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
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 liedThis 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.
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Patrick Henry argued, during the Constitutional ratification convention in Virginia, that a general government that had both “the power of the purse and the power of the sword” would lead to tyranny…
And here we are.
In England, the King’s function is ornamental, while real political power rests with Parliament. In the US, Congress’s function is ornamental, while real political power rests with the President. Remind me again, what exactly was the American Revolution about?
Securing the profits of colonists who had made massive amounts of wealth from smuggling in tea and other staples, but were now cut out after the colonel government and Parliament had come to an agreement in terms of taxation on said goods which were now cheaper then the smuggled ones.
It’s a point well taken but let’s not imagine the UK some sterling manifestation of representative democracy here.
What general government has not had both? Isn’t that approaching the definition of what powers a general government has at the minimum? It’s rather like the old mantra of fist-pounding GOPers about “liberals,” “tax and spend tax and spend ‘. What is it they imagined (nonMMT) governments do?
I am not an enthusiastic Founder-basher but I suspect Patrick Henry’s Liberty was a little too close to Maga’s idea of Freedumb. Samuel Johnson had his number–the loudest fries for Liberty come from [slave drivers].
My first thought was ‘who the hell is going to believe anything that walking mannequin Loomer says’ but then I realized that we are talking about KY republicans.
A silver lining: Massie loses and then runs for president or at least senator. He’d do way more good being 1 of 100 than 1 of 535.
Problem is Rand Paul is already a GOP/Libertarian Senator from KY and is a top Massie ally.
True, but he’d be a shoe-in to replace Mitch McTurtle.
I like Rand too, but a very pale imitation of his father, Massie is more like Ron.
Report from Lexington, KY:
shoe-in to replace Mitch McTurtle Representative Andy Barr will be hard to dislodge after his Senate win in November. He helped run Congress’s protection racket for the FIRE sector and for AIPAC.
My heart says Massie will win. He has guts and integrity-if only he understood that the national ‘debt” is a reserve drain.
How bad is the situation for Kentuckians?
I haven´t been there since the mid-90s. And have had no contact for 20 years now.
Here’s the thing: Dems are so far down that using Kentucky as a laboratory / workshop to figure out how to crack the code makes a lot of sense – to me at least.
We were Democratic for roughly 100 years, until NAFTA did its damage in small town America.
Best…H
If Massie looses the primary, maybe he will run in the general election as an independent. He might win, or at least take enough votes away from the Republican candidate to allow the Democratic candidate to win. Plus, Miriam Adelson would need to spend more millions to keep Massie out of office.
Kentucky has a sore loser law, so if he loses he’s out.
A write in campaign that “he has nothing to do with™” would make a Democratic win possible.
Best…H
“One of the challenges of covering American politics during the polycrisis is the nagging feeling that none this matters, as the game is fixed.”
Trust that nagging feeling. It is so much easier to spend one’s time in the comforting back and forth zone of forever evil Trump or forever evil Democrats that one never even gets to the issue of fixing the fix.
Ben Franklin commented at the signing of the Constitution:
“…it is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years and can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”
Well, here we are, Ben. Thanks for the warning.
But Ben…it want the People. The corrupters and the corrupt are entirely insulated from us.
I live in Kentucky one district over from Massie. What’s different in this race is how many yard signs you see outside of his district. Trump signs that stayed up after the election started disappearing after the blow up over the Epstein files. Granted, those voters can’t vote for Massie but his support is deeper than Trump likes to think it is.
I wouldn’t rule out Thomas Massie yet.
Glad to hear it!
“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.”
They still want some way to override any upstarts not with the game on the state and local level and it’s a big country to keep a lid on.
That’s about it…
Gallrein may have the support of Trump but how toxic will the Trump brand be as the economy starts to nose dive? By October you may have political candidates begging Trump not to come to their States lest it loses them more support.
We’ve already seen this movie. And the USA loves its sequels.
If the economy starts to nose dive, budgets will be proposed that include relief to people.
Then there will be a government shut down as they turn it into culture war battles.
By the time that’s over, there could be many casualties (depending on the kind of emergency) and it will be a pittance if anything.
The Kentucky primary is in 6 days, so unfortunately that won’t be of help to Massie.
Maybe it will. The upcoming engine lubricant shortage seems to have gone viral today. That’s as MAGA adjacentI as it gets. I don’t think Massie has much to worry about except maybe getting cheated.
Putting on my tinfoil hat for a minute, I do sometimes wonder whether the excessive campaign spending is done to influence voters toward a particular candidate, or to justify a victory after the fact in a rigged election. I really have a hard time believing that actual voters are really influenced by some of the crap ads you see. But they might think other people are when they hear how much was spent.
But we’ll never know until we have hand marked ballots, hand counted in public, will we?
Much appreciated!
Does the NEW YORKER piece suggest then, that the fear over Project 2025 eventually turned out to be overblown – as warned by NC at least in 2024 when rumours about Project 2025 first became widespread and JACOBIN and affiliates e.g., liked to warn of fascism around the corner.
Which doesn´t mean there was nothing to it at all, looking back at the first year of Trump II.
(I remember that I was rather doubtful and critical of the fearmongering based mainly on rumours in 2024.)
I am rather lost on how the Project 2025 issue has played out so far. It appears muddy – almost like everything POTUS took up since Jan. 2025. For an outsider it sure has been covered under tons of debris like Gaza, Iran, SMO, Venezuela, tariffs etc.
…well not to forget Epstein, of course.
P2025 did most of what it was designed to do already. USG is now run by grifters and toadies with zero experience rather than career and bureaucratic wonks, experts/scientists and professional managers. Many believe it’s now to the point where it’s nigh impossible to reclaim any semblance of functionality, aside from the theft by said grifters and toadies.
Not a wholly bad situation though. There’s now an opportunity to rebuild better, I’d give that about a 2% chance of happening.
2% is better than 0%
😂
Hard to believe she is competent after watching her give that speech where she repeatedly talks about making sure kids have “A ONE” education over and over.
Then on twitter A1 Steak Sauce reposted the video.
I’ve been trying to get people to start calling it A One instead of AI but its been tough.
I missed that one. JFC. LULz
Wilkerson told Nap that people he talks to from SC say Lindsey is in big trouble. I have no political circle other than the rabbits in my back yard so can’t vouch.
Listen to about 4 mind bending minutes of Nima’s latest interview of Alex Krainer, starting at 7:20. All this is under the rubric of ‘who in God’s name in in charge in the United States.’ First he discusses the Fox News report that the CIA raided the offices of Tulsi Gabbard (their nominal superior), seizing documents, then he turns to Massie. He notes how popular Massie is with his constitutents, who want him to win by a large margin. Then he notes that the huge reversal in poll outcomes in recent days, in favor of the zionist billionaire opponents, is implausible. “As somebody who has spent his professional career doing research on trends… it’s obviously a fraud…” a change in the numbers of that size “would take months.” I have sometimes thought of Krainer as what I call a “business talk fabulist” but when he is grounded, he can be very interesting, YMMV.
The vital detail that all of us paying attention over the past few years have gained is the perspective that money, external influence, and hidden networks now control the function and most of those elected into high government federal office in the USA. It is no longer a government of, by and for the people. It is a bought, bribed, payed off, blackmailed government, that delivers contracts, policy, procedure, law and opinion primarily to further its hidden masters. We are, sadly, waiting for the calamity that will take us down – as has occured with so many other empires down through history. It is what comes after, and how each of us may contribute to humanities benefit, that matters most. Radical reform is required. But sadly, we lack the capacity to implement it because the cabal has captured our fiat money, our government, our media, our industry… most major institutions – to exert much control over the minds of the people.