By James J. Devine
The president of the United States threw a party in Kentucky, and on the tarmac, beneath the roar of Air Force One’s engines, he pronounced victory over a man who committed the unpardonable sin of disagreeing with him.
Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican who dared to demand the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and question the administration’s military adventures, lost his primary. Donald Trump celebrated like a man who had just won a war, not merely eliminated a single obstinate congressman from a district that will send a more pliable Republican to Washington in his place.
“He was a bad guy,” the president declared. “He deserves to lose.”
About two-thirds of Americans, according to the most recent polling, feel much the same way about Trump.
That contradiction—between Trump’s invincibility in Republican primaries and his toxicity among the broader electorate—is the quiet fault line running beneath the president’s winning streak. He has spent the spring methodically purging the GOP of anyone who ever looked at him sideways.
Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted to convict Trump after the Jan. 6 impeachment trial, fell on May 16. Five Indiana state senators who resisted mid-decade redistricting were wiped out two weeks earlier. Massie, the Kentucky contrarian who committed the ultimate sin of working across the aisle to force the release of files about a dead sex trafficker, is packing his office.
“There’s a growing number of people on the right who have a form of TDS called Trump disappointment syndrome,” Massie told NBC’s “Meet the Press” after his defeat. He warned that the president has alienated fiscal hawks, anti-war conservatives, and transparency advocates—constituencies Trump assembled to win the White House and Congress. “I’m worried that in November, this is going to cost the party a lot.”
Texas may be where that worry becomes a nightmare, despite the attempt at cheating by lawmakers who redrew congressional district boundaries to make it more difficult for Democrats to win elections.
On Tuesday, scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated four-term Senator John Cornyn in a runoff that establishment Republicans spent $90 million trying to prevent.
Cornyn voted with Trump 99.2% of the time, but the snowflake-in-chief decided to mess with Texas.
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