Indiana GOP Draws Battle Line Against Trump in Redistricting Showdown

The Indiana political landscape was thrown into fresh turmoil Friday as the Republican-controlled state Senate openly defied President Donald Trump’s nationwide redistricting drive, refusing to reconvene for a special session aimed at carving out additional GOP-friendly congressional seats.

In a move reminiscent of internal party pushback that often shapes Nigerian political caucuses, Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray declared that there were simply “not enough votes” to advance the controversial map-drawing effort—an announcement that immediately set the stage for a full-blown intra-party confrontation.

Bray’s stance represents a significant setback for Trump’s national strategy, which has been aggressively focused on redrawing congressional lines across several states to shore up Republican dominance ahead of next year’s decisive midterm elections.

With Democrats needing only three seats to reclaim the U.S. House of Representatives, the president has viewed redistricting as a pivotal battlefield.

Governor Mike Braun—acting with the backing of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and key operatives in the president’s political machinery had urgently called for the special session, insisting that Indiana must seize the moment to deliver two additional GOP seats.

But Bray, leader of the Republican supermajority in the state Senate, was unyielding.

“Over the last several months, Senate Republicans have given very serious and thoughtful consideration to the concept of redrawing our state’s congressional maps,” Bray said.

“Today, I’m announcing there are not enough votes to move that idea forward, and the Senate will not reconvene in December.”

The governor wasted no time firing back, urging lawmakers to “do the right thing and show up to vote for fair maps,” insisting that Hoosiers deserve transparency on where their representatives stand on consequential political questions.

Indiana’s refusal adds the state to a growing list of Republican-led governments showing hesitancy toward Trump’s mid-decade map strategy, following similar reluctance in Kansas.

Yet, elsewhere, the president’s campaign has registered notable successes—pushing through redistricting plans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, collectively creating the possibility of nine new Republican-leaning seats.

For Trump’s political operation, Indiana had been a prime target.

Republicans already control seven of the state’s nine congressional districts, and strategists were eyeing the Democratic-held 1st District in the northwest and the 7th District in Indianapolis as ripe for flipping.

The current standoff, however, underscores a key dilemma familiar to followers of Nigerian political manoeuvring: national party ambitions often collide with entrenched state-level realities, power blocs, and internal party calculus.

Despite ideological unity, local dynamics can reshape the battlefield.

Meanwhile, Democrats are not standing idle. Just last week, California voters approved a measure to create five new Democratic-leaning districts.

Trump’s Justice Department has since joined a legal challenge seeking to invalidate the map, signalling that the redistricting war is spreading beyond legislative chambers into the courts—mirroring the multifront political contests often seen in Nigeria.

Trump Orders Probe of Clinton as Epstein Files Stir Bipartisan Unrest in Washington

United States President Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to investigate former President Bill Clinton’s alleged links to the late financier and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, amid growing political uproar triggered by newly released emails referencing Trump himself.

The directive, issued on Friday through the president’s social media platforms, marks a fresh escalation in the long-running Epstein scandal and comes at a time when Trump is facing increasing pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to allow full disclosure of all government-held Epstein documents.

In typical combative fashion, Trump dismissed the recent revelations as a “Democratic hoax,” insisting that the resurfaced emails were no more than a political distraction engineered to damage his administration ahead of a crucial election cycle.

“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” he wrote.

The president further claimed that Epstein was “a Democrat,” declaring, “Don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”

Trump subsequently announced he had instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to open an investigation into Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, billionaire Reid Hoffman, and banking giant JPMorgan Chase.

Bondi responded within hours, confirming that she had assigned the case to U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who, she said, would pursue the probe “with urgency and integrity.”

The political storm intensified earlier in the week after House Democrats released three email excerpts from the Epstein case files—documents exchanged among Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, and author Michael Wolff—that appeared to suggest Trump had some degree of awareness of Epstein’s activities.

One message attributed to Epstein read: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him.”

Another stated: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

Not to be outdone, Republican lawmakers later released an additional 20,000 pages from the same files, including a 2017 email in which Epstein allegedly described Trump as the worst of the “very bad people” he had encountered, claiming the president had “not one decent cell in his body.”

The revelations have triggered rare bipartisan alignment on Capitol Hill.

A discharge petition jointly championed by Rep. Thomas Massie (Republican) and Rep. Ro Khanna (Democrat) succeeded in forcing a House vote—now scheduled for next week—on a bill that would require the release of all remaining Epstein-related government records.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a known Trump ally, reluctantly agreed to the vote.

Describing the exercise as “totally pointless,” he admitted that the petition had garnered the necessary signatures.

Meanwhile, the White House has continued its pushback.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt described the Democrats’ initial email release as a “selectively edited smear,” while Trump criticized Republicans supporting the transparency effort as “soft and foolish.”

Political observers note that Trump’s decision to go on the offensive reflects a familiar strategy of shifting the political narrative onto his perceived opponents whenever damaging allegations surface.

However, with bipartisan calls for full disclosure gaining unprecedented momentum, Washington appears braced for a fresh round of political confrontation—one that may prove difficult for either party to contain as the Epstein scandal enters a new and volatile phase.

Nigeria Reverses Mother-Tongue Education Policy

The Nigerian Government has reversed its three-year-old policy mandating the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in early childhood education, announcing that English will once again be used from pre-primary level through to the university.

The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, disclosed the decision on Friday in Abuja, describing the mother-tongue policy as “a failed experiment” that had not delivered the expected improvement in learning outcomes.

The policy, introduced under former Education Minister Adamu Adamu in 2022, was based on the argument supported by various UN studies that children understand concepts more effectively when taught in their first language.

Adamu had maintained at the time that pupils were more likely to grasp ideas when taught in “their own mother tongue”.

But Dr Alausa said recent performance indicators from examination bodies, including the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), the National Examinations Council (NECO) and the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), showed that states which adopted the policy recorded poorer results.

“We have seen a mass failure rate in WAEC, NECO and JAMB in certain geo-political zones of the country, and those are the ones that adopted this mother-tongue policy in an over-subscribed manner,” the minister said.

Nigeria’s education sector burdened by poor instructional materials, underqualified teachers, low remuneration and recurring strikes continues to struggle despite high enrolment rates.

While about 85 per cent of Nigerian children attend primary school, less than half complete secondary education.

The UN estimates that more than 10 million children remain out of school, the highest figure globally.