An estimated $10 million is being spent in a single Kentucky Congressional primary (Trump says, ‘Get Massie!’) even as Congress abdicates its constitutional role and efforts to manipulate the midterms escalate.
If the Game Is Fixed, Why Keep Score?
One of the challenges of covering American politics during the polycrisis is the nagging feeling that none of this matters, as the game is fixed.
The US Congress has largely abdicated its most important constitutional powers — taxation and declarations of war — preferring to focus on collecting campaign cash and avoiding responsibility.
The openly partisan Supreme Court has essentially voided the Voting Rights Act and with it a number of Democratic congressional seats in the South.
Both parties have aggressively gerrymandered states under their legislative control, or attempted to do so, only to be blocked by a court system ultimately under GOP control.
Nonetheless, millions of dollars are being spent and millions of online impressions are being garnered in a single Congressional primary so it must mean something.
As such I will attempt to document the atrocities in the most edifying and entertaining manner I am able.
Trump Moves Fast to Capitalize on Supremes’ Ruling
Per CNN:
Trump’s latest missive came on Sunday, after the Supreme Court ruled last week that Louisiana’s congressional map is an unconstitutional gerrymander and further chipped away at the Voting Rights Act, potentially allowing Republicans to redraw maps in the South a lot more favorably for them. That could tilt the US House map toward the GOP for years to come.
Trump urged his side to act post-haste.
He called on states — even those that have already begun voting — to quickly change their maps for the 2026 election to supposedly comply with the Supreme Court ruling.
“That is more important than administrative convenience,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The byproduct is that the Republicans will receive more than 20 House Seats in the upcoming Midterms!”
Trump Crushed Indiana GOP Opposition
POTUS is going into next week’s Kentucky GOP primary on a roll, kind of like the one he followed from Venezuela in January to Iran in February, per NBC:
The double-digit defeats of the five incumbents, some of whom are veterans of the Indiana Legislature, underscore the influence Trump continues to wield over the Republican Party, even as his approval rating among Americans broadly sags amid rising gas prices and the Iran war.
Trump’s intervention in the typically quiet local primary races attracted a flood of money and national attention. Roughly $12 million was spent on advertising across the seven contests with a Trump-endorsed challenge to a sitting state senator, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact. Most of that came from Trump-allied outside groups opposing the incumbents.
The Republican-led state Senate dealt Trump a rare rebuke when it voted down a new congressional map he backed that was designed to result in two additional seats for the GOP. It was part of a broader mid-decade redistricting battle playing out across the country ahead of this fall’s midterm elections, when control of the narrowly divided U.S. House will be up for grabs.
Several other GOP-led states redrew their maps at Trump’s urging. But ultimately, the heavy-handed pressure campaign from Trump and his allies backfired in Indiana. Six months later, several of those lawmakers paid the price for crossing Trump.
Trump takes his L’s, but so far has just kept coming and has relentlessly increased his dominance of the GOP, even as his initial MAGA supporters have been largely replaced by neocons and “Never Trumpers” like Lindsey Graham and Ben Shapiro.
One of those “traditional” or “moderate” Republicans who joined Team Trump early and has helped develop his political project into a sustained, organized effort is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
Mrs WWE Wrestling Plays for Real
McMahon’s political power comes from her personal fortune, which comes from her estranged husband Vince who monopolized professional wrestling in the US.
There’s an excellent New Yorker profile out on McMahon (archived). Here’s a key snippet that explains her political journey:
By the time Trump first ran for President, in 2016, Linda McMahon was a powerful conservative donor. She had run for Senate twice, in 2010 and 2012, as a moderate blue-state Republican. (She had opposed the elimination of the Department of Education—an idea that she called radical.) She was a tireless retail campaigner. “She went to the towns with ten people,” the manager of an opposing campaign told me. “There’s a political animal in her that loves this stuff.”…McMahon spent almost fifty million dollars on each campaign—a record at the time. She was still married to Vince, and they kept up appearances as a couple, but they were no longer living together. On the eve of the 2010 Senate election, Vince ran a W.W.E. scene that opened with him in a coma. When a doctor at his bedside mentioned McMahon’s campaign spending, Vince suddenly awoke: “Fifty million dollars on what?” She lost both races by twelve points.
A person who helped manage an opposing campaign told me that in some ways McMahon’s investment paid off. Spending that much on identical double-digit losses signalled a commitment to the G.O.P. cause and an abundance of capital.…Max Stier, who runs the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, said that during Trump’s first term people sometimes asked him if Trump had a single good Cabinet secretary. He’d point to McMahon. At the S.B.A., she earned a reputation as a skilled manager of talent. Robb Wong, who worked at the agency under six administrators, told me, “We made bigger, better strides under her than under any other leadership. She was the greatest boss I’ve ever had.”
When it became clear that Trump had lost the 2020 election, McMahon, along with two high-ranking White House staffers, Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow, arranged an Oval Office meeting with him. They wanted his blessing to start a think tank to carry on his agenda, but they were vague on what it should accomplish. “I’m not even sure there were specifics,” Kudlow told me. Other efforts to intellectualize the Trump movement have run into problems, in part because one of Trump’s political skills is a certain strategic flexibility. But McMahon was not interested in publishing white papers. “I’m not a policy wonk,” she told me. She considers herself an executor. She told Rollins that their idea couldn’t be just a think tank. “It had to be a ‘do’ tank,” she said. They called it the America First Policy Institute.
The A.F.P.I. laid the groundwork for a second Trump Administration. McMahon and Rollins hired more than a hundred and fifty staffers. They drafted hundreds of executive orders for Trump to sign should he regain office. Quietly, they challenged the influential Heritage Foundation when it came to maneuvering to staff a second Trump Administration.…When he won, the A.F.P.I. had already assembled an Administration-in-waiting, one that didn’t have Project 2025’s baggage. In Trump’s first year, Heritage and Project 2025 still exerted a major influence, but the implementers tended to be alumni from the A.F.P.I.: Kash Patel, Kevin Hassett, Pam Bondi. Seven Cabinet secretaries came from the think tank. More than eighty A.F.P.I. staffers, about half the organization, went into the Administration.
The piece also dives into McMahon’s alliance with Texas billionaire (and Christian dominionist) Tim Dunn and her mission (aided bigly by DOGE in the early months of Trump 2.0) to destroy the department she chairs.
But let’s look at what that infrastructure McMahon built for Trump is doing to dissident GOPers.
Trump Leads Effort to Purge Thomas Massie from Congress
This Newsday piece from last October sets the scene:
Retired Navy SEAL officer Ed Gallrein entered the 4th District campaign after gaining Trump’s endorsement. He will have the president’s vaunted political operation on his side, and a super PAC launched by Trump aides already has run ads attacking Massie. But he will confront an entrenched, well-funded incumbent in Massie, who steamrolled past challengers, even when he incurred Trump’s wrath.
NOTUS explains why Massie matters:
Massie might be the only Republican member of Congress who would publicly mock Trump while running in a Republican primary. He’s also only one of two GOP incumbents whose primary opponent has received the president’s endorsement.
Massie is running for reelection to Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District — a sprawling district in the commonwealth’s northern half that includes the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio — in open defiance of Trump. Trump’s repeated vows to defeat him came after a congressional session in which Massie voted against the president’s signature legislation (the “one big, beautiful bill”), opposed his top economic policy (global tariffs) and successfully forced the release of federal files associated with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump has called an unnecessary distraction. The Epstein push has won Massie international acclaim, toppling key figures in foreign governments and exposing a web of impropriety among the global rich and powerful.
Massie has emphasized repeatedly that he voted with the president 91% of the time. He says his campaign is not about opposition to the president but about implementing the type of agenda that Trump promised on the campaign trail.
Massie began the race with a big lead in the polls, but money changes everything, per Axios:
The race has turned into an all-out war of inflammatory accusations, savage insults and AI deepfakes.
One pro-Gallrein super PAC ad features an AI-generated Massie dining and holding hands with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), accusing him of being in a “throuple” and “cheating with ‘The Squad’ on the America First movement.”
Pro-Massie groups have attempted to brutally undermine Gallrein’s MAGA credentials, labeling him “woke Eddie” and depicting the retired Navy SEAL in one AI-generated ad as a soldier abandoning Trump on a battlefield.
Both candidates have attacked each other as being insufficiently conservative on a wide range of social issues, including diversity, equity and inclusion, transgender rights, Black Lives Matter, and immigration.
All of this is backed up by more than $25.6 million in ad spending, according to AdImpact, which makes the fight between Massie and Gallrein the most expensive U.S. House primary in history.
The record was previously broken in the 2024 election cycle when AIPAC spent a whopping $14.5 million to unseat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who was one of Congress’ most vocal Israel critics, in a race that saw $25.2 million in overall ad spending.
The Kentucky 4th district race could end up clearing that figure by a significant margin, with a week still to go until the May 19 primary.
As of early April, polling showed the ad money had most effectively swayed older voters away from Massie.
And a little Karl Rove style rat family blogging may have been the coup de grace, note the source:
🚨 EXCLUSIVE 🚨
I have obtained new evidence regarding Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie taking romantic trips to South Africa with two different women: his accuser Cynthia West AND for his honeymoon with his now-wife.
There’s an important piece of corroborating evidence to… pic.twitter.com/dKEcfiubEh
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) May 12, 2026
Massie supporters have pushed back, but it might be too little, too late:
Everyone read and share
Short version:The Loomer hit piece on Massie comes from a woman who made the exact same allegation against her ex in 2024. Problem: courts threw it out. Zero evidence. She lied
This is a political hit piece meant to steal the election for Miriam Adelson https://t.co/FQxC3anhEW
— Clint Russell (@LibertyLockPod) May 13, 2026
The betting markets seem to have been swayed to abandon Massie by this latest attack:
.@Polymarket – KY-04 Republican Primary (chance of winning)
🟥 Ed Gallrein: 54% (+30)🟥 Thomas Massie: 46% (-29)
(+/- shift vs Jan 19) https://t.co/H7juBRgxXr pic.twitter.com/2gGjRkpcXc
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) May 13, 2026
Looks like we might be in for another bad guys win election next week.
Hang tough freedom lovers.
