Representative Thomas Massie, the renegade Kentucky Republican who fiercely guards his political independence, doesn’t love being on President Trump’s bad side. He would prefer not to have the president’s allies spend millions to defeat him in a primary. In fact, if Massie had his way, he’d be working for Trump right now.
In his telling, in the weeks after the 2024 presidential election, the two men talked about Massie, a farmer who champions raw milk, becoming Trump’s agriculture secretary. Massie had formally endorsed Trump late in the campaign, offering to help him win over libertarians who might be tempted to stay home or vote third party in key battlegrounds. Trump had been appreciative, and the two had chatted by phone to hash out the timing of the endorsement announcement. “Just tweet it. I’ll retweet you,” Trump had told him.
The rollout went smoothly, but Massie’s endorsement didn’t get him the job in Trump’s Cabinet. He was recounting this to me in, of all places, a bridal suite inside a converted barn in his northern-Kentucky district. Massie had just delivered remarks to a friendly crowd in the wedding hall downstairs, part of an acrimonious campaign that, if Trump gets his way, will be Massie’s last. The president’s allies are spending big to defeat Massie in a May 19 primary and prop up Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL and a political novice whom Trump personally recruited as a challenger. Massie first won election to the House during the pre-Trump Tea Party era and has handily prevailed in competitive primaries before. But he is also aware of Trump’s unique hold on the GOP: When the president decides he wants a Republican out of Congress, he usually gets his wish. Polls have given Massie a lead over Gallrein, who is not well known in the district, but his advantage is far smaller than in his previous reelection bids.
Trump attacks Massie anywhere and everywhere, whether it’s on Truth Social (“A totally ineffective LOSER”), at an event in Massie’s district (“He’s the worst!”), or at the National Prayer Breakfast (“Moron”). He’s even impugned Massie’s new wife, accusing her of being “Radical Left” (Massie says that she voted thrice for Trump) and suggesting that Massie remarried too quickly after the death of his first wife.
Massie, by contrast, often talks about Trump less like he’s a sworn enemy and more like he’s a jilted ex who’s still a bit obsessed with him. “I don’t feel like I’m fighting with him,” Massie said. What Trump sees as betrayal—Massie’s drive to release the Epstein files and his opposition to core parts of the president’s agenda—Massie merely described as an occasional “policy disagreement.”
As he campaigns in a district that backed the president in 2024 by nearly 36 points, he’s urging voters to keep some perspective on his breaks with Trump. He insists that, far from being a Never Trumper, he’s a Mostly Trumper. In one ad, Massie points out their previous endorsements of each other and says, “I agree with President Trump nearly all of the time.” Another spot highlights his support for the Save America Act, an election bill and Trump’s top legislative priority. “This is going to be a referendum on whether it’s okay to vote with your party 90 percent of the time or whether you have to do it 100 percent,” Massie told members of the Grant County Republican Party inside the converted barn.
In Washington, Massie is known for his ideological consistency during his seven terms in the House—Trump is just one of several GOP leaders he’s crossed in the name of principle—and for relishing the attention that his squabbles with the president have attracted. But Massie takes pride in his willingness to defy Trump when so many in his party will not. He predicts that if he can survive Trump’s bid to defeat him, his victory will embolden more Republicans in Congress to stand up to the president. “There would be six to a dozen congressmen who are more liable to vote with their constituents instead of the party line,” Massie told me, saying that he had spoken with some of them directly but declining to name them.
Needless to say, this does not sound like a Republican who would have lasted long in Trump’s Cabinet. Massie admitted to some ambivalence about the prospect. He said that he used to joke about placing an important condition on an administration job. “I need a small jet capable of reaching Argentina on the tarmac, with enough fuel in it to get out of the country, if I work in his Cabinet,” as Massie told it, “because everybody’s going to get impeached or fired or go to jail.”
Massie came to Congress as a spending hawk, and more than a decade later, that remains his signature issue and the source of many of his disagreements with GOP leaders. “They say I vote ‘no’ a lot. But I really vote ‘Don’t spend,’” Massie told the gathering of approximately 100 Republicans in Grant County, which is about 45 minutes south of Cincinnati. He opposes foreign aid and voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year because of projections that its tax cuts would explode already ballooning deficits. Massie built a clip-on debt clock that he wears on his lapel—one of a few dozen inventions for which the former robotics engineer has or is seeking a patent. “You just spent like $100 million talking to me,” he noted to me, a taxpayer, nearly a half hour into our interview.
Barely 40 when he was first elected to the House, Massie was pudgy and rosy-cheeked, with the kind of youthful appearance that often gets newly elected lawmakers confused for staffers inside the Capitol. “He looked like a teenager,” recalls Phil Moffett, a former GOP candidate for Kentucky governor who encouraged Massie to run and then chaired his campaign. Massie, 55, is a grandfather now. He appears slimmer and more weathered, with a short gray beard—a physical transformation that he jokes about in one of his ads.
Massie speaks with less of an obvious filter than most congressional Republicans. His impersonation of Trump, which he deploys frequently, more closely resembles the cartoonish, lip-puckering Alec Baldwin bit on Saturday Night Live during the president’s first term than it does James Austin Johnson’s more recent interpretation.
Within his district, Massie loves to tell voters how cheap he is. The first story he shared during his speech in Grant County was an elaborate yarn about the time he’d spent as judge-executive—essentially the mayor—of Lewis County in the years before he ran for Congress. The water heater at the county jail had broken down, leading the jailer to complain to Massie because the inmates were refusing to shower and “were getting kind of rank,” Massie said. Massie didn’t want to bill taxpayers the $12,000 quoted as the cost of a replacement, so he found a water heater on eBay for $5,500. To save more money, he installed it himself and then invited the inmates to strip the old water heater “for everything it’s worth” so that the county could sell the parts. “I know you were in here for stealing copper and whatever,” Massie said he told them, “so you probably know everything that’s worth anything on that hot-water heater.” For good measure, they peeled the green inspection sticker off the old heater and slapped it on the new one. “They said, ‘Judge, you could go to jail for this,’” Massie said. To which he replied, “I’ll have a hot shower, though, won’t I?”
The prison tale reminds voters about the fiscally prudent conservative they first sent to Washington in 2012. Kentucky’s fourth district covers a chunk of the triangle between Cincinnati, Louisville, and Lexington in the northwest corner of the state and then stretches east through several rural counties close to the West Virginia border. Massie rode the tail end of the Tea Party wave, dominating a seven-way primary and a special election to replace a retiring Republican who was more closely aligned with the party establishment. Massie won over the same 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 dozens of Republicans who had recently arrived in the House; many were relative newcomers to politics who had run on pledges to cut taxes and spending, and to aggressively oppose the Obama administration. But few of them figured out Congress as quickly as Massie, who had grown up in rural Kentucky but earned two degrees in engineering from MIT. “It was obvious every time we were in a setting, regardless of who the audience was, that Thomas was the smartest person in the room,” Moffett told me. “He picked up on concepts so fast.” The appreciation for Massie’s intellect crosses party lines. “He’s brilliant,” says Representative Ro Khanna of California, a progressive Democrat who worked with Massie for months last year to pass legislation forcing the Trump administration to release the Epstein files. Khanna told me that Massie was “an incredible strategist” during the Epstein fight.
During his first House campaign, Massie told The Cincinnati Enquirer: “I’m ready to be unpopular.” It’s a common refrain for a candidate running against an entrenched system, but Massie made good on his promise. Among his initial votes were a thumbs-down on a bipartisan deal to extend George W. Bush–era tax cuts and aid for states slammed by Hurricane Sandy. He joined 11 other Republicans in opposing John Boehner’s reelection as speaker. And lest Democrats think they might have a new ally, Massie made one of his first bills a proposal to lift a ban on guns in school zones, which he introduced just weeks after 20 children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut.
Massie would play a key behind-the-scenes role in ousting Boehner less than two years later, although he spoke of the episode with some regret. “We ended up with Paul Ryan, and things got worse,” he said. When dissident Republicans held up Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker in early 2023, Massie—who for once was not among the rebels—pushed them to seek changes to House rules rather than merely a new leader. The ordeal ended with McCarthy winning on the 15th vote and Massie landing a seat—somewhat reluctantly, he said—on the powerful House Rules Committee. That perch offered Massie an even deeper education on the arcana of congressional procedure, which he then put to use during the fight over the Epstein files. Working with Khanna, he devised a discharge petition designed not only to evade the opposition of Speaker Mike Johnson and the Trump White House but also to make it over to the Senate, where it eventually passed. “They obviously underestimated me,” Massie said. “If in 2012, when I was running, they knew what I was capable of, they would have spent infinite money to keep me from ever getting to Washington, D.C.”
Trump and Massie clashed during the president’s first term. During the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, in March 2020, Massie forced every member of the House to defy stay-at-home orders and return to Washington for a vote on a $2 trillion relief package that both Republican and Democratic leaders had hoped to pass without a full vote. Trump called Massie “a third rate Grandstander” and urged Republicans to kick him out of the party. Massie ended up winning his primary in a rout.
The two men patched things up in 2024, but their truce collapsed soon after Trump took office. Massie might claim that he agrees with Trump “on nearly everything,” but he opposed the president’s biggest domestic priorities—the debt-ballooning tax bill and his tariff policy—and denounced as “not constitutional” Trump’s increased appetite for launching military strikes overseas without authorization from Congress. The Trump-Massie feud has proved awkward for the many northern Kentuckians who are die-hard supporters of both. None, however, can say that they are surprised by Massie’s positions. “Trump, I support him, but I never know what he’s going to do or say,” Gex Williams, a Kentucky state senator and close Massie ally, told me. “But Massie says or does the same thing today that he did when he got elected. I wish I could be as consistent as Thomas.”
To the extent that Massie has changed over the years, Williams said, he has become more comfortable in his political standing. “He was a little more reserved” earlier in his career, Williams said. “Now he seems to be more relaxed.” Massie is not shy about speaking out against Trump when he feels like it. He also shares with the president a taste for provocation; days after a deadly 2021 shooting at a Michigan high school, he posted a photo of his Christmas card, in which he and his family are holding rifles. “Ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Massie wrote. (Khanna, an ardent supporter of gun control, told me that he’d received the Christmas card in the mail; although appreciative, he keeps it in a drawer.)
Trump and his allies began casting about for a primary challenger to Massie more than a year ago. To soften him up, a super PAC led by Chris LaCivita, Trump’s former campaign co-manager, started running attack ads against him last summer. Massie said that the president reneged on a deal to call off the ads in exchange for his support for a procedural vote advancing the tax-cut bill. In response to questions about Trump’s interactions with Massie over the past two years, the White House sent me a statement attacking him. Massie had opposed key parts of the president’s agenda, including border-wall funding and tax cuts for the middle class, the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me, “because Thomas Massie cares more about peacocking for his radical Democrat friends and liberal media allies than delivering for the men and women of Kentucky’s 4th district.”
In their search for a primary challenger to Massie, the president’s allies eventually settled on Gallrein, who had not previously run for political office. Gallrein has told voters that Trump summoned him to the Oval Office and personally asked him to run, appealing to his sense of patriotism. At a rally last month, Trump described the recruitment this way: “I wanted just—give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie. And I got somebody with a warm body, but a big, beautiful brain and a great patriot.”
In Grant County, the “warm body” who showed up to counter Massie wasn’t Gallrein. He had been scheduled to attend the event, a fundraising dinner for the local party, but his campaign informed organizers earlier in the day that he had to attend funerals instead, Eldon Maddox, the county GOP chair, told me. Although the party is officially neutral, Maddox is a strong Massie backer and hinted that Gallrein had pulled out of the event after he was told that he’d have to answer questions from the crowd. “It doesn’t play very well,” Maddox said. Gallrein’s absence fit neatly into the narrative that Massie’s campaign has put out about him: that the first-time candidate is ducking debates and other opportunities to interact with voters, content to let Trump’s allies drown Massie with attack ads on TV. (Gallrein’s campaign did not respond to interview requests.)
In place of the candidate, Gallrein’s deputy campaign manager, Jennifer O’Connor, nervously read a speech off her phone while Massie sat at a table directly in front of her. When she said that Massie had “voted against President Trump’s plan to secure the border,” he interrupted her. “False,” he said, loudly enough for the room to hear. “Please. I did not interrupt you,” O’Connor told him. “I didn’t lie about you,” Massie replied.
Massie seemed to have much of the crowd in his corner, but not everyone. Pamela Mann, a retired teacher and a tobacco farmer, told me that she had supported Massie in the past but was backing Gallrein this time. “I just don’t understand why he won’t support the president,” Mann said of Massie. She said that when she sees an important vote in which only a few Republicans have broken with the party, “I automatically know one of them is going to be Massie. That’s not why we send people like him to Washington.” A former chair of the county party, Mann had some doubts about Gallrein’s chances, however. “Running for office requires experience,” she said, “and Mr. Gallrein is obviously new to campaigning.”
Most of the Republicans I spoke with shrugged off the beef between Massie and Trump. “That’s a personal thing,” Leo Fell, a retired driving instructor, told me. “They’ll get back together.” He said that he’s voting for Massie despite occasionally disagreeing with him. “I understand everybody’s not going to be perfect,” Fell said.
Massie is banking on voters like Fell to carry him through next month: Republicans who know and trust him, and who haven’t seen much of Gallrein. He believes that his supporters are far more motivated to vote than his critics within Trump’s base. The president, too, doesn’t seem to have the political juice he once did; Republican turnout has sagged in special elections over the past year, and Massie has said that in his internal polling, Trump’s approval rating in the district has dipped to the low 70s; late in the president’s first term, that number was in the mid-90s.
Still, Massie isn’t projecting the same bring-it-on confidence that he did when I spoke with him last year. He insists that he’s okay with the possibility of losing. I asked whether this is fun for him. “I like a challenge,” he said. Then he paused for a moment. “It can be fun and stressful at the same time,” he said. Massie said that when people tell him they’re praying for him, he asks what specifically they are praying for: “If you’re praying for me to stay in the fight, and God answers your prayer, I’ll win my reelection.” If, however, “you’re praying for my soul, I’ll be on my farm next year and out of politics.”
