President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.
Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.
And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.
Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.
“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”
Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”
When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”
In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.
Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.
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