President Donald Trump has spent months purging GOP lawmakers he deemed insufficiently loyal — and that campaign of revenge may have finally caught up to him, journalist Prem Thakker argued in a Zeteo analysis Friday.
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This year, Trump successfully ousted five GOP Indiana state senators who defied his redistricting plan. He also helped rid the Senate of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced he wouldn’t seek a third term last year rather than face a Trump-backed challenger and, in May, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) lost his primary race to a Trump-endorsed opponent.
All of the aforementioned GOP lawmakers, however, still hold their seats for the duration of their terms and, no longer burdened with the fear of facing Trump’s wrath, are free to stand in the way of the president’s agenda.
“There is some downside for Trump in all this,” Thakker wrote. “Cornyn and Tillis will leave Congress after the midterms, having displeased the boss and lost their places in Republican ranks. They might therefore succeed in giving Trump a bloody nose in return, thereby illustrating his loosening grip on the party.”
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Chief among Cornyn and Tillis’ points of leverage against Trump is their ability to sink the president’s nomination of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, which both have shown is extremely likely as a scheduled vote placing him in the position was postponed this week — because he didn’t have enough support.
The two GOP senators have said they will continue to withhold their support for Blanche unless the Trump administration shutters its “anti-weaponization fund” designed to award $1.7 billion to Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.
Massie has also shown defiance in the wake of his primary election loss, criticizing Trump’s White House ballroom project and filing a successor to his Epstein Files Transparency Act from last year. Similarly, Cassidy has shown a greater willingness to openly defy Trump since his own election loss, harshly criticizing a Trump nominee earlier this month and appearing “unrestrained from pressures to appease the administration,” The Hill reported.
