Two weeks ago, five incumbent Indiana state senators “weren’t just defeated,” as NBC’s Steve Kornacki explained, “they were defeated in landslides.”
The five had bucked President Trump’s call to redraw the state’s congressional map, blocking the creation of two additional Republican-leaning districts and drawing the ire of the president and his supporters, who got behind their opponents.
On Saturday in Louisiana, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a 12-year Republican incumbent, became the first elected U.S. Senator to lose in a primary since 2012. Again, Dr. Cassidy wasn’t simply eclipsed by a challenger; he came in a distant third place with less than 25 percent of the vote. Cassidy was one of seven GOP Senators who found Mr. Trump guilty in his second impeachment trial, following the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.*
I cannot recall a president of either party ever wielding so much electoral clout within his own party — perhaps partly because other presidents did not attempt to reshape their party as aggressively as Trump has, and partly because no president has enjoyed the outsider status required to mobilize the disgruntled grassroots.
Today, Kentucky’s Republican Primary offers another stop on what the media has dubbed “Trump’s revenge tour.” The Bluegrass State’s 4th congressional district sports 14-year incumbent Rep. Thomas Massie facing Trump-endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein, a businessman and former Navy SEAL, in “the most expensive House primary on record.”
President Trump called Massie “a third rate Grandstander” in 2020 but then endorsed Massie in 2022. After Massie’s opposition to the “Big Beautiful Bill,” the Iran War, tariffs, and support for releasing the Epstein files, Trump has gone after him.
Latest polling shows “the race to be evenly deadlocked,” but if anyone can withstand the Trump onslaught, it may be Massie . . . who is so thoroughly not a Washington insider.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of the other six U.S. Senate Republicans, four chose not to seek reelection (Sasse, Neb.; Burr, N.C.; Toomey, Penn.; Romney, Utah), while Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won re-election in 2022, and Senator Susan Collins of Maine is on this November’s ballot.
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4 replies on “King & Kingslayer”
Massie has been defeated. So the House of Representstives has no libertarian-adjacent members, and Congress more generally now has only Rand Paul.
The Democratic Party was a cult of personality from 2008 well into November 2016, and has been a cult of anti-personality since then. In reaction, the Republican Party has degenerated into its own cult of personality.
I expect that, even after the end of Trump’s present term, the Democrats will continue to run as if against Trump. I don’t know what the Republicans will do. Obviously, some of them will posture as if guided by the Spirit of Trump or even as the heirs of Trump.
But he seems to be making a hash of things in the Middle East, so that even some of those who had been amongst his loudest supporters are beginning to tell him to wrap-up the war. And the fiscal situation grows ever more dire.
The Republican Party will almost certainly need an alternative faction to pull it from the abyss, as the Tea Party pulled it from the pit dug by the neoconservatives. The Cult of Trump has been expeling people whom the Republican Party will almost surely need in 2028.
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Told you so!
Pam, no, no you didn’t.
You’ve told us many things, some demonstrably false when you said them, others disproven later.
But you didn’t bother to tell us that Trump would seek the ouster of those within his party who often opposed him. Indeed, you never acknowledged the existence of paleocon and libercon dissenters within the Republican Party, instead treating not only all Republicans as backers of Trump but even insisting that Paul were a supporter of Trump.
And, in the absence of such acknowledgment, you couldn’t tell us that Trump would be generally successful in his purges of dissident Republican officials.