May has been a brutal month for anyone hoping for signs that the Republican base has grown tired of President Trump’s anti-democratic strongman shtick.
On Tuesday, Representative Thomas Massie got taken down by Ed Gallrein, a challenger aggressively backed by Trumpworld. The most expensive House primary race ever, this was not a contest of ideas, qualifications, politics or even personality. It was a race driven and decided on presidential spite, the latest installment in Mr. Trump’s long-running vengeance campaign against any Republican he deems disloyal, defiant or simply still in possession of a political spine.
A libertarian-ish maverick with a stubborn streak and a penchant for antagonizing his party’s leaders, Mr. Massie has clashed repeatedly with the president over the years on issues including the bombing of Iran and the release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files. His loss to Mr. Gallrein, an unknown, undistinguished challenger expected to be a much more reliable presidential boot licker, is the latest warning to other Republicans about the dangers of crossing Mr. Trump even now, as his popularity is on the slide.
It should also serve as a vivid and very expensive reminder, especially to Republicans, of how little Mr. Trump cares about the current or future well-being of his chosen party. Destroying the G.O.P. might suit his purposes even better.
Mr. Massie was one of many Trump targets this primary cycle. In Louisiana, the president’s vengeance minions also took down Senator Bill Cassidy, as payback for the senator’s vote to convict in Mr. Trump’s 2021 impeachment trial. In the May 16 primary, Mr. Cassidy failed to even qualify for the runoff election.
Going farther down the political ladder, Mr. Trump’s allies successfully ousted several of the Indiana state lawmakers who had thwarted his redistricting scheme in that state. Message: Defying Mr. Trump is unacceptable at any level of office.
Aggressive loyalty purges harm our democracy — a warning that the targeted lawmakers sought to drive home in their campaigns. “My race will be a referendum on whether you can be in the Republican Party in Washington, D.C., and have a thought that diverges from the president’s,” Mr. Massie told me in January. “If the legislative branch becomes a rubber stamp for the president, then we do have a king.”
Jim Buck, one of the lawmakers unseated in Indiana’s May 5 primary, sounded a similar alarm. “This is a test,” he told me before his primary defeat. “Is Indiana going to lose sight of states’ rights” and have its elected leaders “forever under the thumb of Washington”?
Honestly, it’s not looking good, Jim.
High-minded concerns about democracy aside, Mr. Trump’s petty project has been bad for the G.O.P., a spectacular waste of resources that could have been put to better use in any number of races and places. Pro-Trump groups and individual donors devoted mountains of cash to dislodging solidly conservative officials from solidly red seats. In Kentucky alone, around $19 million went toward media aimed at boosting Mr. Gallrein over Mr. Massie. This seems especially ill advised in an election year when the political winds are blowing hard against the Republican Party, which is desperate to retain its grip on Congress.
Campaign cash is not infinite, even if it seems like it from the outside. This is a reason Democrats have worked hard this cycle to field strong candidates even in deep-red areas where they have only a snowball’s chance of winning. Forcing Republicans to burn money and energy on races that should be easy leaves fewer resources available for close contests in swing districts in Pennsylvania and Arizona or the Senate battles in Michigan and Maine.
Instigating expensive primary brawls, Mr. Trump did the Democrats’ work for them, forcing his own team to burn money unnecessarily. And not because he wanted to produce the strongest general election candidate possible. This was about flexing on his enemies.
Such behavior is obviously not new to the president. For years he has been purging the G.O.P. of its remaining pockets of independence. But the underlying political landscape is always shifting. And the president is now firmly on the downslope of his reign — quack! quack! — with the Constitution giving him only two and a half more years in office. The Republican Party needs to be thinking about and planning for where it will go after he is gone. The more Mr. Trump highlights how thoroughly he has hollowed out his party, turning his congressional team, and even state legislators, into little more than instruments of his bidding, the harder that will be.
Which is almost certainly part of the goal here. Mr. Trump has clearly thrilled to the idea that the Republican Party cannot survive without him — that there can be no such thing as a post-Trump G.O.P. The suggestion that he will ever cede the stage gracefully is laughable. Everything we’ve seen in the past decade suggests that, until the bitter end of his presidency — maybe even beyond — he will work to ensure that the Republican Party remains entirely his creature. The more pathetic the better.
“Our country is not about one individual,” Mr. Cassidy observed in his concession speech Saturday. “If someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves.”
Mr. Trump’s raging unpopularity suggests more Americans are realizing this about the president. The big question is when disenchanted voters will finally make the broader G.O.P. pay for coddling a power-hungry leader who would rather see his party weak than resistant.
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