As the Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie stepped up to concede defeat in his Republican primary election last week, the White House could not contain its delight.
“Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power,” gloated the White House communications director, Steven Cheung, on X. “Fuck around, find out.”
Massie was the most prized scalp in the latest round of bloodletting as Donald Trump resumed his revenge tour against political enemies in his own party. Rallying his diehard Maga base in support of rival candidates, the president consigned a string of Republican adversaries to defeat in last week’s primary races.
The elections underscored Trump’s position as the Grand Old Party’s (GOP) undisputed kingmaker. But with his approval rating at historic lows, the president is as unpopular as he has ever been with American voters. Those ratings may fall even further in the coming weeks, as his administration appears to be gearing up for another invasion, this time in Cuba.
He faced a rare backlash from congressional Republicans last week after new allegations of breathtaking corruption that GOP lawmakers fear will see the party eviscerated at November’s midterms.
Mounting tensions between the White House and Republican leaders exploded when the Trump administration unveiled a $1.8bn (£1.35bn) slush fund to pay the victims of political “weaponisation” by Democrats, including rioters who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
The administration attempted to ram the funding through Congress along with another $1bn for Trump’s cherished White House ballroom. The acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney before joining the justice department, was dispatched to Capitol Hill to strong-arm Republicans into line.
The move backfired. At a hostile meeting, incredulous Senate Republicans told Blanche that the fund was a public relations catastrophe heading into a midterm campaign that will be fought on the rising cost of living, made worse by Trump’s deeply unpopular war with Iran.
“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?” said Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell. “Utterly stupid, morally wrong – take your pick.”
Two police officers who were attacked by Trump supporters when they stormed the Capitol have already filed a lawsuit to block the fund. About 140 officers were injured in the melee, whose climax was an armed siege at the doors of the House of Representatives, where one rioter was shot dead. One police officer, Brian Sicknick, was pepper-sprayed in the face during the violence and died the next day after suffering two strokes. Four more officers caught up in the riot took their own lives in the months that followed.
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Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor who worked on 6 January cases and represents the officers behind the lawsuit, said that Trump’s slush fund was “potentially the most corrupt act of presidential power in American history”.
The anti-weaponisation fund was part of a deal between Trump and his own justice department to settle a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leak of the president’s tax returns during his first term in office. The agreement also states that the IRS is “forever barred” from pursuing any related investigation into Trump, his family or his business.
Oblivious to the controversy, the president himself suggested the fund may be too small. “You’re talking about peanuts,” he told reporters last week. “It destroyed the lives of many, many people.”
The standoff with the White House underscored growing unease that Trump’s priorities, unchecked by the need to face the voters again, are increasingly at odds with those of his party. Republicans on Capitol Hill are furious that the president backed Maga challengers against Massie and other popular incumbents, including Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn of Texas.
One official lamented that Republican lawmakers were being forced to “defend the indefensible” by a president obsessed with relitigating old grievances and erecting monuments to himself. While Trump’s ballroom faces a string of legal challenges, a federal panel last week approved the president’s plan for a 76-metre (250ft) triumphal arch in Washington, close to the Lincoln Memorial.
“The president is legacy-building,” the official said. “Most Republicans are just hoping to survive November.”
Trump continues to flaunt his contempt for the party establishment, however. While the Iran war remains deadlocked, sending petrol prices soaring and his approval rating into freefall, the president is threatening another foreign conflict, stepping up its belligerent rhetoric towards the communist regime in Cuba.
Trump again threatened military action against Havana as his administration indicted former Cuban president Raúl Castro for murder last week. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said that previous US leaders had considered invading Cuba for decades. “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years… and it looks like I’ll be the one that does it. So I would be happy to do it,” Trump said.
Polls suggest that an attack on Cuba would be no more popular than the war with Iran, however. A YouGov survey this month found that 64% of Americans oppose military intervention in Cuba, while only 15% support it.
Trump blamed his crowded schedule for keeping him from attending the wedding celebration of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, to Bettina Anderson, a Palm Beach socialite, in the Bahamas this weekend.
The president admitted that his son would “like me to go” but said the date of the celebration was “not good timing for me”.
“I have a thing called Iran and other things,” Trump told reporters last week, claiming he would be “killed by the fake news” whether he attended the celebration or not.
“That’s one I can’t win on,” Trump said, adding: “Hopefully, they’re going to have a great marriage.”
Photograph by Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images