Donald Trump wants to keep congressional Republicans in power through the remainder of his term — but he also wants to use the midterms to punish those who have stepped off the MAGA line. Tuesday’s Republican primary in Kentucky will test the bounds of the president’s control over the party, its voters, and how much power he can still exert over downballot elections.
The race will see Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican who has represented Kentucky’s fourth congressional district since 2012, face off against the Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL
“I did not see this coming, but my election has become an inflection point for our whole country,” Massie wrote Tuesday morning as polls opened in Kentucky. “Today we make history.”
Massie — a self-described libertarian and former Tea Party member — has been drawing Trump’s ire since the president’s first term. Trump first called for punitive action in 2020, after Massie forced lawmakers to return to the capital during the Covid-19 pandemic, demanding Republicans “throw Massie out of the Republican Party!”
The rupture between the two men has only worsened. Last year, after Massie opposed the passage of Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill — which included massive cuts to health care and social safety net programs — the president wrote that “Third Rate Congressman Thomas Massie, a Weak and Pathetic RINO from the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky, a place I love, and won big SIX TIMES, must be thrown out of office, ASAP.”
Massie has since become one of the only Republicans in Congress to publicly press the Trump administration on the release of the Epstein files, and to criticize American policy towards Israel and Iran. On Tuesday, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller claimed on X that “on every major important initiative from the Trump Administration Massie joins all Democrats to oppose. That’s why all the communist are out supporting him.”
The Kentucky congressman has repeatedly addressed the claims of willful Democratic collaboration leveled against him by the president’s allies, telling a right wing influencer on Monday that he votes “with Republicans 91 percent of the time. And the nine percent I don’t, they’re taking up for pedophiles, starting another war, or bankrupting our country.”
But Massie’s overwhelmingly Republican voting record means nothing to a president who sets the standard at unquestioned, non-negotiable fealty. Trump endorsed Gallrein as Massie’s opponent before he even entered the race, describing him as a “Brave Combat Veteran,” and a successful businessman.
“Should he decide to challenge Massie, Captain Ed Gallrein has my Complete and Total Endorsement. RUN, ED, RUN,” Trump wrote.
And run Gallrein has — on a policy platform that promises he will remain in lockstep with the president and his movement, and a significant amount of financial backing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is also seeking to oust Massie.
On Monday, Gallrein campaigned with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — a sign of the direct hand the Trump administration is taking in its attempts to remove a congressman critical of the president. Hegseth claimed he was there as a private citizen (hard to believe there’s such a distinction for a Cabinet secretary currently at war), and attempted to tie voters’ decision in the primary to support for the president. “President Trump does not need more people in Washington who are trying to make a point, especially from his own party. He needs people willing to help him win, to vote with him when it matters the most,” he said. “Thomas Massie’s record speaks for itself, too. Too much grandstanding, too few great votes, years of acting like being difficult is the same thing as being courageous. It is not.”
In a Truth Social post published on Monday, Trump issued a lengthy attack against Massie, after also having attacked him over the weekend. “The Great People of Kentucky are wise to Massie — He only votes against the Republican Party, making life very easy for the Radical Left,” he wrote. “Unlike ‘lightweight’ Massie, a totally ineffective LOSER who has failed us so badly, CAPTAIN ED GALLREIN IS A WINNER WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN.”
Polling shows Gallrein could potentially steal the nomination from Massie, and affirm Trump’s control over the Republican base. So confident is Trump that his public pressure campaign to oust Massie will succeed, that he’s already eying new targets.
On Monday, the president threatened longtime loyal soldier Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) with a primary challenge of her own, after she campaigned with Massie ahead of his primary. Boebert has been one of a handful of Republicans to break with Trump on the Epstein scandal, and has refused to endorse the appropriation of additional funds for the war in Iran.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), once the human embodiment of MAGA politics, left Congress at the beginning of the year after a public break with the president. Greene wrote on Monday that only she and three other members of the GOP caucus — Massie, Boebert, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) — had joined Democrats in signing the discharge petition forcing a vote on the release of the Epstein files. Trump “told Speaker Johnson not to allow the vote to happen, but we courageously went against the President and refused to budge and overrode the Speaker to force the vote on record,” Greene wrote. In a separate post, she encouraged Kentuckians to “vote for Thomas Massie, who was the ONLY Republican to vote with me to defund Israel and is against funding foreign wars!!!”
It may be a doomed effort to keep Massie afloat. Outside of the polling showing Gallrein with an edge, a slew of Trump-endorsed challengers recently won their primaries in Indiana, after the president called on lawmakers who had refused to go along with his midterm gerrymandering push to be primaried. Over the weekend, Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was easily defeated by Trump-backed challenger Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) and state Treasurer John Fleming, who advanced to a runoff. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made clear what the message was to members of the GOP: “If you try to destroy President Trump, you’re gonna lose, because this is the party of Donald Trump,” he said.
But while Trump is racking up wins in these primaries, he may still lose the war. The president’s approval rating is at a historic low and still falling. Americans continue to be battered by the increasing cost of the war in Iran, which has surged gas and fuel prices, spiked inflation, and worsened the existing cost-of-living crisis. Democrats dislike him more than ever, Republican discontent is increasing, and the critical swaths of independent voters that swung the 2024 election Trump’s way are abandoning him en masse.
While a MAGA candidate might do well in a closed primary with the president’s full attention, Republicans tend to underperform when he isn’t on the ballot. Even if Massie’s congressional career doesn’t survive beyond Tuesday, the electoral consequences of two years of Trump’s reckless governance may be coming home to roost this November.
Natalie Harp with Donald Trump on July 22, 2026.
Nothing About Trump and Natalie Harp Is Normal
In early 2024, while reporting a story on New York’s boisterous, controversial Young Republican Club, one of my sources told me they had a pretty direct line to Donald Trump himself.
At the time, Trump wasn’t president again — yet. But he was campaigning, and in order to get something in front of his eyes you had to first get the attention of someone else: his assistant and right-hand woman, Natalie Harp.
Harp, 35, is now at the center of a major media frenzy, as Democrats like Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff have seized upon her unusual relationship with her boss: part assistant, part hype-man, part gatekeeper. On Sunday night, Ossoff made a comment that many interpreted as an insinuation that Harp had a more personal relationship to the president.
“The president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks,” Ossoff said at a campaign event in Georgia. “See he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”
Ossoff’s comments set off a firestorm both in Democratic circles and the GOP’s reactionary messaging apparatus.
“Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, posted on Monday morning. By Tuesday, the entire media ecosystem had weighed in — with some coming right out and saying what they thought Ossoff was implying in his joke, and detailing why it was out of bounds.
“Ossoff was clearly implying that Trump was having an affair with his staffer,” Megyn Kelly wrote on X. Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna called him a “sexist arrogant jerk.” Pundit Robby Starbuck wrote that “Ossoff is a vile coward for insinuating they’re having an affair.” The flood of backlash poured out of just about every conservative commentator you could think of.
The White House joined the fray after CNN posed a question about Harp to Trump, asking him to respond to Ossoff’s comments directly. “You mean Pee-Wee Herman?” Trump quipped in the moment, referring to Ossoff. His comms team went for a full broadside later online. “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question,” Trump’s rapid response account posted at CNN reporter Kristen Holmes. “They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”
Ossoff, meanwhile, tried to soften the blow of his joke, redirecting it — sort of — away from Harp herself to make it more of a comment on the president’s relationship to his staff in general. “I’ve heard this particular aide referred to as his security blanket,” he told Jen Psaki on MS NOW. “And I think we could say that about any number of the senior aides in the White House.”
But the damage was done, and it’s hard to believe Ossoff didn’t know exactly what he was doing. In recent years, some Democrats have occasionally flirted with the type of mud-slinging that Trump and his imitators became known for, but they’ve rarely landed a hit that provoked this much of a reaction.
“What a coward. Own your sexist joke, bro,” right-wing commentator Scott Jennings posted.
Harp’s history — and her relationship to the president — give some clues as to why the Republican beehive is so agitated.
Harp began her career in the public eye as an anchor for One America News, a right-wing propaganda outlet that was founded in 2013 and became something of a mouthpiece for the Trump administration and then the MAGA movement during the Biden administration. Democrats and liberal commentators have pointed out that Harp was often fawning over Trump during her segments.
While these clips have been used as more evidence that Trump and Harp have a strange dynamic, it’s hard to say that this kind of content is outside of the norm for OAN’s programming at the time. But that doesn’t mean Harp’s history with Trump isn’t strange — even by MAGA supplicant standards.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, she said she was a bone cancer survivor and credited her survival to a “Right to Try” policy pushed by Trump in 2018 that allowed patients to use experimental drugs.
“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” Harp said at the RNC. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”
The Washington Post, however, notes that the drug Harp used was already approved by the FDA — which would have meant that the “Right to Try” law wouldn’t have applied.
Still, it’s clear that Harp feels a close personal connection to Trump. After her short stint at OAN, the Post cited her as a Trump employee as early as 2022. In 2024, The New York Times reported that Harp’s primary role on Trump’s staff was what other aides called “the human printer” — following Trump around with a battery powered printer so she could give him physical copies of social media posts, missives, text messages, and positive, often conspiratorial news stories. The Post story in 2022 also detailed her in this role, noting that other aides were “particularly distressed” by her access to and influence with the president.
“She is indicative of the people around him who just love him,” one anonymous adviser told the Post in 2022. “Love him too much.”
The Times’ reporting also noted that Harp’s esteem for Trump was particularly fervent, describing how she wrote him a series of what the newspaper called “devotional letters,” one of which said: “You are all that matters to me.” The Times described her running behind Trump’s golf cart, reading him social media posts and news articles. Following one of those instances, the Times reports that she wrote him another letter, apologizing for being “an embarrassment” while on the golf course in Scotland. “I want things to always be right between us,” she wrote. “I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).” Harp signed the letter, “With all my heart, Natalie.”
Harp’s family have acknowledged that her relationship to Trump is not that of a traditional staffer. In an interview with CNN on Tuesday night, Harp’s estranged brother Preston Harp said that “Since she was 16 she’s had an obsession with – she’s written letters to other presidents, let me put it that way,” Preston Harp said, mentioning “George Bush during the Iraq War” and that “her dream came true finally.”
These details are certainly odd, but so is basically everything about the particularities of Trump’s inner circle. Ossoff’s comment, however, likely came at least partially in response to another outlandish story that broke earlier this month.
On August 10, the Post reported that Trump had covertly switched planes during a trip to Turkey, hiding in an airline catering truck with a tiny group of aides in order to dodge a potential attack on Air Force One by Iranian proxies. The White House press corps and several key government figures — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio — stayed on board the “decoy plane.” Harp did not. She was reportedly in the food truck with Trump.
It’s impossible to know the exact nature of Harp’s relationship with Trump. Ossoff did not specifically mention an affair, though it’s hard to interpret his familiar comment as anything else — and the right-wing media is reacting to it as such, trying to take a moral high ground on behalf of a president who has, at least in civil court, been found liable for sexual abuse on at least one count, and routinely makes sexist comments toward female reporters and others.
Jesse Watters of Fox News was one of the only right-wing commentators to recognize the hypocrisy of bashing Ossoff’s comment while supporting Trump: “Am I fazed by this comment? No. Has Trump said so much worse, so much more sleazy things against other people? Yes. Have I defended those things? Absolutely. So, I’m not going to pretend to be all hot and bothered by it.”
Watters is an outlier, though. No matter what the charges, Trump will always have his protectors in the GOP, some more loyal than others. In recent years, Natalie Harp has been more loyal than anyone else.