he wasn’t very involved, he led a massive pressure campaign against Indiana lawmakers opposed to his effort. Vice President JD Vance personally flew out to Indiana to lobby on behalf of the plan.
Before the vote, Vance took to X to browbeat one of the state’s top Republicans. “Rod Bray, the Senate leader in Indiana, has consistently told us he wouldn’t fight redistricting while simultaneously whipping his members against it,” the vice president wrote. “That level of dishonesty cannot be rewarded, and the Indiana GOP needs to choose a side.”
Hours later, Indiana Republicans did choose a side: They rejected Trump and Vance.
In Indiana, we saw a dramatic — and frankly shocking — rebuke of this president by the state’s Republican legislators.
To be absolutely clear, the president himself was lobbying more than anybody to get this over the finish line. He personally called lawmakers and then went absolutely ballistic against them on social media, writing just Wednesday night, “Anybody that votes against Redistricting, and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in D.C., will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring.”
The president also attacked the Senate leader: “Rod Bray and his friends won’t be in Politics for long, and I will do everything within my power to make sure that they will not hurt the Republican Party, and our Country, again.”
Meanwhile, the conservative Heritage Foundation decided to run a moblike shakedown of the entire state. In a post on X before the failed vote, the group wrote, “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. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame. #PassTheMap.” But the most unsettling intimidation tactic was the death threats more than a dozen lawmakers have said they received. One Republican state senator, Mike Bohacek, who announced he would not vote for the bill in protest after Trump used a slur against people with intellectual disabilities (Bohacek has a daughter with Down Syndrome), said he received a bomb threat. But in the face of all that, enough Indiana Republicans had a simple message for the president of the United States: “No.” After three hours of debate, the whole ordeal was done in a matter of seconds. The no votes came rushing in, and that was that. In my view, this is a sign that the political landscape has shifted. First, Republicans broke with Trump on the Epstein files. Then they started making noise about Trump’s regime change agenda in Venezuela and the killing of civilians in the Caribbean. And now this stunning rebuke in Indiana, which came on the same day that an AP-NORC poll showed Trump’s approval rating slumping to just 36%. I don’t think the two things are unrelated. The president is starting to quack like a lame duck. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press). Recommended
