Tennessee Goes Full Confederate

Plus Trump's corruption comes with immunity and Republican's have a Massie problem.

This is "What I'm Hearing" — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

Trump’s new immunity deal.

Trump’s corruption keeps on corrupting. Earlier this week, I wrote about how Trump sued his own government, settled the case with himself, routed nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money through the Judgment Fund, and handed his former personal defense lawyer the checkbook. (If you missed it, the full breakdown is here.) Since then, two developments have made an already historic act of corruption worse.

First, the immunity. In an addendum to the settlement signed solely by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the DOJ declared that the IRS is now “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing pending tax claims against Trump, his sons, or the Trump Organization. Read that again. The president didn’t only divert $1.776 billion to a fund he controls. He used a lawsuit he filed against his own government to win permanent immunity from his own tax liability.

Second, the price tag in human terms. Brian Tyler Cohen did the arithmetic: divide $1.776 billion among the roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants Trump has already pardoned, and you get more than $1 million per rioter. And the money does appear headed their way. Robert Hubbell flags NBC reporting that a DOJ official told a Republican ally that large checks are coming for January 6 defendants, one of whose lawyers said he was “pretty darn excited.” The Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have now filed suit to block the fund. They are suing to stop their own government from paying the people who beat them.

Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, on The Bulwark Podcast this week, gave it the cleanest name I’ve heard: this is “reparations for white insurrectionists.” JD Vance seems to agree with him.

Sent to the podium to address the fund, Vice President JD Vance argued that January 6 participants “never ever get an ounce of sympathy” for what he framed as disproportionate sentencing — while, in his telling, other people who’ve gone to prison get too much. He didn’t have to name who he meant by “other people.” Andrew Egger at The Bulwark called the performance “faux-earnest aw-shucks folksy reasonableness.” Rep. Jones put the subtext where it belongs: we run two systems of justice in this country, and this fund is the government formalizing the one where you get grace if you’re white and an insurrectionist, and an execution if you’re Black in Tennessee. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for his part, would only say he’s “not a big fan.” And the Bulwark’s Jonathan Last has the right framing and the right instruction: brand it the “Slush Fund from Hell,” and the moment Democrats hold the House, subpoena the five secret commissioners and the full list of who got paid.

The immunity addendum should end the “it’s just a settlement” defense for good. A settlement resolves a dispute between adverse parties. There were no adverse parties here. There was Trump on one side and Trump’s government on the other, with Trump’s personal lawyer holding the pen. And Rep. Jones is right that the danger runs forward, not just back: if you tell people they can attack the Capitol and get rewarded for it, you are not closing the book on January 6. You're having taxpayers fund the sequel. The remedy is the same as it was Tuesday: litigation now, subpoenas in January, a House majority with the power to compel every name.

Read more: Zeteo, Brian Tyler Cohen, The Bulwark Podcast, The Triad - JVL, Andrew Egger, Robert Hubbell.

Massie’s defeat isn’t the flex Trump thinks it is.

The narrative out of Tuesday night writes itself if you let it: Trump is unstoppable inside his own party. He spent nearly $20 million to end Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky libertarian who crossed him on the Iran war, the tax bill, and the Epstein files. Massie lost to a Trump-backed challenger whose name is honestly irrelevant. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused Trump’s 2020 demand to “find 11,780 votes,” lost his bid for governor. Sitting Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to impeach Trump after Jan 6, finished third in his primary. Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over sitting Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. By morning, the takes were uniform: this is Donald Trump’s party, and Republican resistance is finished.

I don’t buy it. These small victories could spell trouble for Trump and the Republicans. Dan Pfeiffer’s piece this week — “Everyone Thinks Trump Won Last Night. They’re Wrong” — touches on what is really happening here. Start with the Massie number itself. He took 45% of the vote in a district Trump carried by 35 points, against the most money ever spent against a candidate in a House primary. Compare that to Liz Cheney, who got 28.9% after voting to impeach, and you see a growing dissent among Republican primary voters. The key is that Massie didn’t run against Trump’s character the way the Never Trumpers did. He ran at Trump from inside the base, on the Iran war, on Epstein, and on spending. Forty-five percent of Republicans in a red district followed him there.

But Pfeiffer’s most important point is about what comes next. Trump’s approval is under 40%, he’s mired in an unpopular war, voters blame him for the economy, and his 2024 coalition has cracked. Which means the single best thing a vulnerable Republican can do to save their own seat this November is to show some independence from him. But Trump won’t allow it. Cross him, and he’ll turn on you — a social-media broadside, the MAGA base told to stay home, a Super PAC spigot shut off. “A smarter, savvier, less megalomaniacal leader,” Pfeiffer writes, “would give his party the room to do what they need to win. Trump is incapable of doing so, and the GOP will pay a price for it.”

The Massie result tells two stories. On one hand, it fully exposes how shallow the diehard Trump supporters are. Unlike Liz Cheney or Bill Cassidy, Massie’s crossing of Trump wasn’t personal. It was policy. Massie’s transgression was voting to release the Epstein files and opposing the Iran War. Two things the most diehard Trump supporters claim are critically important to them. Yet the majority of them in Massie’s district decided that loyalty to Trump was more important than policy. That is a revealing result.

On the other hand, in a district Trump won by 35 points, he needed to spend 20 million dollars to enact political revenge on a fellow Republican who still got 45% of the vote. Trump still has a firm grip on the core Republican base, but that grip is certainly slipping. And in more competitive districts, Trump's loyalty demand will prove fatal.

My take is that Trump doesn’t really care about being competitive nationally anymore. His sole focus is on keeping an iron grip on the Republican Party. He has figured out that remaining the kingmaker in his party is all he needs to further his self-interests, even if that means a shrinking Republican party.

Read more: The Message Box (Pfeiffer).

Tennessee goes full Confederate.

This is the story I most want you to know about this week.

Start with May 7. At Trump’s request, Tennessee convened a special session for a single purpose: to redraw the congressional map mid-decade to hand Republicans a 9-0 sweep. Within 24 hours, between the committee and the floor, it was law. The target was Memphis, the state’s only majority-Black, majority-Democratic district. The new map cracks it into three and connects a city that is 51% Black to Williamson County, 300 miles away, to dilute the vote. Every one of Tennessee’s nine districts is now majority-white, in a state that is 25% Black and brown. As Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones put it, you can now drive from one Krispy Kreme in Nashville to another on the city’s outskirts and pass through five congressional districts. The Republican sponsors said on the record that the map was drawn to “maximize partisan advantage.” The NAACP and the League of Women Voters are suing for intentional racial discrimination.

When Democrats protested on the floor — linking arms, sounding air horns — Speaker Cameron Sexton stripped all 24 of them from every committee and subcommittee, citing “decorum” and “prohibited props and noisemakers.” Because of who makes up the Tennessee Democratic caucus, that means every Black elected official in the state legislature was removed from every committee they served on. Rep. Jones went further on The Bulwark Podcast, describing reporting from the Tennessee Holler that the punishment wasn’t even applied evenly: he says the caucus’s four white male members were left off the removal list and allowed to resign their assignments on their own, rather than be formally stripped like everyone else. If that holds up, it means that when the supermajority punished the opposition for protesting a racial gerrymander, it drew the punishment list itself along racial lines. “It does show that they see race,” Rep. Jones said, “even in that regard.”

And it isn’t only the maps. The National Guard is still occupying Memphis. ICE is running raids across the state in joint operations with the Tennessee Highway Patrol. Tennessee was the first state to pass a slate of bills written by Stephen Miller, which is why Miller was in the White House this week, handing Tennessee Speaker Sexton a proclamation celebrating the “partnership.” The gerrymander, the occupation, the committee purge, and the Miller bills. Tennessee has gone full confederacy.

Rep. Jones calls his state “the tip of the spear,” and he’s right. Since the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida are all running versions of the same Jim Crow-era play: erase Black-majority districts, then punish whoever objects. Rep. Jones names it plainly: this is a Jim Crow legislature, and these are the Bull Connors and George Wallaces of the 21st century. The Congressional Black Caucus could lose up to a third of its members to Southern redistricting — a contraction of Black political representation unseen since the end of Reconstruction.

The people fighting it are doing it from the streets and the courts because the committee rooms have been taken from them. The least the rest of us can do, wherever we live, is refuse to let it happen quietly: fund the organizers running voter registration on the ground, amplify the local outlets like the Tennessee Holler actually covering it, and demand our own blue-state governors answer Tennessee’s gerrymander with one of their own.

Rep. Jones marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma this month, as part of one of the largest Southern mobilizations since the 1960s. He says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez named the assignment there better than anyone: it’s time for the North to pull up on the South because what happens in Tennessee is connected to what happens in New York. If Democracy dies in Tennessee, it can die everywhere.

So pull up.

Read more: The Bulwark Podcast, Tennessee Lookout, Democracy Docket.