Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday and proved quite prescient when he confidently declared Rep. Thomas Massie was toast in his quest for an eighth term representing Kentucky’s Fourth Congressional District.
His reasoning? President-cum-Dictator Donald J. Trump. That and $20 million.
“What’s the headline? ‘Trump’s strong,’’’ Graham said. “Those who try to destroy Trump politically, stand in the way of his agenda, are going to lose.’’
“Massie’s going to lose because he tried to destroy the agenda,’’ Graham said, referring to Massie’s opposition to increasing the $39 trillion national debt, the war in Iran, sending federal aid to Israel and various other sins – including, of course, his work to release documents from the federal investigation into child sex trafficker and one-time Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein. “You can disagree with President Trump, but if you try to destroy him, you’re going to lose because this is the party of Donald Trump.’’
And so it goes. The Republican Party is now the Trump Party and will remain so for the indefinite future.
Massie, R-SomewhereorotherLewisCounty, lost by an unexpectedly large 10-point margin to some dude named Ed Gallrein, a nobody from Shelby County who has never held public office and was plucked from obscurity by Trump and his henchmen to provide a body — warm, cold or otherwise, it didn’t matter — to oust Massie.
And it worked.
The Trump camp and its allies poured more than $20 million into the Gallrein campaign, a sum that helped make it the costliest congressional primary in history. What they bought in Gallrein is a puppet, one who kept his mouth shut pretty much throughout the primary and whose lone talent appears to be an eagerness to perform any trick Trump commands.
And in a congressional district where Trump took in more than 65 percent of the vote in his successful 2024 presidential campaign, Gallrein’s election is almost assured.
Massie, who has drawn Trump’s ire for charting his own path over the years, is certainly no prize, but at least he stood for something — something abysmal for the most part, but something nonetheless. The only thing Gallrein stands for is what Trump instructs him to stand for.
A nice way to put it is Gallrein is a placeholder. The accurate way to put it is he’s Trump’s stooge. That’s apparently the way Republicans in the 4th Congressional District want it.
(I’m reminded of the quip from Happy Chandler after he was fired as baseball commissioner and replaced by the worthless Ford Frick, president of the National League: “When the clubs pushed me out in 1951, they had a vacancy and decided to keep it.”)
Massie isn’t the only GOP candidate who found himself crossways with Trump over the past few weeks and stumbled at the polls as a result.
Sen. Bill Kennedy (R-LA), who voted to impeach Trump during his first fling in the White House, lost his bid for a third term, finishing third in the GOP primary. At least five of the Republican state senators in the Indiana legislature who opposed congressional redistricting plans favored by the White House wound up losing their re-election bids to Trump-backed challengers.
And it appears another incumbent U.S. senator is about to go down to another Trump-backed rival. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is expected to defeat Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), popular among his GOP colleagues and supportive of the Trump agenda. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he sided with Paxton because he’s “someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT.”
In retrospect, it has been suggested that Massie, a libertarian maverick, which is to say a pain in the neck, lost because he really wasn’t all that popular, a claim belied by his overwhelming support in his first seven runs for Congress, where he rarely faced legitimate competition. In fact, his iconoclasm made him a folk hero in some quarters. The critique that he is a showboat is kind of silly because he’s always been a showboat, nothing more and nothing less.
Some of Massie’s supporters on X and other social media sites attribute his exit to groups aligned with Israel, which spent millions to bring him down because of his persistent opposition to sending federal dollars to Jerusalem, much of which was devoted to that nation’s defense. Too much of that analysis has crossed the line into antisemitism, bolstering the widely-held notion that ugly hostility toward the Jewish people is growing in the United States.
Both of those assertions, and others, miss the point. The reason Massie lost and Gallrein won is Donald J. Trump. Pro-Israel groups could have spent an even greater fortune trying to bring Massie down and he still would have won, easily, were it not for Trump’s involvement. Concerns about Massie’s many eccentricities would have been greeted with a wave of the hand if Trump had stayed out of the race.
It’s Trump’s party. The question to ponder is simple: What magic does this man possess that attracts an incomparable devotion from large segments of the Republican population?
It is, in a bizarre way, fascinating to witness, enthralling in the same way a horror movie can be enthralling. This passion, which moves the sort of folks who would drive a Thomas Massie from office at Trump’s command, survives despite clear evidence that his first 16 months in office have proved appalling.
The latest Quinnipiac poll places Trump’s approval at 34 percent. That’s not underwater, that’s below the deep, blue sea. The same day the Kentucky primary went down, he arranged for a $1.8 billion slush fund with the Justice Department, some of which will ultimately wind up in the pockets of his loyalists, including those who participated in the infamous Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol who received a Trump pardon for their disgraceful conduct.
Trump’s war with Iran has sent gas prices soaring. His tariffs fiasco propelled the world economy into a tizzy. Inflation is on the rise. He is using the Justice Department as his own private law firm to settle scores with people he abhors. He has a stranglehold on scientific research and watched as Medicaid cuts imposed to provide a tax cut for the wealthy have ruined families. All that and he continues to insist he was somehow cheated out of a second term in 2020. There are concerns about his mental health.
Trump’s second term has been a failure. Some of the folks who cling to him aren’t wild about the war in Iran and remain rueful over the cost of pouring gasoline into the tanks of their cars. But, as evidenced by what happened to Massie, they follow him like the Pied Piper.
It’s ridiculous. And fascinating. A million factors have contributed to the situation. One aspect involves White men, who dominate his political base. Those folks, to a significant extent, are caught up in grievance politics and see in Trump a man who disdains the same people they disdain — Black folks to some degree, Mexicans, coastal liberals. And in many ways, they see Trump championing their causes — the campaign against DEI, immigration crackdown — that fulfills their sense of propriety.
Massie, in an odd way, saw it coming.
A Massie ally, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Bowling Green), who endorsed him in this latest unsuccessful effort, ran for the Republican presidential nomination against a crowd of contenders, including Trump, in 2016. Paul actually led for a while but, like the others, he eventually succumbed to the Trump juggernaut.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, after that election, Massie said he learned something.
“I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron (Paul, Rand’s father, who sought the presidency as a Libertarian) and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race,” Massie said. “And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
And Trump, as evidenced by Tuesday’s results, remains the craziest son of a bitch in the race.
--30--
Written by Bill Straub, a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. Cross-posted from the NKY Tribune.
Comments
