Donald Trump displayed his supremacy over the Republican party on Tuesday when voters in northern Kentucky rejected the maverick congressman Thomas Massie in favour of the US president’s hand-picked challenger.
Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy Seal and farmer who was recruited into the race by Trump, defeated the seven-term incumbent in a primary election in Kentucky’s fourth congressional district, in what the president’s allies framed as a test of whether dissent could still exist inside today’s Republican party.