This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Is Donald Trump strong or weak right now?Usually, telling whether a president is up or down isn’t difficult, but the past few weeks have offered reasons to believe both.Last night, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who has been publicly critical of Trump’s policies throughout his second term, lost a primary to Ed Gallrein, a candidate recruited and backed by Trump. The president’s attempt to turn that race into a referendum on himself seems to have worked: Massie, who’s just as idiosyncratic now as he was when the voters of his district elected him to the first of seven terms, ended up about 10 points behind Gallrein.This flex was the latest in a string. On Saturday, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, whom neither Trump nor voters ever forgave for his vote to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial, came third in a Republican primary. And earlier in May, several Republican state legislators in Indiana who had opposed Trump’s gerrymandering push lost primaries to Trump-backed challengers, fulfilling a vow of revenge from the White House.A common thread in commentary on these races is that they demonstrate Trump’s enduring grip on power. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s break with Trump wasn’t a sign of fractures in the MAGA movement, the thinking goes; the real story was his ability to completely exile Greene, who has always been a singular character anyway, and who now has more entrée into anti-Trump spaces than MAGA outlets. “This is @realDonaldTrump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it,” the proudly submissive Representative Randy Fine of Florida declared last night.Yet Trump’s standing seems to also be deteriorating. This week, a New York Times/Siena poll found the president at 37 percent approval, his lowest in the poll ever and a four-percentage-point drop from January. The paper’s polling analyst, Nate Cohn, was led to wonder whether the much-vaunted “floor” in Trump’s polling is starting to crack. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released yesterday has him even lower, at 35 percent—12 points below where he began his term in the same survey. Much of his issue polling is even worse. That means some Republicans are rejecting Trump’s decisions, even if they retain a fondness for the man himself.How do we reconcile these contradictions? If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, the answer will not surprise you: Trump’s hold on the MAGA base is still powerful, but the same actions that help him maintain it also help erode his standing with the broader public—and threaten to lead Republicans to defeat in November’s midterm elections.Primary voters—and especially primary voters in Indiana, Louisiana, and Kentucky—are not representative of the general electorate. (Trump won those states by 19, 22, and 31 points, respectively, in 2024.) They aren’t even necessarily representative of the Republicans who vote in the general election, a group that is likely to be less engaged, less ideological, and less politically extreme overall. As a result, votes in November are more likely to hinge on issues such as inflation or the Iran war.Sometimes the peculiar dynamics of primaries create situations that make Trump look superficially strong but actually suggest weakness. Yesterday, Trump finally issued a long-awaited endorsement in next week’s Texas runoff for U.S. Senate. The race pits Senator John Cornyn against state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Cornyn is a longtime mainstream Republican who has mostly been a loyal if unenthusiastic foot soldier for Trump; Paxton is, to use the political-science terminology, a real piece of work.Trump was initially expected to endorse Cornyn, but polls showed Paxton ahead and one found that even a Trump endorsement wouldn’t change that. Trump dithered, then waited until the last minute to back Paxton. That effectively guarantees that Trump will back the winner, but it could be a Pyrrhic victory: Republican senators are now afraid that a Paxton nomination could cost the GOP the seat in November. Democrat James Talarico is still unlikely to win, but it’s not impossible, given the many scandals that taint Paxton.Although the idea of a MAGA crack-up may be nothing more than a pipe dream of Trump critics, Cohn’s data are real. MAGA isn’t collapsing, and the base remains devoted, but it is shrinking. Trump’s sinking numbers may not matter as much to him, because he won’t face voters again, but they matter a great deal to other Republican officeholders. Many of them would like to find ways to distance themselves from Trump’s unpopular policies (and they may try as the general election gets close), but cases such as Massie and Cassidy remind them that the immediate political risk of crossing Trump outweighs the dangers of being yoked to an unpopular agenda. The latter might well end your career, but the former almost certainly will.The irony is that Trump would probably benefit politically from a GOP Congress that was more willing to challenge him, because it would restrain him from his worst ideas. This is one reason the Founders designed the system this way, but Trump has no real civic awareness and his aides are determined to grant him quasi-monarchical power. An uncowed Republican Congress might have pushed Trump harder on affordability measures, and it might not have supported the war in Iran, had he asked for authorization—but he didn’t, calculating that it wouldn’t take action to block him.Politics is a pendulum, so Trump may get a more antagonistic Congress despite—or because of—his efforts to resist it. In fact, he already has. Cassidy, in his first act since losing the primary, bucked Trump with a procedural vote to further a resolution that would end the war in Iran, and at least one moderate GOP colleague suggested that Cassidy will take more votes like that. Even if Paxton doesn’t blow the Senate race, Democrats remain the favorites to retake at least the House of Representatives. That would be one clear indication of Trumpian weakness.Related:Why Thomas Massie thought he was differentTrump shows he’s still got juice.Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:The real reason Thomas Massie lostThe challenge for American JewsThe book that plunges you into messy American historyToday’s NewsTwo police officers who defended the Capitol during the January 6 attack sued the Trump administration to block a nearly $1.8 billion compensation fund, arguing it uses taxpayer money to reward rioters and militia groups involved in the assault.The Trump administration indicted Cuba’s former president Raúl Castro with murder, conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals, and destruction of aircraft, according to court documents. These charges stem from Cuba’s 1996 shooting of planes operated by the humanitarian group Brothers to the Rescue, in which three U.S. citizens and one permanent resident were killed.Former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a leading architect of the post-2008 Wall Street reforms and one of the first openly gay members of Congress, died at 86.Evening ReadBen Jackson / NHLI / GettyMy Son’s Hockey Team and the Crisis of American ResentmentBy Chris MurphyMy 14-year-old son competes in a serious, multistate hockey league. During his five-month, 60-game season, he travels up and down the East Coast on weekends, and I occasionally miss votes in the Senate to watch him. Rider isn’t likely to play in the National Hockey League, nor is he interested in devoting his entire childhood to chasing a pro career as a goalie. He still plays other sports—flag football, basketball, and golf. That sounds about right for an eighth grader.But for the owners of the Atlantic Hockey Federation—the youth-hockey association that pulls together elite teams from Connecticut and many other states, as far west as Arizona—kids’ sports is a cutthroat business, a way to make a handful of people very rich.Read the full article.More From The AtlanticAlexandra Petri: Greetings, class of 2026! Have you heard about AI? Wait, why are you booing?The David Frum Show: In Trump’s Iran war, America’s loss is China’s win.It’s maddeningly difficult to ban smoking.Jude Law shouldn’t be this good as Vladimir Putin.Culture BreakDisney / Everett CollectionWatch (or skip). The Mandalorian and Grogu (out now in theaters) is a Star Wars movie to fall asleep to, David Sims argues.Explore. Who can be trusted when everyone is vulnerable? Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed (now streaming on Apple TV) is a nervy thriller for the scam era, Sophie Gilbert writes.Play our daily crossword.Explore all of our newsletters here.Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.