There’s some extra primary action this week from Tennessee which is hosting a rare Thursday primary. Here is a breakdown of the biggest races, and the recent election laws that will affect the outcomes.
The biggest story for Tennessee’s elections this year is redistricting. The Republican legislature approved maps, with the votes for and against them breaking along party lines, that break up Democratic districts.
The greatest change was the redrawing of District 5, which split Davidson County, where the Nashville Metropolitan Area is, among three different districts. The new district will now almost certainly go to a Republican.
This makes the GOP primary for the 5th Congressional district the most contentious in the state, with nine Republican candidates vying to be on the ballot in November. This is after three candidates were voted off the ballot by Tennessee’s Republican party, including Trump-backed former State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus, who moved to Tennessee last year.
Three of the most prominent candidates are former Tennessee Speaker of the House Beth Harwell, Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles and retired Tennessee National Guard Brigadier Gen. Kurt Winstead. It has been a charged battle, with candidates lobbing accusations at each other in debates and televised ads.
The winner will face, and almost certainly beat, Democratic State Senator Heidi Campbell, after incumbent Democrat Jim Cooper decided not to run due to the new maps. He had held the seat for 20 years.
Another interesting race is in Nashville’s state Senate District 19, which had an unconventional start.
Incumbent Sen. Brenda Gilmore (D) retired after the candidate filing deadline in April, leaving public defender Keeda Haynes as the sole candidate. This triggered Tennessee’s Anti-Skulduggery Act, intended to prevent incumbents from essentially choosing their successors by pulling out of the race at the last second.
The field was reopened, allowing five more Democrats to join, while Haynes was pushed off the ballot. Former city council member Jerry Maynard and nonprofit advocacy executive Charlane Oliver lead the pack. The primary winner is favored in November in this largely Democratic district.
Tennessee has enacted several provisions limiting voting access in recent years, including banning the use of private funding for election administration, changing the process for post-election audits to allow the secretary of state to decide which counties are audited and what type of auditing is used and banning ranked-choice voting.
The state also passed bills that require watermarks on absentee ballots, expand access to absentee ballots for nursing homes and expand authorization of the state coordinator of elections to find and purge non-citizens, as well as those who have moved states or passed away, from voter rolls.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.