By Sheila Suess Kennedy
September 28, 2026
A recurring question with which many of us grapple is: How did we get here? What were the flaws in our systems, in our institutions, in too many of our people that allowed–facilitated!– the elevation of a morally repulsive, demonstrably unfit man to the Presidency? Why does anyone continue to support him? What accounts for the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party, and the election of equally unfit Senators and Representatives?
In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman addressed the first question, writing that Trumpism didn’t emerge out of thin air – that Trump and Trumpism are the “culmination of a decades-long threat to American democracy, to the moral, legal and social fiber of this country.” He drew a straight line from Koch Brothers’ money, which allied itself with segregationists and religious fundamentalists, created the Federalist Society, and now infests the Roberts Supreme Court, the crypto-industry and the tech-broligarchy.
Krugman’s description of that history has been amplified by a number of political and religious historians, who have traced the lengthy history of an autocratic, reality-averse and patient far-Right movement that finally has come to dominate America’s federal government and the governments of several Red states.
Like Indiana.
I have written before about the deep disappointment so many Hoosiers have experienced with Indiana Senator Todd Young. Young is intelligent; he clearly knows that this administration is destroying what I call the American Idea, but he continues to meekly bend his knee and do Trump’s bidding. There’s a tendency to focus on Young simply because we believe he does know better.
Indiana’s other Senator, however, is Jim Banks. Banks is a MAGA True Believer, a thorough-going ideologue who, despite being a constant embarrassment to the Hoosier state, is firmly in charge of Indiana’s Republican Party.
Talking Points Memo recently featured our embarrassing Senator in a report about Trump’s effort to skew the census in order to distort the vote. (Trump wants the Census Bureau to disregard the Constitutional language requiring it to count “all people,” and count only those who are citizens, a count that would cause Blue states to lose representation and Red states to benefit. He also wants the Bureau to stop collecting demographic data, absence of which will make it harder to implement civil rights laws.)
In what TPM calls “a kind of nerd corollary to Trump’s claims about the 2020 election,” MAGA figures like Banks are claiming that Trump’s “victory” was snatched from him by shadowy actors at the Census Bureau. Not only did these miscreants deny Trump his victory, but their actions deprived the GOP of several seats in Congress.
These claims are quite obviously looney-tunes, so Senator Banks enthusiastically endorsed them.
“The 2020 Census was a fraud,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) declared on X last year, one example of the claim. “The Biden admin used a shady ‘privacy’ formula that scrambled the data and miscounted 14 states. It included illegal immigrants and handed Democrats extra seats. Americans deserve a fair count and I’m fighting to fix it.”
Of course he is.
This particular conspiracy theory rests–as so many do–on the innumeracy and statistical ignorance of its proponents.
At the center of these claims is a technique used by statisticians who are dealing with large data sets to protect the privacy of individual respondents; it’s called differential privacy.
The technique, an online army and a handful of elected officials claim, messed with apportionment, the process through which officials determine, based on population, how many seats each state gets in Congress and in the Electoral College. The fact that differential privacy isn’t even used on the population numbers that underlie apportionment has not done much to dampen enthusiasm for this allegation. Other versions of the conspiracy theory allege differential privacy fuzzed up the data that underlies redistricting.
These allegations are intended to support the GOP’s effort to exclude immigrants from apportionment, add a citizenship question to the Census, and to stop collecting the racial demographic information used to challenge discriminatory voting maps. Whether Banks is bright enough to understand that and simply carrying MAGA water-or whether he is truly the crazed zealot he seems to be–is an open question.
The other open question–at least for Hoosiers–is whether the upcoming election will be typical, with the (pathetically few) Indiana voters who bother to turn out continuing to elect any coward, zealot or buffoon with an R beside his or her name. I guess we’ll find out in November, when Banks’ chosen candidate for Secretary of State is on the ballot….
Sheila Suess Kennedy is Emerita Professor of Law and Public Policy at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. As an attorney, she practiced real estate, administrative and business law in Indianapolis before becoming corporation counsel for the City of Indianapolis in 1977. In 1980, she was the Republican candidate for Indiana’s then 11th Congressional District and in 1992, she became executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. She joined the faculty of the School of Public and Environment al Affairs in 1998.
This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.” The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
