Elana’s View
President Donald Trump is making the kind of headlines he likes in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Indiana, picking off disloyal Republican legislators and showcasing his near-total control over the party.
He’s shaping a GOP that will soon have fewer dissenters — and new potential problems.
First, let’s put the president’s “revenge tour” in perspective. The bar for loyalty keeps going up. Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., toppled by Trump on Saturday, pushed past his clear doubts and voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., declining to sharpen that into criticism of the president. He voted with Trump 100% of the time in 2025, according to VoteHub’s analysis.
In Kentucky, GOP Rep. Thomas Massie faces potential defeat on Tuesday as a Trump-aligned PAC pumps nearly $7 million into the priciest House primary yet. Massie, known in Washington as an incessant rebel against the Trump administration, voted with it 81.5% of the time in 2025.
Massie’s record might sound worse. Shouldn’t a president have party lawmakers who back him as often as possible? But if Trump is making primary decisions based on sheer fealty, then he might want to back Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, another 100% supporter who has failed to get a presidential endorsement even as the party worries his challenger could lose the seat to a Democrat.
Here’s a far more important number to Trump: 37%. That’s the record-low approval he notched in a Times/Siena poll released Monday, with 69% of independents disapproving. While Trump focuses on showing off his influence in red-state races where he can win, his own numbers spell trouble for Republicans in battleground races and states. The president is now likely to start 2027 with a party that’s both more loyal and less powerful in Congress, losing seats if not both majorities.
There’s another downside to Trump’s purge. Cassidy is now signaling that he may return to Washington newly emboldened to stand up to the president. That means Trump could spend the rest of this year asking for votes from three Republicans he antagonized who have no reason to fall in line: Cassidy, Cornyn (if he loses), and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who chose to retire after tangling with Trump last year.
Add in Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who’s keeping her distance from the administration as she runs for reelection, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who survived a Trump-driven primary in 2022, and suddenly it gets harder to push anything through the Senate.
That’s a problem for Trump’s nominees — he’s currently got vacancies atop the Justice Department and key health agencies — as well as the second party-line immigration bill Republicans are trying to muscle into law.
The party’s operatives say they can compete effectively this fall, separately from the Trump endorsement sweepstakes that many primaries have become.
“Republicans are in lockstep with President Trump — the ultimate turnout driver — and making major investments to win top battleground states,” RNC spokeswoman Emma Hall said. “Meanwhile, Democrats are out of money, running toxic far-left candidates, and stuck defending a historically unpopular agenda.”
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Tillis tends to couch his criticism of the Trump White House by pointing to bad advice the president gets. Massie sounds pretty similar.
“You know, I still like Donald Trump, believe it or not,” the libertarian-minded Kentuckian told local news station WLWT when Trump began escalating their feud. “I voted for him three times. But Ronald Reagan said, ‘Trust but verify.’ And that’s where I am. I trust, but sometimes he has bad advisers. Sometimes he has the wrong people whispering in his ear.”
Trump also loses something tangible by pushing out Massie — not to mention Rep. Lauren Boebert and Sen. Rand Paul, two of his allies whom the president threatened over the weekend to target next, though that can’t happen this year. Massie and Paul have given Trump a valuable window on issues where he may be losing touch with his MAGA base, from the Iran war to the Epstein files.
In a Congress with scant Republicans left who want to cross Trump as the 2028 election starts, his aspiring successor (be it JD Vance or Marco Rubio) will find it that much harder to define themselves as separate from his legacy when they need to.
The polls show they might need to.
Room for Disagreement
Trump’s midterm efforts are looking far more successful when it comes to mid-decade redistricting that’s designed to give his party a more favorable House playing field.
That’s thanks in large part to courts that have chipped away at the Voting Rights Act at their highest levels and, on the state level, negated Democrats’ voter-approved Virginia remapping.
But regardless of where the advantage came from, it’s real. A win in redistricting promises to cushion the blow for the president while he plays on friendly turf knocking off his intraparty enemies.
Notable
- Some of Trump’s fellow Republicans see him as more invested in the midterms to preserve his legacy, versus help the party overall, as our Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett reported.
- Cornyn is trying pretty hard to tie himself to Trump, regardless; he recently proposed naming a highway after the president.