Upcoming primaries will test Trump's hold on GOP

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s dramatic defeat has sparked substantial speculation over its potential fallout, both in Europe and in the United States.

The most immediate question for the U.S. is whether the backlash against personal corruption, policy failures and authoritarian rule that did in Orban was a precursor of one that could soon start to shake the power of his American soulmate, President Donald Trump.

Republican primaries next month in the red states of Indiana and Kentucky may give the first clues into whether the similar factors causing Trump’s poor poll ratings are beginning to threaten his vise-like hold on the GOP.

At issue is if a handful of Republican officeholders who had the temerity to challenge Trump can survive his efforts to purge them. Their survival might spur resistance from other Republicans, who have refused to speak out against the president, even if they privately oppose what he is doing – and how he is doing it.

On May 5 in Indiana, five Republican state senators, who helped kill a Trump-inspired congressional redistricting plan last December, face primary foes who went to the White House in March to pose for pictures and get the president’s personal endorsements.

And on May 19 in Kentucky, U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a conservative purist who led the fight to open the Justice Department files of convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and opposed Trump on the Iran war and other issues, faces a primary challenge from a Trump-backed GOP rival.

The Indiana contests stem from the legislative showdown last December in which the State Senate voted 31-19 against a State House-passed plan to eliminate the seats of the state’s two Democratic U.S. representatives, part of a national effort to bolster the GOP’s chances of holding the House.

Senate President Rodric Bray and six other members of the GOP leadership joined the chamber’s Democrats in rejecting the plan. Bray is not up for re-election this year. But Trump has followed up threats he made during the fight by backing challengers to five who are running – and endorsing several other legislative hopefuls.

Meanwhile, his allies, including Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Banks and conservative groups like Club for Growth, Turning Point Action and Hoosier Leadership for America, are spending over $5 million to support the senatorial challengers.

But it is not a one-sided fight. Among those opposing Trump’s purge effort is former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a non-Trump traditional Republican who has largely stayed out of the president’s line of fire.

"I think it's important that people who are fine public servants and have shown it in other contexts, who stood up for a principle here and showed bravery in so doing, that ought to be rewarded, not punished, and it's certainly not going to be punished by people from several hundred miles away who couldn't find Indiana with a road map," Daniels told radio station WFYI in Indianapolis.

And Trump’s first-term vice president, former Gov. Mike Pence, endorsed one of Trump’s legislative targets. In such fights, he said, “I would simply defer to the state legislatures and the governors to determine what they think is appropriate.”

Meanwhile, across the Ohio River in Kentucky, another bitter internal GOP battle pits Massie, a seven-term GOP incumbent, and Ed Gallrein, a former Navy Seal for whom Trump made a campaign appearance last month.

“Massie is a complete and total disaster as a congressman and, frankly, as a human being,” Trump told a rally last month in the tiny northern Kentucky community of Hebron. “I just can’t stand this guy.”

A fiscal conservative often critical of Trump’s authoritarianism, Massie has emerged as the president’s single most consistent Republican foe in the U.S. House. Though Speaker Mike Johnson removed him from the powerful House Rules Committee, he still wields substantial leverage because of the GOP’s slim three-vote majority. That means it only takes two recalcitrant Republicans to block the leadership on the House’s many strictly partisan votes, and one of those is often Massie.

For example, last week, when the House voted 214-213 to reject a Democratic challenge to the president’s war-making powers, Massie was the only Republican to vote with the Democrats.

Many of his one-member stands are primarily aimed at enforcing proper congressional procedures. For example, in 2020, during the COVID pandemic, he opposed a unanimous consent request to pass a relief bill because he felt members should be required to cast votes on the record.

“I read the bills, I try to make the decision on what is best,” Massie told a GOP dinner last month in Williamstown. “And sometimes it means voting ‘No’.”

Probably the main thing that upset Trump is Massie’s role, along with California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, in forcing the administration to release files connecting Epstein with many prominent people in public life, including Trump, though without evidence so far that they joined in his wrongdoing.

Candidate Trump promised to make the files public, but his Justice Department has moved slowly doing so, even after Congress passed and Trump signed a Massie-Khanna bill requiring it.

Until now, Trump’s small number of GOP congressional critics have mainly spoken out after deciding to retire, like North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis has done in the past year.

The Indiana and Kentucky primaries will show if Republicans opposed to the president’s policies and methods can do so more openly – and survive politically.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is a columnist for Dallas Morning News.