The president of the United States vowed to destroy members of his own party. Not their policies. Not their careers in the abstract. Them, personally. One by one, by name.
“We’re going to take them out,” said President Donald Trump in December, referring to Indiana state senators who refused his demand to redraw congressional maps in a way that would have handed Republicans two additional U.S. House seats.
The proposed maps would have carved up Democratic strongholds, but the incumbent senators refused, because the request was tantamount to cheating.
Trump responded by backing challengers, raising money against members of his own party, and dispatching operatives into their races.
In the primary, five of the seven lawmakers who opposed him lost their jobs.
Another remained locked in a race too close to call. One survived.
Senator Spencer Deery said he felt mid-decade redistricting would undermine the people’s faith in the electoral process and was inconsistent with conservative principles.
“My opposition to mid-cycle gerrymandering is not in contrast to my conservative principles; my opposition is driven by them,” Deery said. “As long as I have breath, I will use my voice to resist a federal government that attempts to bully, direct, and control this state or any state. Giving the federal government more power is not conservative.”
A week after Election Day, Deery had a three-vote lead in the race against his Trump-backed challenger, Paula Copenhaver.
The race will be decided in Tippecanoe County, the last election board to count votes, where only two provisional ballots remain left to review. Even if Copenhaver takes both, it looks like Deery might still win by a single vote.
What happened in Indiana was not a disagreement over tax rates or farm subsidies. It was a purge of legislators who committed the single unforgivable act in the politics of 2026: disobedience.
And here is where the past reaches into the present.
There is a poem, though the man who inspired it never formally wrote it down. Martin Niemöller was a German pastor, a decorated U-boat commander in World War I, a nationalist and an antisemite who voted for Adolf Hitler’s party in 1933. He welcomed the Nazi regime because he believed it would restore German greatness.
What changed him was not the roundup of socialists or trade unionists. He looked away from that. What changed him was when the state reached into his church, dictating what he could preach and who could serve as a pastor.
By then, it was too late for many others.
Niemöller spent eight years in concentration camps. After the war, he spoke of how the Nazis first came for the Communists, and he did not speak up because he was not a Communist. Then they came for the social democrats, the trade unionists and the Jews. Each time, he said, he remained silent because he was not one of them. And when they came for him, there was no one left to speak.
The poem is not about abstract guilt. It is about the arithmetic of abandonment. It is about the illusion that loyalty to a leader will protect you once you are no longer useful to him.
Indiana state Sen. Jim Buck served for more than three decades. He is 80 years old.
His district urged him to vote against the map, and he did. Trump endorsed an opponent. Roughly $1.3 million in attack ads flooded Buck’s race, while the incumbent’s campaign spent less than $150,000.
“No matter how hard you try, perception becomes reality,” Buck said after losing. “You tell a lie enough times, and it becomes the truth.”
State Sen. Linda Rogers said the ads aired three or four times an hour. She lost. State Sen. Greg Walker, a 20-year veteran, lost. They said they had no regrets. They followed their districts. They followed the law. And they were eliminated.
Trump’s allies spent at least $8 million, and likely more. Trump-aligned super PACs, Turning Point USA and the Club for Growth, poured money into the races. Indiana’s Republican governor contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars. So did the state’s U.S. senator, Jim Banks, a Trump ally who later said: “Everyone in Indiana politics should have learned an important lesson today.”
The lesson was not about policy. It was about what happens to anyone who says no.
Niemöller did not begin as a hero. He began as a collaborator. He believed in the leader’s aims until the leader’s aims came for him. What he learned — too late for so many others — was that in a system built on absolute personal loyalty, there is no neutrality. There is no principled objection the leader will eventually respect. There is only compliance or elimination.
Indiana is one state. These were eight legislators in a Republican primary. This is not comparing Trump to Hitler. That is not the point.
The point is the mechanism: the demand for obedience not to an idea or a constitution, but to a single person. The use of political power not to win arguments, but to destroy those who resist. The warning is that you do not have to be the target of the purge to be endangered by it. You only have to be next.
Buck said he worries his defeat will send a signal to legislators across the country: Stand up to the president, and you will lose your job.
“This is what our founders feared the most,” he said. “That Washington would all of a sudden feel like they have the right to dictate what the states do.”
The founders feared something else, too. They feared the leader who would not tolerate limits on his will. They built a system of dispersed power precisely because they understood that the most dangerous person in a republic is the one who demands that everyone else in his party bend the knee.
Trump has said he will remember who stood with him. He has also shown what happens to those who do not.
The senators in Indiana learned that lesson Tuesday. The question now is whether the rest of the party is paying attention — or whether they will wait until there is no one left to speak.
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