It may seem counter-intuitive, but President Donald Trump spent the weekend engaged in scorched earth efforts to undermine the re-election efforts of several of his fellow Republicans.
Forty-eight hours that could have been spent targeting the Democrats ahead of this November’s crucial midterm elections, were instead devoted to the defenestration of prominent Republicans who have crossed him. On Saturday night, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana learned the hard way that once Trump deems you a traitor to the Make America Great Again cause, he still has the power to cook your electoral goose.
Cassidy, accused by Trump of being a “disloyal disaster”, committed the cardinal sin of supporting the president’s impeachment for “incitement to insurrection” back in February 2021. Five years later, Trump finally got his man, accusing Cassidy on social media of supporting “something that has now been proven to be total ‘bullsh*t’” and calling him “a sleazebag, a terrible guy who is BAD FOR LOUISIANA”.
He urged the state’s Maga voters to back an alternative, ideologically pure candidate, and they did so in droves, sending Julia Letlow and John Fleming to a runoff next month. Cassidy now becomes a footnote in history: the first sitting Senator from either party to be de-selected in a primary since 2012.
But Trump is not done yet. He is also gunning for Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who faces a primary contest in Kentucky on Tuesday. Massie is a persistent thorn in Trump’s side, and a key Republican demanding a full accounting of the president’s relationship with sex trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein. On Sunday, Trump branded him “The Worst Republican Congressman in History” and directed Kentucky Republicans to “vote the bum out…we can’t live with this troublemaker for another two years”.
He also focused his fire on another once-loyal member of the MAGA movement, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert of Colorado. An ally of Massie who has campaigned alongside him in Kentucky, Trump is now inviting the party to oust her as well.
Lauren Boebert (centre) is in Trump’s crosshairs over perceived disloyalty (Photo: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)Outsiders might think Trump is adopting a curious, even dangerous strategy when Republicans enjoy only wafer-thin majorities on Capitol Hill and voters are showing increasing signs of hostility towards him. Polls show the President plumbing new depths of historic unpopularity.
Even the White House accepts that November’s midterms will be a referendum on Trump’s performance in office, and if the elections were held today, Republicans would almost certainly lose control of the House and face an extremely tight battle in the Senate.
But Trump knows the elections are still five months away, and by the time they take place, many of America’s electoral maps will be unrecognisable.
Across the South, Republican lawmakers are now in a race against time to redraw congressional boundaries, after the US Supreme Court overturned a central pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and empowered them to eviscerate any district currently sending Democrats to Congress.
The Court struck down a crucial pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, landmark civil rights legislation that not only gave non-white citizens the vote, but also demanded that wherever African Americans and other minorities were living en masse, congressional maps must be drawn to reflect the power of their vote.
Today, those maps are all being redrawn to minimise the impact of Black voters who overwhelmingly back Democrats. Trump says that he expects Republicans to pick up an additional 20 seats in the House of Representatives, a projection that substantially boosts his party’s chances of retaining power.
Trump is prioritising wealthy backers such as Elon Musk (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty)Trump may also believe that he can win, even if he loses. The Court’s decision has opened the way for months of litigation and appeals over the midterms’ outcome if voters back Democrats in sufficient numbers to over-ride the impact of the rushed changes to the electoral map.
The president has already demonstrated that he only respects the outcome of elections when Republicans win them. If they lose, he may relish the prospect of challenging the results, even at the cost of a constitutional crisis over the requirement for a new Congress to be seated next January.
Trump is also basking in the backing of the country’s top CEOs. Many of them accompanied him to China last week, and paid tribute to his leadership, even though his summit with President Xi Jinping failed to secure the immediate deals they were seeking. While American voters are recoiling from the soaring price of petrol and other goods due to the standoff over the Strait of Hormuz, the titans of industry are making billions out of the country’s rebounding stock market and a stratospheric oil price that is delighting America’s energy behemoths.
Last Tuesday, Trump claimed that when considering the future of his war on Iran, he does not consider the financial situation of ordinary Americans “even a little bit”. On the face of it, that position looks like electoral suicide. But as he delights his big money backers, redraws electoral maps to game the midterms’ outcome and proves that he still holds MAGA in his thrall, Trump believes his cunning plan can work, whatever verdict the electorate delivers.
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