President Donald Trump’s months-long effort to find a primary challenger to Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, a fellow Republican and MAGA devotee, is the latest proof that Republicans in Washington were never truly intent on achieving the agenda they sold to voters last year.
If they were, they would be endorsing Massie as exactly the kind of anti-establishment conservative they’d want to see more of in Congress. An MIT engineer who lives off the grid on his Kentucky cattle farm, Massie believes that Americans have so little understanding of how government spending is contributing to both the budget deficit and inflation that he wears a lapel pin he engineered to display a mini “debt clock.” It registers the growth of the national debt in real time (about $80,000 a second).
Massie’s not into the trappings of Washington life. For a couple of his 12 years in DC, he lived out of his camper truck. He’s one of those lawmakers who actually reads the fine print of bills before he votes. He blames the influence of the military-industrial complex for feeding a congressional addiction to “forever wars.” He votes against nearly all foreign aid spending. And he’s so true to his convictions that he’s often voted against his Republican colleagues this year because it’s “not what they campaign on,” he told me.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his podcast audience last week, “I don’t think there are many people in the country who live out Donald Trump’s own stated principles more precisely than Thomas Massie.”
Trump sold voters on giving him another term in the White House by focusing on their fears and resentments. He promised to end American engagement in foreign countries, bring prices and interest rates down, close the border, revive investment in U.S. manufacturing and find criminals who were operating above the law — including releasing files relating to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein — and bring them to justice.
But when Trump started to pivot away from his own promises on inflation, foreign affairs and Epstein, Massie tried to use his leverage — House Republicans can only afford to lose two votes on every vote in the House — to pull him back.
He was one of only two Republicans to vote against the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” because, he told me, “You can’t cut taxes and increase spending at the same time in the same bill” without causing “inflation and high interest rates.”
He pushed for Congress to restore its war powers after Trump bombed Iran without authorization.
He’s been a consistent “no” vote on what he calls “genuflecting resolutions” that “put Israel on a pedestal in the midst of their war in Gaza.”
He railed against aid to Ukraine, condemned the influence of the pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and blasted Trump’s bailout of Argentina.
And when the White House balked at releasing the FBI files on Epstein, Massie filed a discharge petition to force a House vote on a bill to release the files.
“Part of the reason (Trump) wants to sweep that under the rug is some of his rich and powerful friends and even donors are implicated in these files,” Massie alleged. Trump has responded to such claims by calling the whole thing “a hoax.”
But Trump and his pugilistic advisors don’t see dissent as an opportunity to listen and strengthen their argument. It’s a reason to take down the opposition. Last week, the president endorsed former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein to challenge Massie in next year’s GOP primary.
The campaign will be heavily funded by three billionaire supporters of Trump and Israel – megadonor Miriam Adelson and hedge fund managers Paul Singer and John Paulson. The trio financed a $2 million stream of attack ads that began running against Massie this summer; he expects the campaign to spend about $20 million more.
For some Trump supporters, it’s a baffling development. Massie may be an iconoclast, but Trump isn’t targeting him for going against the MAGA agenda. He is targeting Massie for doing what Trump said he would do — but didn’t.
“When leaders of my own party protect sex traffickers, spend our grandkids into oblivion, fund endless wars, lockdown our citizens, bailout corporations, bow to other countries, and hurt small farmers, it’s true that I won’t be their yes man,” Massie wrote Thursday on X. He was responding to Vice President JD Vance who told students at the University of Mississippi that the president’s attacks on Massie were “because we can never count on him for some of the most difficult votes.”
“The president’s political strategy is to intimidate my colleagues by attacking me,” Massie told me, speaking from the parking lot of a feed store in his district.
The political intimidation tactics are working — in part because Congress is a dysfunctional disaster.
Massie says that no matter which party has had the majority in Congress, or the White House, there is a unifying theme to how DC operates: “The whole game is rigged.’’
Congress exists in a “black box that Americans can’t look into and see what’s going on,” he explained. “The lobbyists love it that way.” The Speaker of the House is given too much power. Representatives don’t work hard enough to understand what’s in the laws they’re passing. And the practice of stuffing omnibus bills with unrelated provisions intended for undisclosed special interests is a “sneaky trick.”
Despite this brutal critique, Massie somehow still harbored hope that, “this time, Trump wouldn’t get off-track in his second term.”
Massie waited until October 2024 to endorse him, but he “thought for certain that he would go in there and really disrupt the system,” he told me.
Massie, no slouch at math, also knew those odds were slim. Trump lacked “a consistent ideology” and that made it impossible to follow through on his promises because he’d be “on two different sides of the same issue,” he explained.
He also warned Trump’s advisors not to “underestimate how the swamp can stop all forward progress” because Congress has been captive to special interests for decades. And while Massie didn’t expect Trump to focus on the deficit — because he “never campaigned as a fiscal conservative” — he said he was “hopeful that they could get that job done” because the president had surrounded himself with people who portrayed themselves as budget hawks — like Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
“But they’re not getting that job done,” Massie added. Instead of disrupting the system and demanding reforms, Trump has “kind of been pulled into it.” The deficit keeps growing and “waste, fraud and abuse is going to continue relatively unabated.”
Other conservatives, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, dismiss Massie’s opposition and contend that Trump is being consistent. But as Trump’s popularity declines, the public is increasingly aligned with Massie’s assessment — 63% of the country disapproves of his handling of the cost of living, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Meanwhile, Trump’s political pressure on Massie is working. After Trump’s primary threat, Massie had a record fundraising quarter from grassroots contributors. But his fundraising consultant for his political committee recently resigned. Too many large donors had been warned by Trump and House leadership not to contribute.
“I don’t think Thomas Massie understands government,” Trump told reporters in May. “I think he’s a grandstander.”
The president was wrong. I’ve covered legislators for more than three decades. Few lawmakers are as adept as Massie at identifying the flaws with the system while simultaneously having the guts to call it out. It’s Trump who doesn’t understand. He’s demonstrating that he doesn’t really care to halt inflation, stimulate jobs, and put America first as his MAGA agenda promised, because if he did, he’d be listening to the Kentucky congressman — instead of trying to defeat him.
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.
