(Dobbs) The Election Was Between Thomas Massie and Donald Trump.

Even if I have never understood Trump's magic, he hasn’t lost it.

This is a picture I was hoping not to see.

Republican Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, conceding last night’s primary election after seven terms in the House of Representatives.

By nature, Massie’s loss would not normally make me sad. He is a conservative at his core. Even despite sharp public breaks from his party’s flag bearer Donald Trump, he has voted Trump’s way roughly 90% of the time. Maybe the strongest testimony to his right-wing proclivities is the Christmas card he sent out in 2021. As if the message isn’t bad enough any time of the year, this went out just a week after a 15-year-old boy killed four fellow students and injured seven at his high school in Oxford Township, Michigan. His father had given him the gun just four days earlier.

Carrying the caption “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Massie’s card inspired his colleague, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, to send the same thing out to her list of the naughty and nice, and I wouldn’t vote for Boebert for dogcatcher.

So in normal times, I’d root against anyone irresponsible and insensitive enough to send out what Massie sent out. Especially now, after Monday’s shootings in San Diego, when two local teenagers went to the city’s Islamic Center and killed three men. The message that both Boebert and Massey sent was, it’s fine for kids to have guns.

Whether in Oxford Township or San Diego or anywhere else, it’s not.

But in yesterday’s primary, Massie’s the one I was rooting for. Unlike too many Republican colleagues, he has not voted in lockstep with the president 100% of the time. To the contrary, he has spoken out against Trump when it mattered to him. On the “One Big Beautiful Bill”— he was one of only two members of his party to vote against it— on the Epstein files, and most recently, on the war with Iran, which prompted one PAC that opposed him to claim, he “stands with Iran and radical leftists in Congress.”

Massie’s explanation for his opposition to the White House when he thought it was merited? “There’s three branches of government and we’re supposed to keep each other accountable.” If only more Republicans would think like that.

He has been on the short end of some of the most personal and mean-spirited attacks Donald Trump can wage. The president has called the congressman “a moron,” “a loser,” “a nut job,” “a fool.” Trump doesn’t even get as vengeful with some of his worst adversaries from the other side of the aisle.

He handpicked a former Navy Seal, “from central casting” as he put it, to run in the primary against Massie. A guy named Ed Gallrein, who declared at a rally the day before yesterday, “There has never been a more important time to stand behind our president.” The voters bought that.

But yesterday’s election wasn’t really between Massie and Gallrein. It was between Massie and Trump.

In the wake of last Saturday’s primary election loss in Louisiana by incumbent Republican senator Bill Cassidy, who had the gall to vote after the January 6th insurrection to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, yesterday’s Kentucky primary was a bellwether to see whether the Cassidy outcome was an outlier, or a portent of more to come.

We probably have our answer.

The race became one of the most expensive House primaries ever, with donors reportedly spending more than $32 million on the two main candidates, with Trump’s disciple slightly out-raising Trump’s nemesis.

Donald Trump holds a grudge like no other president in modern memory, and with Thomas Massie as his newest victim, his revenge tour never ends. As a case in point, only two of the ten Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment are still in the House. Come January, of the seven Republican senators who voted in impeachment trials to convict Trump— like Bill Cassidy— at best only two will still serve in the Senate.

And who’s next? Last week Lauren Boebert went to Kentucky to campaign with Massie, after which Trump posted on social media, “Is anyone interested in running against Weak Minded Lauren Boebert in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District?” Although he previously had endorsed Boebert, Trump wrote, “Anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good primary fight!”

Then just yesterday, the same day as Kentucky’s primary, he gave his endorsement for this year’s contested senate seat in Texas to state attorney general Ken Paxton, leaving four-term incumbent John Cornyn hanging in the wind. Trump’s complaint about Cornyn? He “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” That runoff is next week.

Thomas Massey would be far from my first choice for Congress. But if his reelection could have meant there would be at least one independent-minded Republican who’d still speak out against Trump when necessary, one who is not a spineless rubber stamp for this president, I’d have had his back. In a congressional district that went for Trump with 67% percent of the vote two years ago, we weren’t going to do any better. Now, we’re going to do worse.

What’s obvious is, Trump hasn’t lost his magic. Even if I have never understood that magic, he hasn’t lost it.

But I’m not giving up hope. I am in the school of thought which believes that even with the recent string of Republican successes with the gerrymander, which will wipe out the voice of minorities in some elections, Trump is so unpopular, and has so little time to take the bad taste out of voters’ mouths, that maybe Democrats still can flip enough seats anyway to retake the House and possibly even the Senate.

Because in November, it won’t just be MAGA voters weighing in.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame. He also has been a consultant for the Counterterrorism Education Learning Lab.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net