A progressive daily ledger of Trump-world self-owns, legal pain, policy blowback, and bad-faith chaos.
May 18, 2022 edition. The big story from Tuesday’s primaries was that Trump’s movement kept dragging the GOP toward election-denial extremism, even as some of his personal picks underperformed and a few of his loudest habits kept looking like liabilities.
Trump’s camp got enough wins on May 17 to keep the former president’s grip on the GOP obvious, but the night also exposed a recurring problem: his endorsement machine helps elevate chaos candidates who are easier to nominate than to defend. The strongest screwups on this date were less about one catastrophic event than about a pattern of bad judgment, overreach, and political self-harm that was becoming plain in real time.
The through-line is simple: Trump can still move Republican voters, but he keeps moving them toward candidates and causes that make the party look more extreme, more litigable, and more beatable in November. That is not exactly the aura of command.
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5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.
On May 17, 2022, Trump-backed Doug Mastriano won Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary and Ted Budd won the North Carolina GOP Senate primary. The results showed that Trump’s endorsement still moved votes, while candidates tied to his false 2020 election claims kept finding a path to nomination.
Madison Cawthorn lost the May 17 North Carolina Republican primary to Chuck Edwards, despite a late Trump endorsement that was supposed to help. The result highlighted the limits of a rescue attempt that came too late for a candidate already dragging heavy baggage.
In Idaho, Trump’s preferred faction lost a key test when incumbent Gov. Brad Little survived a challenge from a Trump-endorsed hard-liner. It was not a total blowout, but it was another sign that even when Trump intervenes, Republican voters do not always hand him the exact result he wants.