Donald Trump’s ousting of his Republican nemesis in Congress is a “Pyrrhic victory” where winning comes at such a cost that it’s tantamount to defeat.
That’s the view expressed by the MAGA-friendly opinion writers at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, who warned on Wednesday that the president’s iron grip on his party could prove to be a “curse” at the midterm elections.
Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who lost his primary Tuesday to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein, was one of the last congressional Republicans willing to stand up to the president, leading the campaign to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
In other primary contests this month, Trump also successfully pushed out Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who voted to impeach him following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, and six members of the Indiana state Senate who refused to draw new political maps mid-cycle to help the GOP gain House seats in the midterms.
“Trump has reason to feel good about his grip over the GOP, but this could become a curse for the party in the midterms,” the Post’s editorial board wrote.
Incumbents facing tough re-election fights typically need to distance themselves from unpopular presidents in order to keep their seats, but few Republicans are doing that over fears that Trump will turn on them, the editors noted.
“Massie’s defeat will only sharpen that instinct,” they warned. “Trump may prefer to be feared than loved by Republican lawmakers, but that will cost his party.”
The president is facing record-low approval ratings driven in part by concerns about gas prices, the cost of living, and the war in Iran.
The Washington Post’s opinion editors also blasted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for campaigning for Gallrein at a rally in Kentucky on Monday, a move they described as “completely inappropriate… for the leader of the Pentagon.”
The criticism comes despite Bezos overhauling the opinions section last year to be more Trump-friendly.
The billionaire Amazon founder, who personally killed an endorsement of Trump’s 2024 rival Kamala Harris and later attended the president’s inauguration, ordered his opinion editors in February 2025 to only write pieces advocating for “personal liberties and free markets” in an apparent bid to curry favor with the White House.
He then pushed out veteran opinion journalists and columnists, replacing them with pro-MAGA voices and conservative commentators.
The opinion editors have since tied themselves in knots to adopt Trumpian stances on key issues.
The paper praised the lone House Republican who voted to keep the Epstein files secret, and took a completely contradictory stance on gerrymandering depending on whether the effort was led by Republicans or by Democrats.
“What’s happening in the Lone Star state is not a threat to democracy,” the opinion editors wrote last year after Trump demanded that Texas draw new, Republican-leaning districts to help the GOP keep control of Congress in the midterms.
When Democrats in Virginia tried to offset those new districts this year by redrawing their own maps, the Post blasted the move as “a power grab by Democrats” and accused the state of “plunging America deeper into the gerrymandering abyss.”
Courts later struck down the new districts in Virginia, but not in Texas.
