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Is Donald Trump strong or weak now?
Normally, telling whether a president is up or down is not difficult, but the past few weeks have given reasons to believe both.
last night, Representative Thomas MassieThe Kentucky Republican, who has been a public critic of Trump’s policies in his second term, lost the primary to Ed Gallrein, a candidate registered and supported by Trump. The president’s attempt to turn the race into a referendum on himself appears to have succeeded: Massie, who is no more sane now than he was when voters in his district elected him in his first of seven terms, finished about 10 points behind Gallrein.
This adaptation was the latest in a series. on saturday, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisianawho neither Trump nor the voters ever forgave him for his vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial in 2021, he came third in the Republican primary. And in early May, several Republican state lawmakers in Indiana who had opposed Trump’s smuggling push lost primaries to Trump-backed opponents, fulfilling a vow of retaliation from the White House.
A common thread in the commentary on this race is that it reflects Trump’s enduring hold on power. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s break with Trump was not a sign of the breakup of the MAGA movement, the thinking goes; the real story was his ability to completely oust Greene, who has been a standout character anyway, and who now has more access to anti-Trump positions than MAGA stores. “This is @realDonaldTrump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get to live in it,” proudly loyalist Rep. Randy Fine of Florida. he announced last night.
Yet Trump’s position also seems to be deteriorating. This week, a New York Times/ The Siena poll found the president with 37 percent approval, the lowest rate of the election and a drop of four percentage points from January. The magazine’s polling analyst, Nate Cohn, was led to wonder if the much-appreciated “floor” in Trump’s polling is. start to crack. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday has him even lower, at 35 percent—12 points below where he began his tenure in the survey. Much of his voting issue is worse. That means some Republicans reject Trump’s decisions, even if they continue to like the man himself.
How do we reconcile these contradictions? If you are common reader of this journalthe answer won’t surprise you: Trump’s hold on the MAGA base remains strong, but the very moves that help him maintain it also help damage his standing with the broader public—and threaten to lead Republicans to defeat in the November midterm elections.
Primary voters—and especially primary voters in Indiana, Louisiana, and Kentucky—are not representative of the general electorate. (Trump won those states by 19, 22, and 31 points, respectively, in 2024.) Not even Republican representatives vote in the general election, a group that is likely to be less engaged, less radical, and generally less radical. As a result, the November vote is more likely to hinge on issues such as inflation or the Iran war.
Sometimes the unique dynamics of primaries create situations that make Trump appear strong on the surface but in reality show weakness. Yesterday, Trump finally gave his long-awaited approval in the Texas runoff election for the US Senate next week. The race pits Sen. John Cornyn against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn is a longtime Republican who has been a loyal if unenthusiastic trooper for Trump; Paxton is, to use political science terminology, a real piece of work.
Trump was originally expected support Cornynbut polls showed Paxton ahead and one found that even a Trump’s endorsement won’t change that. Trump swooned, then waited until the last minute to support Paxton. That ensures Trump will back the winner, but it could be a Pyrrhic victory: Republican senators now fear that Paxton’s nomination could. the cost of the GOP seat in November. Democrat James Talarico still unlikely to win, but not impossible, given the many scandals tainting Paxton.
While the idea of a MAGA implosion may just be a dream of Trump’s critics, Cohn’s data is real. MAGA does not collapse, and the base remains committed, but it shrinks. Trump’s sinking numbers may not matter much to him, because he won’t face voters again, but they matter a lot to other Republican leaders. Many of them would like to find ways to distance themselves from Trump’s unpopular policies (and may try as the general election nears), but cases like Massie’s and Cassidy’s remind them that the immediate political risk of crossing Trump outweighs the risk of being yoked to an unpopular agenda. The latter may finish your work, but the former will certainly do it.
Ironically, Trump would probably benefit politically from a GOP Congress that was more willing to oppose him, because it would stop him from his worst ideas. This is one reason the Founders designed the system this way, but Trump has no real civics and his aides are determined to give him monarch-like power. An unresponsive Republican Congress might have pushed Trump harder on austerity measures, and might not have supported a war in Iran, had he asked for approval—but he didn’t, figuring it wouldn’t act to stop him.
Politics is a pendulum, so Trump may find Congress more hostile despite—or because of—his efforts to oppose it. In fact, he already has. Cassidy, in his first act since losing the primary, systematically voted for Trump to advance a resolution that would end the war in Iran, and at the very least. one moderate GOP colleague he suggested that Cassidy would take more votes like that. Even if Paxton doesn’t win the Senate race, Democrats remain the favorites to retake at least the House of Representatives. That would be one clear indication of Trumpian weakness.
Related:
Here are three new stories from Atlantic:
Today’s news
- Two police officers who guarded the Capitol during the January 6 attack to sue the Trump administration blocked nearly $1.8 billion in ransom funds, saying it was using taxpayer money to reward rebels and militant groups involved in the attack.
- The Trump administration indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro and murder, conspiracy to kill an American citizen, and destruction of an aircraft, according to court documents. These accusations stem from the 1996 Cuban shooting of planes operated by the humanitarian organization Brothers to the Rescue, where three American citizens and one permanent resident were killed.
- Former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a key architect of Wall Street’s post-2008 reforms and one of the first openly gay members of Congress, he died at the age of 86.
Evening Read
My Son’s Hockey Team and the American Grievance Crisis
By Chris Murphy
My 14-year-old son competes in a major international hockey league. During his five-month, 60-game season, he travels up and down the East Coast on weekends, and I often miss Senate votes to watch him. Rider is not likely to play in the National Hockey League, nor does he want to spend his entire childhood pursuing a career as a goaltender. He still plays other sports—flag football, basketball, and golf. That sounds about right for an eighth grader.
But for the owners of the Atlantic Hockey League—a youth hockey association that brings together elite teams from Connecticut and many other states, as far west as Arizona—children’s sports are a cutthroat business, a way to make a few very rich.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this journal.
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