Donald Trump displayed his supremacy over the Republican party on Tuesday when voters in northern Kentucky rejected the maverick congressman Thomas Massie in favour of the US president’s hand-picked challenger.
Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy Seal and farmer who was recruited into the race by Trump, defeated the seven-term incumbent in a primary election in Kentucky’s fourth congressional district, in what the president’s allies framed as a test of whether dissent could still exist inside today’s Republican party.
“It’s not a retribution campaign, it’s a send a message campaign,” a senior White House adviser told CNN. “This is basic political management of a party. You have to keep everybody on the reservation. Occasionally you have to shoot a hostage. The next one is Thomas Massie.”
Massie, a libertarian-minded conservative, repeatedly broke with the president over military action against Iran, government spending and the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. He spent months insisting that Kentucky Republicans valued independence over obedience. Instead, voters in the deeply conservative fourth congressional district appeared to conclude that loyalty to Trump mattered more.
The election took place as voters in five other states – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, Oregon and Idaho – went to the polls to decide their nominees for the November general election, in what was the biggest primary night of the year so far.
Trump critic Thomas Massie defeated in Kentucky Republican House primary
Massie now joins the ranks of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney and other elected Republicans who were either ousted or decided to retire because of their party’s capitulation to Trump.
Over the weekend, Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted in favour of Trump’s conviction after the 6 January insurrection, lost a primary in Louisiana after the president backed challenger Julia Letlow.
Trump endorses attorney general Ken Paxton in Texas Senate primary
Donald Trump has endorsed the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, in the state’s Republican primary, bolstering his bid to unseat the incumbent US senator, John Cornyn.
The US president praised Paxton, a hardliner who has pitched himself as a political warrior for Trump’s Make America Great Again movement, as an “America First Patriot” in a post on social media on Tuesday.
Georgia’s Republican races for governor and US Senate head to June runoffs
The Republican primary campaign for Georgia governor will go to a June runoff, with the lieutenant governor Burt Jones facing off against healthcare billionaire Rick Jackson – and locking out Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state and longtime political enemy of Donald Trump who was on track to finish a distant third.
The Republican race to challenge the US senator Jon Ossoff remains similarly unresolved, while former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Democratic primary for governor outright.
Pennsylvania primaries spotlight key races for Democrats to retake House
Primaries across Pennsylvania clarified key battlegrounds for November’s midterm elections on Tuesday.
Sixteen of the state’s 17 US representatives are seeking re-election, and Democrats are zeroing in on four districts they view as essential pickup opportunities in their bid to retake the House.
US Senate votes to advance resolution to curb Trump’s Iran war powers
The Senate voted on Tuesday to advance a war powers resolution aimed at forcing Donald Trump to end the war in Iran unless he receives congressional authorization to continue it.
Tuesday’s 50-47 vote marks the first time the chamber has advanced the bill, the eighth attempt at doing so since the conflict began in February.
This time, Senator Bill Cassidy, fresh from a primary loss in Louisiana in a race in which Trump endorsed his opponent, voted to take up the measure.
What else happened today:
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The US justice department quietly added a provision barring the IRS from auditing Donald Trump’s tax returns on Tuesday, amending a widely criticized agreement that creates a secretive and loosely controlled $1.776bn fund to compensate allies of the president.
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The two teenage assailants responsible for a mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, California, rushed toward the mosque “fully armored” with handguns and rifles, authorities said. The shooters had met and been radicalized online, according to the FBI.
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The NAACP on Tuesday launched a campaign urging Black athletes, their families, alumni and fans to boycott athletic programs of public universities in states that “have moved to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation”.
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A federal judge in New York has banned US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from arresting immigrants in or around three federal courthouses in lower Manhattan, where vigorous confrontations have played out since the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
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The US supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a rare public rebuke of the nation’s highest court, declaring that it “can and should be better” in the wake of a string of controversial moves by its conservative supermajority.
Catching up? Here’s what happened Monday 18 May.
