This week’s election results affirmed that the most corrupt, unpopular, and sleepiest president of the modern age somehow retains an unbreakable chokehold on his political party. Trump-endorsed primary candidates prevailed while the Republican incumbents he targeted—including Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy—lost bigly.

Consider the peculiar case of Rep. Thomas Massie, who lost his House seat in a Kentucky district. Trump had soured on him after Massie demanded the full release of the “Epstein files.” Massie wasn’t alone in attracting the president’s ire on this issue. The president has turned on many more of his former biggest supporters—MTG and Lauren “second base at Beethoven” Boebert, among them—for similar reasons.

The situation was perhaps best described by the political commentator Mehdi Hasan: “Republican voters in Kentucky who presumably spent much of 2024 banging on about Epstein just ejected from Congress their own Republican congressman, who helped get the Epstein files out, in order to please the close friend of Epstein, Donald Trump.”

How do we explain Trump’s continued grip on his party? The obvious answer is his raw sex appeal, but is that hot, scaly bod of his really enough to get primary voters to the polls? There must be more to it.

Perhaps it’s his mastery of the issues? The endearing way he slurs his words? Maybe it’s all the wars he ended when he wasn’t starting them. Or, perhaps, it’s simply his stirring vision of the United States of America as a shining city on a hill where any white South African can come live out his........

© The Daily Beast