Trump’s Clout Faces Its First Real Test of 2026

INDIANAPOLIS — Jean Leising, an Indiana state senator, voted for Donald Trump three times and said she was one of the few Republican women legislators willing to come to a fundraiser in the early days of his 2016 candidacy.

“That was when he couldn’t get any women,” Leising reminded me, speaking just off the state Senate floor on the sine die of Indiana’s legislative session last month.

Yet the longtime lawmaker said she’s nearing her breaking point with Trump now that he’s mounting a vengeance campaign against her state Senate colleagues who, like her, opposed his demand that they redraw Indiana’s congressional districts ahead of the midterms.

“I still support some of his policies, but I really, really don't like what he did, with the intimidation that they encouraged,” Leising told me.

Whether those sorts of intimidation tactics, and the effort now to oust those lawmakers who defied him, are vindicated could determine the fate of Trump’s presidency.

He was technically a lame duck the moment he took the oath of office last year. But how soon that status becomes a fact of political life will be shaped in Indiana and a handful of other states over the next two months.

The president has put his clout on the line in a series of state and congressional races that will first be determined in April and May. This is the spring of Trump testing.

Should Trump-backed candidates easily prevail in upcoming special elections and primaries, it will affirm his hold on the Republican Party, even as he approaches the back half of his final term, and remind GOP lawmakers that what’s always been the source of his strength remains intact: his capacity to control the party’s primary voters.

Yet if some of those Republicans brandishing Trump’s support lose, or only win narrowly on otherwise MAGA-friendly terrain, it will be devastating to the president’s image, drain him of political capital and accelerate a flight of GOP lawmakers on the Iran war and elements of his domestic agenda.

That Trump is involved at all in primaries rather than focusing entirely on bolstering his party for a forbidding general election is an illustration of his unusual presidency. Though at this point that barely needs repeating. Most presidents recognize that their fate is tied to the party’s success and would spend the bulk of their time and money preparing for the fall. (Yes, he did spend a night this week headlining a fundraising dinner for House Republicans).

Trump, though, is not like most presidents. So his party’s lawmakers must confront a figure primarily bent on retaining his intra-party grip and whose interest in the fall election at this point mostly centers around pushing through a voter ID bill that he’s become wrongly convinced is a panacea for Republicans in the midterms.

But nobody ever said Donald J. Trump was a party man.

Which is ironic because no president has ever so dominated his party. Take a glimpse at, well, nearly every Republican primary this year. They’re all single-issue campaigns, and the issue is no issue at all — it’s Trump. Specifically, the races are oriented around demonstrating one’s loyalty to the president and portraying one’s opponent(s) as disloyal to the president. That’s it. Just take a look at the ads being run.

Even as Trump’s standing plummets with independent voters, his core base is still overwhelmingly loyal to him, no matter his policy preferences. The gap between a party’s primary voters and the general electorate when it comes to a sitting president has rarely been wider.

This is all to say that Trump and the candidates he supports should be favored to prevail in the weeks ahead. Yet there are potential pitfalls ahead for the president.

First, in April, are a pair of races that aren’t primaries but could be revealing in their own way.

The April 7 special election runoff to replace former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in a heavily conservative swath of North Georgia shouldn’t be close. This is Trump country. Yet the Democrat, Shawn Harris, has capitalized on liberal enthusiasm to raise significant money against the Trump-backed Clayton Fuller. If Fuller doesn’t win by a double-digit margin in a seat that Trump carried with nearly 70 percent of the vote in 2024, it will illustrate waning enthusiasm on the right.

That same day, Wisconsin voters go to the polls to vote on a State Supreme Court seat. Unlike last year — surely you recall Elon Musk donning the cheesehead — this contest has not drawn nearly the same amount of attention from the president. In fact, he’s stayed out of it, recognizing that he has everything to lose, a little to be gained, in a contest that won’t determine the court’s balance of power (that was last year’s race).

The Republican-aligned candidate is widely expected to lose. Yet as in Georgia, margin matters in Wisconsin. Should the Democratic-supported hopeful prevail by double-digits, it will illustrate the left’s enthusiasm and the right’s challenges in a marquee swing state when Trump is polling at 26 percent with independents, as a recent Marquette poll found.

The most significant contests of the spring, however, are in May. And none are bigger than that of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has become GOP public enemy number one for the Trump White House.

“Thomas Massie’s political career is over, even if he doesn’t know it yet,” Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager in 2024, told me.

Groups directed by LaCivita and the Republican Jewish Coalition are pouring money into the Northern Kentucky district to unseat Massie, who has been the most outspoken Trump critic among congressional Republicans (it’s a small caucus). A libertarian aligned with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Massie has only grown more emboldened in his criticism of Trump since the president targeted him, whether on the Epstein files or foreign policy.

“He’s done my second act for me, because he’s done everything we’ve said he was going to do,” LaCivita crowed.

Should Massie defy Trump, overcome the president’s visit to his district earlier this month and neutralize the millions MAGA world and adjacent are pouring into TV ads, it would be a resounding message that a Republican can cross Trump and live to tell about it.

What may determine Massie’s fate is how quickly the Iran war comes to an end. Even the congressman’s allies worry that a protracted conflict will only deepen support for Trump in an already Trumpy district and highlight Massie’s opposition to the conflict.

The other May congressional primary in which Trump is motivated by retribution is in Louisiana. Even after committing public acts of loyalty, including confirming a vaccine skeptic as health secretary, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) was ultimately condemned because he wouldn’t openly recant his decision to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021.

Now, Trump is attempting to unseat Cassidy with Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.), who also has the blessing of the state’s MAGA governor, Jeff Landry (who does take an interest in politics when he’s not attempting to run LSU and its athletics).

Cassidy still has ample money, though, and may live to at least fight in a runoff because there’s a third, relatively well-known candidate in the initial balloting. We’ll know that Letlow needs a boost if Trump shows up in Louisiana to rally with her in April or before the May 16 primary.

As part of an apparent deal to lure Letlow into the Senate race, Trump has also endorsed a contender, Blake Miguez, for her old House seat. A Trump visit to Louisiana could also serve as an opportunity to bolster Miguez, who’s facing an array of opponents who are criticizing him for living far outside the district’s boundaries.

Surprisingly, given its size and rising importance in Senate and presidential politics, Georgia has gotten scarce attention to date this year. But Trump long ago took sides in the governor’s race there, backing Lt. Gov Burt Jones. Jones’s candidacy is in danger, though, because of the unexpected entrance of a self-funding businessman, Rick Jackson, who has surged in polls after spending millions from his fortune.

Jackson has also contributed to Trump’s own super PAC and visited him at Mar-a-Lago, steps meant to chill the president’s commitment to Jones. This is another race that could head to a runoff, given Jackson’s late entry and the presence of other candidates. It’s also a contest in which Trump could mitigate embarrassment by offering one of his patented co-endorsements should it go to a runoff. (This is also, effectively, what he is doing at the moment in the Texas Senate runoff, another May contest, in which he’s praised both candidates but not taken sides).

However, of all the races that will test Trump’s clout, none may offer a better insight into whether he can dictate any primary of his choosing than the Indiana legislative races. The White House is targeting state senators up for re-election this year who opposed the order from Trump to craft new House seats, which was aimed at delivering two more seats to the party.

Can Republicans in otherwise good standing with their voters survive a Trump-backed primary over an issue that didn’t resonate locally?

Even those from Trump-supporting districts told me there was scant support for a disruptive, mid-decade redraw.

“The overwhelming feedback I received was ‘Greg, don't do this,’” Greg Goode, a state senator Trump has lambasted on social media, told me. Goode, who said he explained as much to the president over the phone in two “cordial” calls, even held a town hall dedicated entirely to the topic.

Goode delivered an impassioned speech on the Senate floor explaining his opposition and invoking what he called “Hoosier common sense.”

Still, he said it was “a difficult vote” for him to cast because he remains deeply supportive of Trump’s agenda.

When I was speaking with Goode and his colleagues at the Indiana statehouse late last month, they said there had been little follow-through on the threats to unseat them.

But Trump allies have since begun a bombardment through television ads and mailers, worrying some of the incumbents — and prompting them to portray the Trump-backed assault as the work of outsiders attempting to tell Hoosiers how to vote for local office. Of course, the lawmakers are careful not to impugn Trump himself in their defense.

“Outside, dark-money groups are targeting senators to show they’re in control, not Hoosiers,” state Senator Spencer Deery told me. “And I think no matter their politics, Hoosiers should be concerned about outside groups coming in and messing around in our elections.”

The challenge for Deery and the others who defied Trump, though, is that his opponents are very much making the election a loyalty test to Trump.

The Trump-aligned outside group Club for Growth has sent mailers into his district — with a gold “Trump Endorsed” seal — about his GOP opponent alongside a picture of the president pointing a finger straight at the camera that reads “Donald Trump Needs You To Vote Paula Copenhaver For State Senate.”

Below that, in smaller print, is a quote from Trump’s endorsement tweet, calling Deery, a conservative, a “’RINO’” and a “favorite of the Far Left.”

It’s the usual Trump tactics taken to the extreme, a costly intervention in a Lafayette, Indiana-area state Senate primary.

But why, oh why, risk the political capital when so much else is on the line this year?

Leising, the state senator I saw outside the Senate chamber, had a succinct answer.

“Because he likes to win,” she said.