A RECURRING headline here in the more left-leaning mainstream media is the precipitously downward slide of President Donald Trump’s approval ratings. They are in freefall, they crow, hitting new lows weekly as his popularity continues to plummet. Trump just might be the most despised president since such contests were first recorded in the 1940s.

All of this may be true. Trump’s approval ratings are tanking, falling below 38 per cent which is pretty dismal. But does he care?

Probably not. Trump has no need of a Glinda extolling the positives of popularity. He has found other ways to win. On an almost daily basis now, Trump has demonstrably proven that he knows how to corrupt the system in his favour. That system just happens to be our democracy.

Perhaps the most heinous example — although Trump might have topped this by the time we go to press, so thick and fast are the crimes coming these days — is the obscene “settlement’ Trump just effectively made with himself, that will protect him and his family from any tax scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The legal victory also establishes a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponisation” slush fund with which Trump plans to reward, among others, the thugs and criminals involved in the violent January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol.

Two members of the police forces involved in defending the Capitol and lawmakers that day are suing to stop this payout to their assailants, calling it “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.”

One of the two officers suing is Harry Dunn, an African American member of the Capitol Police force who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the physical and racist abuse he suffered during the January 6 insurrection.

The testimony of a black man, assailed by a white mob, has become the image of our times. It is as if we are back in the civil rights era struggles of the 1950s and ‘60s, and as if we didn’t win.

This sense of regression has been most powerfully rendered by the optics — and decision-making — coming out of the southern state of Tennessee after a Republican-orchestrated May 7 vote there changed the voting maps and effectively disenfranchised the black population.

The redistricting in Tennessee speaks precisely to why Trump is politically unruffled by his nose-diving popularity, even if his ego may quietly be taking a little bruising. Racially or politically-based gerrymandering is one part of a wider scheme to rig the midterm elections, where Republicans are standing to lose considerable ground. Trump doesn’t need to be popular if the voters who oppose him are diluted into a demographic of majority MAGA loyalists.

As a result of the Tennessee vote, the majority black city of Memphis has now been redivided into three heavily Republican districts, eliminating the state’s only majority-black US House district.

Black State Representative Justin Pearson, who represents Shelby County, the Memphis region that was carved up in this brazenly political coup to silence him, called the May 2026 redistricting vote “a political lynching that violated the rights of every Tennesseean. This racist and reckless action was also an attack on black political power that should appall everyone in the state, whether you are black or not, a voter or not, live in Memphis or not, or are a Democrat or not.”

In April 2023, Pearson was one of two black Tennessee legislators expelled from the legislature for leading chants on the House floor advocating for gun reform in the wake of yet another school shooting — this time in Nashville. He was reinstated a week later. Representative Justin Jones, representing the Nashville area, was also expelled and reinstated days later.

But during the redistricting vote, the pictures coming out of the Tennessee House of Representatives were as if we had time travelled back to the days of lunch counter sit-ins.

There was black Tennessee State Senator Charlane Oliver, standing on her desk after her microphone was cut off, clinging to a home-made banner that read “No Jim Crow 2.0. Stop the TN Steal,” as burly white Senate Chief Clerk Russell Humphrey tried to rip it from her hands.

There were the protesters being physically evicted from the chamber by white police officers. One was Pearson’s brother. As Pearson tried to intervene, exhorting the officers to let his brother walk out unimpeded, the scuffle appeared to worsen. ”What the f*** is wrong with you?” you can hear Pearson yelling, followed by further invective.

And there was Representative Jones, after the redistricting vote had passed, walking through the hallways holding aloft a burning paper Confederate flag.

Jones had earlier placed a paper copy of the Confederate flag on the desk of a Republican legislator, who scrunched it into a ball in his fist and threw it away. Once at the microphone, Jones, who was frequently interrupted, accused the body of being a “white sheet caucus” and addressed the Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton as the “grand wizard.”

“He is someone who has called me ‘boy’,” Jones said later, describing members of committees in the Tennessee House as “seething with racism.”

Jones’s evocation of white sheets and grand wizards referred to the notorious white supremacy cult, the Ku Klux Klan, who wear sheets and pointed hats and which long terrorised black communities. The leaders are referred to as “grand wizards.” The Klan still exists, although in a more fragmented and less visible form.

In interviews after the vote, Jones said the Republicans in Tennessee had “turned back the clock of history.” Recalling the civil rights struggles of his grandparents, Jones said, “When I walked out at the end of the session, it was pre-1965.” He thought of all the black martyrs, he said, and that the Republicans had “spit on the graves of all those who paid with days in jail and nights of bomb threats.”

After the vote, Speaker Sexton promptly stripped all Democratic lawmakers of their committee and subcommittee assignments as a form of collective punishment for the protests inside.

“When you challenge white supremacy, white supremacists like Ku Klux Cameron Sexton push back by taking away your committee assignments,” responded Pearson. “We will not yield to authoritarianism or bigotry. Fighting for justice requires risk and sacrifice.”

In a post on X, Pearson wrote: “It’s unsurprising that the same people who cracked our majority black district through racist redistricting want to crack our dissent but we will never be silenced!”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland and the author of No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War, published by Pluto Press.