Most of them, anyway.
His chosen candidates took down five—for sure—of the seven Republican incumbents the president targeted for punishment. Only Indiana Sen. Greg Goode, R-Terre Haute, and possibly, narrowly, Indiana Sen. Spencer Deery, R-West Lafayette, escaped the purge.
Trump was angry with these Hoosier legislators because they had the temerity to honor their constituents’ wishes rather than his in the foolish fight he started to redraw Indiana’s congressional maps mid-decade.
Because this president is one who prefers to command through fear rather than lead by inspiring genuine loyalty, he vowed to make an example of the seven lawmakers. He and his allies spent astronomical sums—the lowest accounts say $7 million, the highest $14 million—to defeat them.
The true number may never be known. In this age of digital advertising and dark money, the flow of political expenditures is almost impossible to track with precision.
And what did this massive splurge of political and financial capital buy Trump?
Yes, it probably will intimidate GOP legislators in Indiana and elsewhere—including, probably, Goode and Deery—into acquiescence, resentful or otherwise, for a little while longer.
But at a cost.
Greg Ballard, the former GOP mayor of Indianapolis, already has launched an unsubtle campaign to pull Republicans disaffected from their traditional party into a new one. This new party, perhaps anticipating the day when the president demands that Republicans’ annual gatherings be renamed Trump Day Dinners, is to be called the Lincoln Party.
Again, subtle Ballard isn’t.
But the Trump-inspired carnage on Primary Day doubtless will help Ballard’s cause. Given that the president’s message to the five lawmakers he struck down, and all their followers, was that they no longer have a place in the Indiana Republican Party, where does he think they will go?
They won’t become Democrats.
But they very well may sign up with a new political party that seeks to honor their historic loyalties and values.
It wasn’t just the fact that Trump threw a grenade into his own shrinking tent that made this a stupid fight.
In political terms, there is next to no difference between the challengers the president backed and the incumbents he defeated. Left alone, the six would have reverted to supporting Trump 99 out of 100 times because that was their natural inclination.
Nor were their votes against the president’s Congress-packing plan entirely selfless, principled acts of political courage. In some cases, there were elements of crass political calculation.
Republicans have a 7-2 advantage in this state’s membership in the U.S. House of Representatives. The GOP achieved that margin because 57% of Hoosiers cast their ballots for Republican congressional candidates.
Trump wanted to expand that edge to 8-1 or even 9-0 by rejiggering and further gerrymandering the congressional district maps.
In theory, it could have been done, but at some risk of turning previously safe House districts into contested ones. If the mapmakers didn’t get it exactly right, that 7-2 number could easily become 6-3 or even 5-4.
And that was before Trump drove all Hoosier moderate, non-MAGA Republicans in Ballard’s direction.
The smarter play, some Hoosier Republicans argued, was to spend the money and effort Trump devoted to the redistricting fight and subsequent revenge campaign on defeating U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan, D-Indiana.
They had a point. The guess here is that the $7 million to $14 million Trump and company spent attacking his friends and driving a wedge into his own party would have devastating effect if that cash had been spent trying to unseat Mrvan.
But that’s not Trump’s way.
He doesn’t play chess. He doesn’t even really play checkers.
He just smashes the board in the hopes that other people will give him his way.
He smashed the board effectively on Primary Day in Indiana.
He sent pieces of the Hoosier GOP flying this way and that, racking up victories that testify to little more than presidential petulance.
It was a victory that bought Donald Trump next to nothing in real terms.
And Hoosier Republicans even less than that.
