As he came down the center aisle of the House for his February State of the Union address, President Donald Trump shook the hands of many Republicans looking for their couple seconds of fame on national TV.

But he breezed past Rep. Chip Roy, never looking him in the eye and moving on to pose for a selfie with another Republican.

That moment summed up Trump’s rocky relationship with the Texas firebrand and, more broadly, the House Freedom Caucus. The group of roughly three dozen far-right lawmakers rose to prominence by derailing legislation and helping to force out GOP speakers. Their relationship with Trump has been complicated over the years, but their power has waned significantly as Trump’s power has grown.

Roy, the group’s ideological soul on many policy matters, lost by a double-digit margin Tuesday in his bid for the GOP nomination to become Texas state attorney general. He was defeated by a state senator who claimed Roy wasn’t a real MAGA supporter.

Roy is not the only one. Come January, almost the entire top rung of the Freedom Caucus will leave the House, a hollowing out of one of the most influential power centers of the past decade.

Many are running for statewide office: Reps. Andy Biggs (Arizona governor), Harriet Hageman (Wyoming senator), Barry Moore (Alabama senator), Tom Tiffany (Wisconsin governor), Ralph Norman (South Carolina governor) and Byron Donalds (Florida governor).

Most are underdogs at the moment, except for Donalds, Hageman and Moore. Another former caucus chair, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, is in a tossup race in November against an opponent who came within a point of toppling him in 2024.

This comes after Trump and his top political advisers helped defeat the Freedom Caucus chair of the previous Congress, Bob Good, in an August 2024 primary. Trump was frustrated over Good’s initial endorsement of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, an HFC alumnus, in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.

It’s possible that of the six people who have been HFC chair since its founding in 2015, only Reps. Jim Jordan and Andy Harris will hold public office next year. And Harris is a political sitting duck, with Democrats in the Maryland state legislature eyeing eliminating his district ahead of the 2028 elections.

Some HFC members have made accommodations with Trump and his loose moorings to conservative policy, staying out of his crosshairs and winning endorsements. Others – like Roy – tried to put up a fight on big issues like the massive domestic policy bill that passed last July. Freedom Caucus members prompted multiple marathon votes to protest the legislation.

They got no real conservative wins with their protests and only drew the ire of Trump’s inner circle.

“We need less people running for Congress because they want to be famous,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Puck News this month.

Trump never formally endorsed in the Texas attorney general race, unlike the Senate campaign, in which he supported the outgoing Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who ousted four-term GOP Sen. John Cornyn.

But the president’s allies made clear they wanted Roy out.

“Dudes next,” Chris LaCivita, the 2024 Trump campaign manager, wrote on social media Thursday.

Two days earlier, the Trump team defeated another GOP troublemaker, Rep. Thomas Massie, in the Kentucky primary behind a first-time candidate. Massie had never joined the Freedom Caucus but was a close ally.

Trump’s shift in support is a change from his first term, when the first generation of Freedom Caucus members were part of his inner circle.

Mick Mulvaney, an HFC cofounder, got plucked to become White House budget director, eventually taking over as acting chief of staff for Trump for almost 15 months.

Jordan and his Freedom Caucus ally, then-Rep. Mark Meadows, had Trump on speed dial for the first couple of years of his presidency, regularly pushing him into fights with establishment Republicans.

In December 2018 those two far-right lawmakers outflanked the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on a government funding deal and persuaded Trump to start a government shutdown.

It was a political disaster that hurt the GOP, but the political muscle flex by the Freedom Caucus showed its influence.

In the summer of 2018, when DeSantis was a low-profile HFC member and locked in a tight battle for the GOP nomination for Florida governor against an establishment favorite, Trump provided a critical endorsement that put him over the top.

And when Trump grew tired of Mulvaney as his chief of staff, he pulled Meadows out of the House and made him his top West Wing adviser.

Even when Trump was out of power, the Freedom Caucus continued to exert its influence.

Rather than support Kevin McCarthy’s assumption to speaker, Roy and a band of roughly 20 Freedom Caucus members held out their votes and denied him the gavel for several days of marathon roll calls in January 2023.

They eventually supported McCarthy, but only after HFC members and allies Roy, Massie and Norman got seats on the powerful Rules Committee.

Those three Rules votes helped them shape the party’s agenda. If the hard right didn’t like a bill, they would derail it in committee or use parliamentary moves to defeat it on the floor.

For the first time in more than two decades, votes to take up GOP bills started to fail on the floor. And in October 2023, several Freedom Caucus members led the fight that ended with them voting to oust McCarthy, the first ever ejection of a speaker in the middle of a term.

But trouble also started to set in in the summer and fall of 2023 as DeSantis launched a presidential campaign that took aim at Trump, who was mired in several criminal and civil legal battles.

More so than any ideological position, loyalty is the defining trait Trump wants in his allies – which is why his relationship with the Freedom Caucus unraveled.

Good, Massie and Roy all endorsed their former House colleague over Trump, who went on to trounce DeSantis in the primary and took particular glee in personal lines of attack.

Meadows, who provided a treasure trove of text messages to investigators of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, has been largely frozen out of Trump’s second term, running a conservative nonprofit on Capitol Hill.

Norman endorsed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for president in 2024. She ended up being the last Republican standing against Trump in the primary.

Locked in a close battle for the gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, Norman could probably vault to the top if Trump would endorse him – but that hasn’t happened.

Like Roy and Massie, Norman often talked a good game about standing up for fiscal policy and reducing the federal debt. When the Senate passed its version of the “big” bill last July, with Trump’s blessing, the South Carolinian declared it was a nonstarter” in the House.

He and Roy then held out for many hours trying to change the bill, but ultimately folded under pressure from Trump.

Only Massie voted against the legislation. He followed up with an even bigger encore of disloyalty: leading the effort to force the release of investigative files into the late Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking cases.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, who will be arguably the highest-profile Freedom Caucus member next year, joined Massie in that effort. She even campaigned for Massie in defiance of Trump.

Trump is now encouraging a primary challenge to her for 2028.

In a long concession post on social media, Roy indirectly referenced his sometimes rocky relationship with Trump.

“It matters that leaders stand up and say what needs to be said no matter the consequences,” he wrote, ending with a scripture reference from Paul about fighting “the good fight” and keeping “the faith.”

“It was not our time,” Roy wrote.