by Steve Benen | May 19, 2026 | 2026 election, Maddowblog, News, Politics
It’s hard to overstate the intensity of Donald Trump’s contempt for Republican Rep. Thomas Massie. Put it this way: The president appears to hate the Kentucky congressman and windmills in roughly equal measure.
With this in mind, Trump and his political operation have gone after the incumbent lawmaker with a vengeance, as part of what’s become the single most expensive congressional primary in American history. As part of the effort, the president even deployed a high-profile surrogate to Kentucky the day before Primary Day. The New York Times reported on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s stunning return to the campaign trail:
Speaking at a campaign event for Ed Gallrein, Mr. Massie’s rival in the Republican primary, Mr. Hegseth attacked Mr. Massie as an obstructionist, accusing the seven-term libertarian known for bucking the party line of betraying his fellow Republicans — in particular Mr. Trump, who has often raged against Mr. Massie in public statements.
“Too often Massie’s instinct is to throw elbows at fellow Republicans instead of the people who are destroying our country or want to destroy our country,” the beleaguered Pentagon chief said, in apparent reference to Americans who dare to disagree with the White House.
Part of the problem with Hegseth’s efforts in Kentucky is that he presumably had other things to do on Monday. Indeed, according to the secretary’s boss, as recently as Monday morning, the president was moving forward with tentative plans for a renewed military offensive in Iran (which Trump called off hours later). It stands to reason that the nation’s defense secretary would’ve been rather busy on such a day, and intervening in a congressional primary in Kentucky
by Steve Benen | May 18, 2026 | 2026 election, Congress, Maddowblog, News, Politics
After Donald Trump left the White House in early 2021, many prominent figures in Republican politics assumed that he’d effectively set his political career on fire. By any sane measure, this was an understandable assumption: The then-former president had just plotted to seize illegitimate power and bore responsibility for an insurrectionist attack on his own country’s seat of government.
The idea that Trump would maintain a leadership role in American politics wasn’t just wrong; at the time, it seemed utterly ridiculous.
With this in mind, when the then-former president was impeached for his role in trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election, several GOP officials felt comfortable voting their conscience instead of toeing the party line. Indeed, the impeachment vote was the most bipartisan in the nation’s history: 10 House Republicans voted to hold Trump accountable, as did seven Senate Republicans.
Almost all of those 17 GOP lawmakers are now gone from Capitol Hill, and one will soon join them: Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana suffered an embarrassing loss on Saturday, finishing third in his primary race and failing to advance to a June runoff. Six years after winning re-election by a 40-point margin, the incumbent finished with just under 25% of the intraparty vote.
There’s no great mystery as to what happened: The incumbent president set out to destroy Cassidy for his 2021 impeachment vote, and Trump succeeded in his goal. The senator had spent the last year and a half trying to thread a partisan needle — up to and including confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary, in direct contradiction to the senator’s
by Steve Benen | May 13, 2026 | 2026 election, Congress, Maddowblog, News, Politics
After Donald Trump returned to the White House, an unhealthy competition emerged among many of his most sycophantic congressional allies. The goal was, apparently, to see who could go the furthest to impress the president with proposals to glorify him in the most outlandish ways possible.
Some championed legislation to create a $250 bill that would feature Trump’s face; others pushed a similar bill to put Trump’s face on $100 bills. Some tried to make Trump’s birthday a federal holiday, while others wanted to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. Some unveiled legislation to rename Washington Dulles International Airport after Trump, and others backed a bill to name the Washington, D.C., subway system after the president and his MAGA slogan.
While this might be difficult to believe, one House Republican even sponsored an actual bill to direct the National Institutes of Health to conduct research into “Trump derangement syndrome,” as if it were an actual ailment.
But these head-shaking proposals were all introduced in 2025, and now, as the midterm election cycle takes shape, the list of bills designed to venerate the incumbent president is still growing. The Hill reported:
Texas Sen. John Cornyn (R), who is in a tight reelection contest to keep his Senate seat, introduced legislation on Tuesday to dedicate a highway to President Trump.
“I am proud to introduce legislation to rename US Highway 287 as Interstate 47 in honor of our 47th President,” Cornyn wrote in a social media post. The highway is the second-longest U.S. route, spanning 1,791 miles from Choteau, Mont., to Port Arthur, Texas. GOP Sen. Cynthia Lummis (Wyo.) co-sponsored the bill.
There’s no reason to believe the
by Steve Benen | May 11, 2026 | 2026 election, Maddowblog, News, Politics
As Republican lawmakers look ahead to a challenging midterm election cycle, many have already begun airing television ads focused on a specific issue: funds for rural hospitals. In fact, the message of the ads makes these GOP incumbents appear rather liberal on an issue that has long been a serious problem for the party.
But as The Washington Post reported, there’s a key detail that the Republican commercials are omitting, in the apparent hope that voters won’t know the difference. From the article:
On rural health care this year, Republicans want voters to remember the Band-Aid they helped create, not the reason the bandage was needed in the first place.
It’s an interesting dynamic playing out in races nationwide, with groups and campaigns spending money to inform voters that Republican senators supported the Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion fund aimed at strengthening overall health care in rural America. But those ads are somewhat misleading. They wholly ignore that the program was needed only because of the sizable cuts to Medicaid that Republicans made elsewhere in the same sweeping 2025 tax-and-domestic policy law that created the rural health program.
At issue is the inaptly named “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which Donald Trump signed into law last summer, and which included some of the largest cuts to U.S. health care in modern history. Of particular interest were the nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid funding, which Congress realized would do more than just hurt low-income families.
As The Associated Press reported the day the president put his signature on the far-right package, the Republican cuts were poised to “hit already fragile rural hospitals hard
by Steve Benen | May 4, 2026 | 2026 election, Maddowblog, News, Politics
With Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell retiring in Kentucky, GOP officials are optimistic about holding onto the seat. The monthslong question, however, is which of the party’s top contenders would get the nomination.
Much of the right had already rallied behind Rep. Andy Barr, whose candidacy is perhaps best known for a recent campaign ad in which he boasted, “It’s not a sin to be white; it’s not against the law to be male; and it shouldn’t be disqualifying to be a Christian.” He nevertheless faced a primary against former state Attorney General Daniel Cameron and businessman Nate Morris, who enjoyed the backing of billionaire Republican megadonor Elon Musk, who invested $10 million in Morris’ candidacy.
Late last week, the GOP field narrowed from three candidates to two. The Associated Press reported:
President Donald Trump entered the fray of another Republican primary Friday by endorsing Kentucky congressman Andy Barr for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former longtime Senate GOP leader. […]
In a Truth Social post just before his endorsement of Barr, Trump announced that he’d asked Morris to “step aside” from the race to join his administration as an ambassador.
The president didn’t elaborate on the specific office he’d reward Morris with, writing, “I’ve asked Nate to step aside from that Race to take a role in my Administration as an Ambassador. … We will be announcing Nate’s new role soon.”
As a practical matter, Barr is now very well positioned to succeed. Indeed, shortly after Trump endorsed him, Senate Republican leaders, including National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Tim Scott, also threw their backing behind the congressman, leaving little
by Steve Benen | Apr 22, 2026 | 2026 election, Maddowblog, News, Politics
For generations, states redrew congressional district lines after the decennial census. There were exceptions, but in nearly all of those instances, mid-decade redistricting only happened when courts told states that their maps were unlawful and needed to be redone.
The idea that politicians would simply choose to start redrawing maps, in the middle of a decade, in pursuit of partisan advantage, was practically unheard of — for the most part.
Texas Republicans broke radical ground with a mid-decade redistricting scheme in 2003, and last summer, at Donald Trump’s best, GOP officials did it again: Fearing an electoral backlash in the 2026 midterms, the party decided to give itself a buffer, creating a new map designed to give Republicans five additional U.S. House seats, more than a year before voters cast a ballot.
At that point, the president and his allies seemed quite pleased with themselves. There was one angle, however, that Trump and his party neglected to appreciate: Democrats weren’t just going to sit back, capitulate and grumble about how frustratingly impressive the GOP’s hardball tactics are.
On the contrary, Democrats had the capacity to fight back — and they did.
After the president and Texas Republicans effectively launched a partisan arms race, California Democrats approved a comparable plan to give their party five more seats of their own. GOP officials, again at Trump’s behest, added a handful of additional seats to their gerrymandering tally in Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, while Democrats in Utah gained an advantage in Utah after a failed Republican gambit.
All of which set the stage for a dramatic showdown in Virginia. MS NOW reported:
Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment on
