President Trump has spent the past year using the federal government to target those he considers his political enemies. Now, in a series of primaries this month, he is turning his ire on fellow Republicans by asking voters to punish those who have crossed him.
Contests in Indiana, Louisiana and Kentucky in the coming weeks all feature Trump-backed challengers trying to oust Republican incumbents who have earned Mr. Trump’s ire. The fights have soaked up energy and cash from the president’s allies and his political operation, pulling attention away from the broader battle with Democrats over control of Congress this fall.
In Indiana, Mr. Trump hopes to oust a half-dozen Republican state senators who defied him by defeating a redistricting effort that would have drawn the state’s two Democratic House members out of power. In Louisiana, he is backing a challenger to a Republican senator, Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict him in his second impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. In Georgia, Mr. Trump is supporting a candidate for governor who is running against the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to help the president “find” votes for him in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
And in Kentucky, Mr. Trump is invested in unseating one particularly irksome Republican congressman who has refused to vote for the president’s full agenda.
“We’ve got to get rid of this loser,” Mr. Trump said at a March rally in Representative Thomas Massie’s northern Kentucky district, a deeply conservative swath encompassing suburbs of Cincinnati.
Mr. Massie has openly challenged Mr. Trump in a way that no other congressional Republican seeking re-election this year has done, even as he has stressed that he sided with Mr. Trump on roughly 90 percent of votes.
“I say, look, if they’re bankrupting the country or covering up for pedophiles or starting another war or spying on you without a warrant, I’m sorry, that’s when I deviate from the party,” Mr. Massie said in an interview. “That’s the 10 percent we’re talking about here.”
Since returning to office last year, Mr. Trump’s administration has focused intently on punishing the president’s perceived enemies: firing them, investigating them, charging them with crimes.
The extension of this retribution tour into the midterm landscape has bothered some fellow Republicans, who have grumbled in public and private that Mr. Trump is more engaged in campaigns of vengeance than in maneuvering to save the party’s narrow congressional majorities. Mr. Trump personally recruited some challengers who will appear on the ballot this month, and he has posed with most of them for photos behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, for their use in campaign ads. His advisers and allies are overseeing some of the primary efforts.
“Retribution is not a Christian value,” said Travis Holdman, one of the Indiana Republican state senators being targeted, who said the millions being spent against him and his colleagues would have been better directed against the lone congressional Democrat in his state who holds a swing seat.
David McIntosh, the head of the Club for Growth, a conservative group focused on economic issues that is spending $2 million to defeat the incumbent state senators, had a ready retort.
“If that senator had helped us pass redistricting,” he said, “we wouldn’t need to.”
For close to a decade now, Mr. Trump’s endorsement has been the most coveted and powerful in Republican primaries, and the president closely tracks his win-loss record as a measure of his potency inside the party.
“With the Republican Party, it’s like, 399 and zero,” Mr. Trump bragged in a radio appearance last fall with characteristic exaggeration. “Think of that. And many of those are insurgents.”
While his record is not 399-0, Mr. Trump has sought to punish Republican critics in primaries before — with great success. Only two of the 10 House Republicans who had voted for his impeachment survived the 2022 primary season. The rest either opted to retire or lost, including former Representative Liz Cheney.
Delanie Bomar, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said that Republicans were aligned with Mr. Trump “for good reason. He is the key to victory in these ruby red states.”
So far, the slate of May 2026 primaries represents Mr. Trump’s biggest electoral effort to impose party discipline at the ballot box in his second term. Polls show his public support has dropped, but he remains broadly popular among Republicans.
“A large reason they’re attacking me,” Mr. Massie explained, “is to keep the other Republican members of Congress in line.”
First up: Indiana
The first crack comes on Tuesday, when Mr. Trump is seeking to oust seven Republican state legislators in Indiana who helped defeat his effort to carve up the state’s congressional map.
Millions of dollars have poured in to support the Republican challengers, including from such Trump allies as the Club for Growth and a nonprofit group aligned with Jim Banks, one of Indiana’s two Republican senators.
“It’s important that we bring in new members in the Republican, very red state of Indiana who understand — as elected officials — they’re part of a larger team,” Mr. McIntosh said, adding that they had a “good shot” to defeat all the incumbents and win one open race.
One ad compared a Republican who voted against the new maps to toilet paper, calling him “soft, weak, liberal.” Another ad boosted his challenger using Mr. Trump’s name no fewer than four times in 15 seconds.
Mr. Trump’s intervention had warped the usual rules of engagement in local races, said Mike O’Brien, a Republican strategist in Indiana.
“In any other world, in any other time, a bunch of D.C. consultants start firing ads from Virginia to Indiana — it is a negative, and we would have rallied and protected our guys,” Mr. O’Brien said. “That is just not the world we live in right now.”
Some of the Indiana insurgent campaigns have been haphazard.
Blake Fiechter, a Bluffton, Ind., city councilman, entered the race with Mr. Trump’s endorsement in January, and then withdrew in February. “I felt like I was on a raft alone trying to navigate,” he told a local TV station. Two weeks later, he was back in after meeting Mr. Trump in Washington.
In Kentucky, it’s personal
No race has become as acrimonious or personal as the campaign against Mr. Massie, a libertarian who opposed some of the president’s signature initiatives and worked with Democrats last year to pass legislation forcing the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender and onetime Trump friend.
Mr. Trump has disparaged Mr. Massie as “the worst,” a “loser,” a “nut job,” “a disaster for our party” and “disloyal” — all at a single event. In February, Mr. Trump targeted Mr. Massie’s new wife, suggesting that “this new union all went so fast that maybe he didn’t know what he was getting into.”
The airwaves have been flooded with attacks, including from one super PAC helmed by a top Trump political adviser, Chris LaCivita, that has spent $4.5 million since last summer.
“It’s in these times,” Mr. Massie said in an interview. “I’m glad I don’t own a TV.”
The president has said he personally recruited Mr. Massie’s challenger, Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, into the race, calling him “central casting” during his rally in March. (Mr. Trump also joked that he needed only a “warm body” to beat Mr. Massie.)
“He’s politically toast,” Mr. LaCivita confidently said of Mr. Massie. “He just does not admit it yet.” Mr. Massie, meanwhile, forecast that the president’s team would wake up after his May 19 primary with a political “hangover.” He also criticized the outside spending as a divisive distraction from the goal of keeping Republicans in power.
“He keeps shrinking the tent, and he’s going to need the whole tent in November,” Mr. Massie said.
A Republican for impeachment
In Louisiana, Mr. Trump endorsed Representative Julia Letlow against Mr. Cassidy in January.
In recent months, Mr. Cassidy and his allies have outspent Ms. Letlow four to one on the airwaves, casting her as a liberal and using past video of her applying for a university post and saying, “We need a division of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
Mr. Trump’s support for Ms. Letlow has included appearing with her at Mar-a-Lago recently and filming a two-minute video praising her as “loyal as can be.”
On Thursday, he turned his fire on Mr. Cassidy, whose vote he still needs in the Senate, calling him a “very disloyal person” in one social media post and urging his ouster in a second. Notably, neither mentioned Ms. Letlow.
The latest flare-up was over how Mr. Cassidy, who is a physician, did not support the president’s nominee for surgeon general, whom Mr. Trump withdrew on Thursday.
The primary is May 16 but the presence of a third candidate, John Fleming, the state treasurer, means the top two vote-getters are likely to go to a runoff.
Mr. Trump has not endorsed anyone in the open Georgia Senate primary in May. But he is backing Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, an outspoken pro-Trump Republican, for governor. People around Mr. Trump said he was focused on ensuring that Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state, did not win the nomination. Mr. Raffensperger was the state’s top election official in 2020 who called out the president when he falsely claimed he had won Georgia.
A third candidate, Rick Jackson, has spent millions of dollars on ads selling himself as a Trump-like outsider taking on the establishment.
“President Trump doesn’t play by their rules, that’s why I gave him $1 million,” Mr. Jackson says in one ad. “Trump wins over and over and over.”
Shane Goldmacher is a Times national political correspondent.
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