It seems he has no such qualms when it comes to domestic political battles.
Because for nearly a year, America’s two major parties – Mr Trump’s Republican Party and its opponents, the Democrats – have been doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling, then quintupling down on their own steadily worsening tit-for-tat.
It’s the same thing America faces in Iran, just minus the bombs and warships: two sides locked in a mutually destructive spiral, with too many incentives driving them away from compromise instead of towards it.
At issue is a toxic practice at which the US is, by the standards of fully democratic countries, uniquely well practised. No, not gun violence this time.
Gerrymandering.
The 2024 election results for the US House of Representatives. You see much more Republican red here than Democratic blue, due to the divide between dense urban seats and sparsely populated rural seats, but this produced a Republican majority of just 220-215. Picture: Fox News
That is the process through which America’s politicians can draw their own electoral boundaries, unlike in Australia, for instance, where the process is handled by an independent body, the Australian Electoral Commission.
Gerrymandering, or “redistricting”, as the politicians themselves tend to call it, has always been a problem in the United States. But only in the past year has it spiralled out of control, with both sides choosing to flagrantly weaponise it in pursuit of their own advantage.
‘Doesn’t make sense’: Trump’s growing anxiety
Mr Trump started it, driven by anxiety about the upcoming midterm elections, which are scheduled for November and which normally go very badly for the president’s party.
Those elections will determine, among other things, which party controls each house of Congress, the House of Representatives and Senate, for the final two years of his presidential term. At present, his Republicans have a majority in both chambers.
Their hold over the Senate is probably safe.
The House of Representatives is a different matter though; the Republicans are a single lost seat away from relinquishing their majority.
The current House Speaker, Mike Johnson, who will be turfed out of that job if the Democrats take control. Picture: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Should that happen, and should the Democrats take charge of the House next year, the ramifications for Mr Trump could be severe. His political opponents would then control Congress’s oversight powers, which let it investigate the administration’s activities.
With his own party running things, Mr Trump has faced remarkably little scrutiny, and even less pushback. That would change dramatically. It’s entirely possible that Mr Trump could face a third impeachment. And he would have essentially no prospect of getting legislation passed for the rest of his presidency.
The President seems to be aware of all this, because he is palpably worried about the midterms. And unusually, for someone who typically claims any election that doesn’t go his way is “rigged”, he has publicly conceded the odds won’t favour him in November.
“When somebody gets elected president, that party always loses the midterms. I don’t know why. Nobody can explain it,” he told Fox News in mid-April.
“I ask people who are deep into the psychological world. I said, ‘Why is it that a voter votes for the opposite party, even when you have a good president?’ It doesn’t make sense to me.”
Donald Trump. Picture: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images via AFP
It’s actually pretty easy to explain: voters are always beset by problems, and they tend to blame whoever is in power. Mr Trump and his party benefited from that dynamic in 2024, as Americans punished the Democrats for presiding over a huge spike in inflation.
This time, however, the knives are out for them, due in large part to Mr Trump’s own putrid approval ratings. And it will be nigh impossible to shift voters’ ire onto the Democrats, given they now hold no power at all in Washington.
‘Never-ending cycle’ begins
Everything above was the catalyst, last June, for Mr Trump to pressure the Republican leaders in America’s second-largest state, Texas, to engage in some shameless gerrymandering.
It’s important to understand that each American state controls its own elections. So if you want to redraw congressional districts, it is done at the state level, not the national level. Mr Trump can’t do it himself; he needs governors and state legislatures to help.
Over howls of protest from the Democrats and voting rights activists, Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled legislature did what Mr Trump wanted, coming up with a new electoral map which would, theoretically, flip five seats in Congress to their side.
How? Anthony Salvanto, CBS’ executive director of elections and surveys, explained how the gerrymandering process works pretty well the other day, via a simple graphic.
“When you talk about one party or another ‘picking up’ districts, they’ve made changes to their state lines such that more partisans are in those districts, to give them an advantage,” Mr Salvanto said.
The majority party can accomplish its objective in multiple ways. It can draw the lines so its opponent’s voters are densely concentrated in just a handful of districts, like in the first image here. Or it can chop up areas that tend to vote against it into little pieces, and put each piece into a district where its residents will be hopelessly outnumbered.
Gerrymandering usually involves doing a combination of both.
Option one: pack all your opponent’s voters into relatively few seats. Picture: CBS News
Option two: divide your opponent’s voters into a bunch of seats, guaranteeing they’ll be outnumbered in all of them. Picture; CBS News
When it’s taken to an extreme, you end up with a wildly unrepresentative system, where one party can turn a relatively narrow majority of votes into a massive majority of seats.
In California, for example, the Democrats won 60 per cent of the vote in 2024, but 83 per cent of the seats. The Republicans’ 40 per cent vote share earned them only nine of the 52 districts on offer.
It was California, in fact, that more than any state other than Texas, helped send the US into its current gerrymandering doom spiral. Its Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, whose main focus these days is setting up a run for president, responded to the Republicans’ shenanigans in Texas by doing the same thing in his own state.
Mr Newsom redrew California’s electoral boundaries to flip five seats to the Democrats, thus cancelling out the Republicans’ ill-gotten gains with some equally ill-gotten gains of his own.
We’ve since seen similar moves, from both sides, in Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri and Utah. In total, the Democrats have added about 10 seats so far, while the Republicans are up to about 14.
This is what CBS News, in that report above, called a “never-ending cycle of redistricting”. One party gains an advantage, so the other feels compelled to cancel it out, and it keeps going on and on, endlessly escalating, with no restraint in sight.
The rough number of seats each party has gerrymandered into its column, based on past voting behaviour. Blue means the state was gerrymandered in favour of the Democrats, and red means the same for the Republicans.
How about another example? I mentioned Tennessee. Here is how one of that state’s senators, John Stevens, explained its own redistricting push this week.
“Tennessee is a conservative state, and this map ensures that our congressional delegation reflects that,” Mr Stevens said.
“This is about allowing Tennessee to maximise its partisan advantage.”
Tennessee is, indeed, a conservative state; only a third of its residents tend to vote for the Democrats. It was also already a preposterously gerrymandered state.
In 2024, the Republicans won their usual two-thirds of Tennessee’s vote, and that earned them eight of its nine seats, or 89 per cent.
The move Mr Stevens was defending, splitting up the Democrats’ only district and redistributing a chunk of its voters into neighbouring seats, should ensure that next time, the Republicans win all nine. So that 33 per cent minority of Tennesseans will now have no representation in Congress whatsoever.
That’s the end point of this gerrymandering war: a chronic disenfranchisement of voters everywhere in the US. Conservative Americans who live in Democrat-run states will have less representation in Washington, and progressive Americans who live in Republican-run states will suffer the same fate.
The whole system is being degraded because neither party is willing to unilaterally disarm.
Maybe Australia got it right here. Maybe the politicians shouldn’t be drawing their own maps.
