Discipline and punish
Donald Trump’s midterm strategy: purge the Republican Party
A case study in two bitter primaries for safe Republican seats
Ask a Republican in Washington behind closed doors what Donald Trump’s midterm strategy is and they will probably give you a shrug.
“When I hear it I’ll let you know, but there doesn’t appear to be one,” a prominent party strategist told your correspondent.
In the midst of a hugely unpopular war abroad and soaring grocery and petrol prices at home, Republicans have no positive message to take on the road as the summer campaign season heats up.
Nor have they settled on how to attack the Democrats.
To faraway observers in America’s heartland, the White House appears to be focused instead on two things: bullying state lawmakers into redrawing maps that are more favourable to Republicans, and going after unlucky incumbents.
The first is working and could give the party a boost in November.
The second, even if it succeeds, will not help them hold Congress.
Bill Cassidy, a senator from Louisiana, and Thomas Massie, a congressman from Kentucky, could hardly be more different—one is an old-school institutionalist, the other an anti-establishment populist.
Yet on May 16th and 19th respectively, they each face the toughest primary fights of their careers in some of America’s most Republican states.
The offence that brought them both here is crossing Mr Trump, who even as his approval ratings collapse into the mid-30s remains fixated on what he does best: exacting revenge.
Mr Cassidy’s original sin was voting to impeach Mr Trump after January 6th, in 2021.
At the time, he called storming the capitol “an act of sedition” and said that “the president clearly got people stirred.”
Since Mr Trump was re-elected—an awkward surprise for the senator, presumably—Mr Cassidy has desperately tried to win back favour.
As a doctor who chairs the health committee, he has balked at the rise of anti-vaxxers.
Yet in an astonishing nod to the president he voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy junior, their leading crusader, to the cabinet anyway.
It was not enough.
In January Mr Trump propped up a challenger in Julia Letlow, a congresswoman and self-described “mama bear” who has the profile of an obedient soldier.
The two are now locked in a tight three-way race with John Fleming, the more radical state treasurer.
Mr Cassidy and his establishment friends are spending more than $20m on it.
At a campaign event at Drago’s Seafood just north of New Orleans, Mr Cassidy pitched himself to locals gulping garlicky charbroiled oysters.
“They are focused on something in the past and I’m focused on our present and our future,” he said, leading the room through a call-and-response chant of “past” and “future” like a Little League coach firing up his team.
His flyers boast that he is “Louisiana first”—not “America first”—and that he now votes with Mr Trump 100% of the time.
Asked whether he regrets the impeachment vote, Mr Cassidy is equivocal.
People think he sits around “like Lady Macbeth washing her hands because she can’t rid herself of a stain”, he says.
“That’s not life…you make a decision based on facts and you move on.”
Two years ago Louisiana’s legislature changed the rules so that voters can only take part in their own party’s primary.
Then, a fortnight before election day, the governor suspended the other congressional races on the May ballot to redraw the map after a new Supreme Court ruling.
Both moves will shrink turnout and make the electorate more hardline.
That hurts Mr Cassidy, who has limited appeal beyond country-club, Economist-reading Republicans (who should count double).
His response has been to court Democrats instead, calling on them to switch their registration to “no party” and vote for him.
At an event in St Mary’s Parish in early April he reportedly claimed that 6,000 people had done so.
But Democrats have little reason to rescue a conservative who, in their view, abandoned his principles to become a “yes man”, says Robert Mann, a political historian in Louisiana.
Liz Cheney tried something similar in Wyoming four years ago. It failed.
Huddled Massie, yearning to breathe free
Mr Massie’s predicament is completely different.
The northern Kentucky congressman is an MIT-trained engineer who lives off the grid on a cattle farm and has built his political brand round being a maverick.
His snubbing of Mr Trump is both more recent and more persistent.
In the president’s eyes his worst offence was leading the charge that forced the government to release a trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex-offender and a former buddy of Mr Trump’s.
But Mr Massie was a thorn in the side of the Republican leadership before that too, voting against last summer’s “Big Beautiful Bill” so as not to add to the deficit and introducing a bipartisan war-powers resolution to try to block the administration from striking Iran without Congress’s approval.
What makes him different from his Republican colleagues, he says, is that he reads the fine-print and votes against bills he thinks are unconstitutional.
Mr Trump, who has called Mr Massie both a “smart cookie” and a “third-rate grandstander”, responded by recruiting and endorsing Ed Gallrein, a failed state-Senate candidate and navy SEAL, to run against him.
On March 11th, less than two weeks into the war in Iran, Mr Trump left Washington to campaign against Mr Massie in Hebron, Kentucky, a town of 6,000 people.
“Massie is a complete and total disaster as a congressman and frankly, as a human being,” he told loyalists in red-white-and-blue outfits.
So far the best ad in the race is an AI-generated video that depicts a traitorous Mr Massie in a “throuple” with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar, two left-wing Democrats.
The president’s top donors have poured $14m into attacks like it to oust the congressman, helping to make it the most expensive House primary on record.
Mr Massie has a clearer message and, perhaps, a weaker opponent than Mr Cassidy, giving him better odds of surviving Mr Trump’s ire.
At a Boone County Republicans meeting in the town’s red-brick courthouse one week before election day, he was received as though he were the party’s messiah.
But after he had rattled off a list of wonky policy accomplishments, an older man stepped up to the microphone and asked why voters should back him over “the one person in the whole United States, and maybe the world, that understands everything”, referring to Mr Trump.
Mr Massie asked what information the president had that made him reverse course and keep the Epstein files sealed after promising not to during the campaign.
The man insisted that Mr Trump must have had good reasons that he couldn’t share.
“I don’t give anyone but God that kind of trust,” the congressman said firmly.
The crowd roared.
Conservative supporters of both incumbents reckon that Mr Trump has better things to do than “punch down”.
Sarah Longwell, a political strategist, says that in focus groups Trump-voting independents are fed up with the president’s inattention to prices, something he posts about less than his personal vendettas these days.
Although Mr Trump has not yet tapped into his $330m MAGA INC war-chest, party operatives worry that his revenge tour is taking donor money that could be used down the line to help Republicans beat Democrats in actual swing districts.
“They’ve piled up $30m of Republican money and burned it here in northern Kentucky,” Mr Massie says.
“I think there is going to be a hangover after this race.
Whether I win or lose they’re gonna be like, wow, was the blood-letting worth it?”
The good news for Republicans is that it is only May, and the party still has time to refocus before the general election.
Getting down to business on Capitol Hill and passing policies for everyday Americans should help.
But if the president wins this week’s battles that could soon become harder, too.
Republicans need Mr Cassidy’s vote in the Senate, and if he loses re-election he will have no incentive to continue placating the president or the party before his term ends in January.
That is perhaps why months ago John Thune, the chamber’s majority leader, tried to persuade Mr Trump not to endorse against precious incumbents.
Too bad he didn’t listen.
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