One month before Donald Trump launched his presidential bid, the Supreme Court agreed to consider a bid by conservative legal activists to rejigger the boundaries of American electoral politics in their favor. The plaintiffs in the case, Evenwel v. Abbott, argued that Texas should not use total population numbers in determining how to redistrict the state, and instead count only citizens of voting age.

But the significance of the case extended well beyond Texas. If the justices held that states had to redraw maps based on eligible and registered voters alone, large urban areas would see their electoral power diluted in favor of rural regions that trend whiter and more conservative. That shift, in turn, would strengthen the Republican Party in red, purple, and blue states alike.

When the Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs in April 2016, it appeared that Evenwel might be the high-water mark of conservative legal activism. Hillary Clinton, after all, was certain to trounce Trump in the upcoming election and nominate a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, tilting the court in liberals’ favor for the first time since the 1960s. Evenwel seemed destined to be a footnote in legal history.

But now, more than halfway through Trump’s first term, the historic significance of the case is clear: It was an early skirmish in the coming legal war over redistricting and the 2020 census, one that is culminating today with the president’s pigheaded determination to put a citizenship question on the next national survey. Revisiting Evenwel also helps to further lift the veil on Trump’s motives, showing that the goal all along was never to make American democracy fairer and more representative, but to magnify the political power of white conservatives.

The Trump administration announced in March 2018 that it would add a citizenship question on the 2020 census. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross claimed the question would help the Justice Department enforce the Voting Rights Act, though critics suspected the real goal was to suppress immigrant and noncitizen participation in the census, shifting the landscape of American political power away from diverse urban communities toward whiter, more conservative, rural residents.