Representative Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s unhealthy aspect. He would like to not have the president’s allies spend tens of millions to defeat him in a major. The truth is, if Massie had his means, he’d be working for Trump proper now.
In his telling, within the weeks after the 2024 presidential election, the 2 males talked about Massie, a farmer who champions uncooked milk, changing into Trump’s agriculture secretary. Massie had formally endorsed Trump late within the marketing campaign, providing to assist him win over libertarians who is perhaps tempted to remain house or vote third get together in key battlegrounds. Trump had been appreciative, and the 2 had chatted by cellphone to hash out the timing of the endorsement announcement. “Simply tweet it. I’ll retweet you,” Trump had advised him.
The rollout went easily, however Massie’s endorsement didn’t get him the job in Trump’s Cupboard. He was recounting this to me in, of all locations, a bridal suite inside a transformed barn in his northern-Kentucky district. Massie had simply delivered remarks to a pleasant crowd within the wedding ceremony corridor downstairs, a part of an acrimonious marketing campaign that, if Trump will get his means, will likely be Massie’s final. The president’s allies are spending huge to defeat Massie in a Could 19 major and prop up Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL and a political novice whom Trump personally recruited as a challenger. Massie first gained election to the Home through the pre-Trump Tea Get together period and has handily prevailed in aggressive primaries earlier than. However he’s additionally conscious of Trump’s distinctive maintain on the GOP: When the president decides he desires a Republican out of Congress, he normally will get his want. Polls have given Massie a lead over Gallrein, who isn’t well-known within the district, however his benefit is much smaller than in his earlier reelection bids.
Trump assaults Massie anyplace and in all places, whether or not it’s on Reality Social (“A very ineffective LOSER”), at an occasion in Massie’s district (“He’s the worst!”), or on the Nationwide Prayer Breakfast (“Moron”). He’s even impugned Massie’s new spouse, accusing her of being “Radical Left” (Massie says that she voted thrice for Trump) and suggesting that Massie remarried too rapidly after the demise of his first spouse.
Massie, in contrast, usually talks about Trump much less like he’s a sworn enemy and extra like he’s a jilted ex who’s nonetheless a bit obsessive about him. “I don’t really feel like I’m preventing with him,” Massie stated. What Trump sees as betrayal—Massie’s drive to launch the Epstein information and his opposition to core components of the president’s agenda—Massie merely described as an occasional “coverage disagreement.”
As he campaigns in a district that backed the president in 2024 by almost 36 factors, he’s urging voters to maintain some perspective on his breaks with Trump. He insists that, removed from being a By no means Trumper, he’s a Principally Trumper. In a single advert, Massie factors out their earlier endorsements of one another and says, “I agree with President Trump almost all the time.” One other spot highlights his help for the Save America Act, an election invoice and Trump’s prime legislative precedence. “That is going to be a referendum on whether or not it’s okay to vote along with your get together 90 % of the time or whether or not it’s important to do it 100%,” Massie advised members of the Grant County Republican Get together contained in the transformed barn.
In Washington, Massie is understood for his ideological consistency throughout his seven phrases within the Home—Trump is only one of a number of GOP leaders he’s crossed within the title of precept—and for relishing the eye that his squabbles with the president have attracted. However Massie takes satisfaction in his willingness to defy Trump when so many in his get together won’t. He predicts that if he can survive Trump’s bid to defeat him, his victory will embolden extra Republicans in Congress to face as much as the president. “There can be six to a dozen congressmen who’re extra liable to vote with their constituents as an alternative of the get together line,” Massie advised me, saying that he had spoken with a few of them straight however declining to call them.
For sure, this doesn’t sound like a Republican who would have lasted lengthy in Trump’s Cupboard. Massie admitted to some ambivalence concerning the prospect. He stated that he used to joke about inserting an necessary situation on an administration job. “I would like a small jet able to reaching Argentina on the tarmac, with sufficient gasoline in it to get overseas, if I work in his Cupboard,” as Massie advised it, “as a result of everyone’s going to get impeached or fired or go to jail.”
Massie got here to Congress as a spending hawk, and greater than a decade later, that continues to be his signature difficulty and the supply of a lot of his disagreements with GOP leaders. “They are saying I vote ‘no’ quite a bit. However I actually vote ‘Don’t spend,’” Massie advised the gathering of roughly 100 Republicans in Grant County, which is about 45 minutes south of Cincinnati. He opposes overseas assist and voted towards Trump’s One Large Lovely Invoice Act final yr due to projections that its tax cuts would explode already ballooning deficits. Massie constructed a clip-on debt clock that he wears on his lapel—one of some dozen innovations for which the previous robotics engineer has or is in search of a patent. “You simply spent like $100 million speaking to me,” he famous to me, a taxpayer, almost a half hour into our interview.
Barely 40 when he was first elected to the Home, Massie was pudgy and rosy-cheeked, with the type of youthful look that usually will get newly elected lawmakers confused for staffers contained in the Capitol. “He appeared like a young person,” recollects Phil Moffett, a former GOP candidate for Kentucky governor who inspired Massie to run after which chaired his marketing campaign. Massie, 55, is a grandfather now. He seems slimmer and extra weathered, with a brief grey beard—a bodily transformation that he jokes about in one of his adverts.
Massie speaks with much less of an apparent filter than most congressional Republicans. His impersonation of Trump, which he deploys ceaselessly, extra intently resembles the cartoonish, lip-puckering Alec Baldwin bit on Saturday Night time Reside through the president’s first time period than it does James Austin Johnson’s more moderen interpretation.
Inside his district, Massie loves to inform voters how low-cost he’s. The primary story he shared throughout his speech in Grant County was an elaborate yarn concerning the time he’d spent as judge-executive—basically the mayor—of Lewis County within the years earlier than he ran for Congress. The water heater on the county jail had damaged down, main the jailer to complain to Massie as a result of the inmates had been refusing to bathe and “had been getting type of rank,” Massie stated. Massie didn’t wish to invoice taxpayers the $12,000 quoted as the price of a alternative, so he discovered a water heater on eBay for $5,500. To save lots of more cash, he put in it himself after which invited the inmates to strip the previous water heater “for every part it’s value” in order that the county might promote the components. “I do know you had been in right here for stealing copper and no matter,” Massie stated he advised them, “so that you in all probability know every part that is value something on that hot-water heater.” For good measure, they peeled the inexperienced inspection sticker off the previous heater and slapped it on the brand new one. “They stated, ‘Decide, you can go to jail for this,’” Massie stated. To which he replied, “I’ll have a sizzling bathe, although, gained’t I?”
The jail story reminds voters concerning the fiscally prudent conservative they first despatched to Washington in 2012. Kentucky’s fourth district covers a bit of the triangle between Cincinnati, Louisville, and Lexington within the northwest nook of the state after which stretches east by means of a number of rural counties near the West Virginia border. Massie rode the tail finish of the Tea Get together wave, dominating a seven-way major and a particular election to exchange a retiring Republican who was extra intently aligned with the get together institution. Massie gained over the identical voters who, two years earlier, had elected Rand Paul to the Senate over a candidate championed by Kentucky’s longtime GOP powerbroker Mitch McConnell.
Ideologically, Massie resembled the handfuls of Republicans who had not too long ago arrived within the Home; many had been relative newcomers to politics who had run on pledges to chop taxes and spending, and to aggressively oppose the Obama administration. However few of them discovered Congress as rapidly as Massie, who had grown up in rural Kentucky however earned two levels in engineering from MIT. “It was apparent each time we had been in a setting, no matter who the viewers was, that Thomas was the neatest individual within the room,” Moffett advised me. “He picked up on ideas so quick.” The appreciation for Massie’s mind crosses get together strains. “He’s sensible,” says Consultant Ro Khanna of California, a progressive Democrat who labored with Massie for months final yr to go laws forcing the Trump administration to launch the Epstein information. Khanna advised me that Massie was “an unbelievable strategist” through the Epstein struggle.
Throughout his first Home marketing campaign, Massie advised The Cincinnati Enquirer: “I’m able to be unpopular.” It’s a standard chorus for a candidate operating towards an entrenched system, however Massie made good on his promise. Amongst his preliminary votes had been a thumbs-down on a bipartisan deal to increase George W. Bush–period tax cuts and assist for states slammed by Hurricane Sandy. He joined 11 different Republicans in opposing John Boehner’s reelection as speaker. And lest Democrats assume they may have a brand new ally, Massie made one in all his first payments a proposal to raise a ban on weapons at school zones, which he launched simply weeks after 20 kids and 6 adults had been murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary College, in Connecticut.
Massie would play a key behind-the-scenes function in ousting Boehner lower than two years later, though he spoke of the episode with some remorse. “We ended up with Paul Ryan, and issues received worse,” he stated. When dissident Republicans held up Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker in early 2023, Massie—who for as soon as was not among the many rebels—pushed them to hunt modifications to Home guidelines somewhat than merely a brand new chief. The ordeal ended with McCarthy successful on the fifteenth vote and Massie touchdown a seat—considerably reluctantly, he stated—on the highly effective Home Guidelines Committee. That perch provided Massie a fair deeper schooling on the arcana of congressional process, which he then put to make use of through the struggle over the Epstein information. Working with Khanna, he devised a discharge petition designed not solely to evade the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Trump White Home but in addition to make it over to the Senate, the place it will definitely handed. “They clearly underestimated me,” Massie stated. “If in 2012, after I was operating, they knew what I used to be able to, they’d have spent infinite cash to maintain me from ever attending to Washington, D.C.”
Trump and Massie clashed through the president’s first time period. Throughout the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020, Massie pressured each member of the Home to defy stay-at-home orders and return to Washington for a vote on a $2 trillion reduction bundle that each Republican and Democratic leaders had hoped to go with out a full vote. Trump known as Massie “a 3rd charge Grandstander” and urged Republicans to kick him out of the get together. Massie ended up successful his major in a rout.
The 2 males patched issues up in 2024, however their truce collapsed quickly after Trump took workplace. Massie may declare that he agrees with Trump “on almost every part,” however he opposed the president’s largest home priorities—the debt-ballooning tax invoice and his tariff coverage—and denounced as “not constitutional” Trump’s elevated urge for food for launching army strikes abroad with out authorization from Congress. The Trump-Massie feud has proved awkward for the various northern Kentuckians who’re die-hard supporters of each. None, nonetheless, can say that they’re shocked by Massie’s positions. “Trump, I help him, however I by no means know what he’s going to do or say,” Gex Williams, a Kentucky state senator and shut Massie ally, advised me. “However Massie says or does the identical factor in the present day that he did when he received elected. I want I could possibly be as constant as Thomas.”
To the extent that Massie has modified over time, Williams stated, he has turn out to be extra snug in his political standing. “He was a bit extra reserved” earlier in his profession, Williams stated. “Now he appears to be extra relaxed.” Massie isn’t shy about talking out towards Trump when he feels prefer it. He additionally shares with the president a style for provocation; days after a lethal 2021 capturing at a Michigan highschool, he posted a photograph of his Christmas card, through which he and his household are holding rifles. “Ps. Santa, please deliver ammo,” Massie wrote. (Khanna, an ardent supporter of gun management, advised me that he’d obtained the Christmas card within the mail; though appreciative, he retains it in a drawer.)
Trump and his allies started casting about for a major challenger to Massie greater than a yr in the past. To melt him up, an excellent PAC led by Chris LaCivita, Trump’s former marketing campaign co-manager, began operating assault adverts towards him final summer season. Massie stated that the president reneged on a deal to name off the adverts in change for his help for a procedural vote advancing the tax-cut invoice. In response to questions on Trump’s interactions with Massie over the previous two years, the White Home despatched me an announcement attacking him. Massie had opposed key components of the president’s agenda, together with border-wall funding and tax cuts for the center class, the White Home spokesperson Davis Ingle advised me, “as a result of Thomas Massie cares extra about peacocking for his radical Democrat mates and liberal media allies than delivering for the women and men of Kentucky’s 4th district.”
Of their seek for a major challenger to Massie, the president’s allies ultimately settled on Gallrein, who had not beforehand run for political workplace. Gallrein has advised voters that Trump summoned him to the Oval Workplace and personally requested him to run, interesting to his sense of patriotism. At a rally final month, Trump described the recruitment this fashion: “I needed simply—give me anyone with a heat physique to beat Massie. And I received anyone with a heat physique, however an enormous, stunning mind and an excellent patriot.”
In Grant County, the “heat physique” who confirmed as much as counter Massie wasn’t Gallrein. He had been scheduled to attend the occasion, a fundraising dinner for the native get together, however his marketing campaign knowledgeable organizers earlier within the day that he needed to attend funerals as an alternative, Eldon Maddox, the county GOP chair, advised me. Though the get together is formally impartial, Maddox is a robust Massie backer and hinted that Gallrein had pulled out of the occasion after he was advised that he’d need to reply questions from the gang. “It doesn’t play very nicely,” Maddox stated. Gallrein’s absence match neatly into the narrative that Massie’s marketing campaign has put out about him: that the first-time candidate is ducking debates and different alternatives to work together with voters, content material to let Trump’s allies drown Massie with assault adverts on TV. (Gallrein’s marketing campaign didn’t reply to interview requests.)
Rather than the candidate, Gallrein’s deputy marketing campaign supervisor, Jennifer O’Connor, nervously learn a speech off her cellphone whereas Massie sat at a desk straight in entrance of her. When she stated that Massie had “voted towards President Trump’s plan to safe the border,” he interrupted her. “False,” he stated, loudly sufficient for the room to listen to. “Please. I didn’t interrupt you,” O’Connor advised him. “I didn’t lie about you,” Massie replied.
Massie appeared to have a lot of the gang in his nook, however not everybody. Pamela Mann, a retired instructor and a tobacco farmer, advised me that she had supported Massie up to now however was backing Gallrein this time. “I simply don’t perceive why he gained’t help the president,” Mann stated of Massie. She stated that when she sees an necessary vote through which only some Republicans have damaged with the get together, “I routinely know one in all them goes to be Massie. That’s not why we ship folks like him to Washington.” A former chair of the county get together, Mann had some doubts about Gallrein’s probabilities, nonetheless. “Operating for workplace requires expertise,” she stated, “and Mr. Gallrein is clearly new to campaigning.”
A lot of the Republicans I spoke with shrugged off the meat between Massie and Trump. “That’s a private factor,” Leo Fell, a retired driving teacher, advised me. “They’ll get again collectively.” He stated that he’s voting for Massie regardless of sometimes disagreeing with him. “I perceive everyone’s not going to be good,” Fell stated.
Massie is banking on voters like Fell to hold him by means of subsequent month: Republicans who know and belief him, and who haven’t seen a lot of Gallrein. He believes that his supporters are much more motivated to vote than his critics inside Trump’s base. The president, too, doesn’t appear to have the political juice he as soon as did; Republican turnout has sagged in particular elections over the previous yr, and Massie has stated that in his inside polling, Trump’s approval score within the district has dipped to the low 70s; late within the president’s first time period, that quantity was within the mid-90s.
Nonetheless, Massie isn’t projecting the identical bring-it-on confidence that he did when I spoke with him final yr. He insists that he’s okay with the potential of dropping. I requested whether or not that is enjoyable for him. “I like a problem,” he stated. Then he paused for a second. “It may be enjoyable and nerve-racking on the similar time,” he stated. Massie stated that when folks inform him they’re praying for him, he asks what particularly they’re praying for: “In the event you’re praying for me to remain within the struggle, and God solutions your prayer, I’ll win my reelection.” If, nonetheless, “you’re praying for my soul, I’ll be on my farm subsequent yr and out of politics.”
