Trump knocks off Thomas Massie in heated primary

President Donald Trump has knocked off another GOP dissident in his effort to cleanse the Republican Party of anyone who has even modestly challenged his agenda.

Rep. Thomas Massie lost Tuesday’s Kentucky primary to challenger Ed Gallrein, following a bitter race full of dirty tricks and astonishing amounts of money. At upwards of $35 million, the contest had become the most expensive primary in US history.

Massie is a seven-term libertarian who came to Congress in 2012 during the tea party movement that swept in a new class of deficit hawks and “constitutional conservatives.” Virtually all of those original tea partiers eventually migrated to Trump’s MAGA movement, where their concerns about the budget deficit, endless wars, and adherence to the Constitution have been sublimated to their fealty to Trump, who has no interest in any of these values. Massie was the last man standing, and as such, had made Trump’s life difficult, ultimately embarrassing the president by forcing him to make good on his campaign promise to release the government’s files on Trump’s friend, the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

As I explained recently:

Trump was only two months into his second term when he first threatened to have Massie primaried. “I will lead the charge against him,” Trump pledged on Truth Social after the congressman had refused to vote for a short-term spending bill. Massie didn’t seem too worried. “He’s going after Canada and me today,” he told reporters. “The difference is Canada will eventually cave.” Massie went on to be one of only two House Republicans to vote against the president’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill, calling it a “debt bomb.”

For Trump, the final straw came in June last year, when Massie worked with [California Democrat Ro] Khanna to try to block the president from attacking Iran without congressional approval. When Trump joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Massie criticized Trump directly. “I feel a bit misled,” Massie told Fox News Digital. “I didn’t think he would let neocons determine his foreign policy and drag us into another war.”  

Trump was furious. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” Trump fumed. Shortly afterward, he deployed his best campaign operatives to try to unseat the Kentucky Republican. Chris LaCivita, Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager, set up MAGA KY PAC to fund a primary challenge, underwritten almost solely by three pro-Israel billionaires: Miriam Adelson, widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and hedge fund titans Paul Singer and John Paulson. Together or through their PACs, they contributed $2.975 million to unseat Massie.

LaCivita first proved his commitment to punishing Trump defectors when he helped unseat Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) in 2024. Good was no bleeding heart. He was the Trump-supporting chair of the arch-right House Freedom Caucus. But his temerity in endorsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the GOP presidential primary was all it took. “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” LaCivita vowed. Trump appeared in an ad targeting Good, and Good lost the primary by fewer than 400 votes.

This year, Trump helped oust five Republican Indiana state legislators who had rejected pressure from the president to redraw the state’s congressional maps to create two new Republican seats in mid-decade redistricting. And this month, Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary after Trump targeted him over Cassidy’s vote to convict him in his 2021 impeachment trial.

“Combined with Cassidy‘s loss over the weekend in the Louisiana Senate primary and the five Indiana state senators losing their primaries two weeks ago,” says Trey Grayson, a former secretary of state and 2010 Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, “a lot of Republicans are going to say, ‘I think I’ll keep to myself and stay in line.’ That would be a natural reaction.” 

Massie’s defeat may indeed cow the rest of the Republican conference, but it’s likely to only embolden the congressman, who will still have the rest of the year to continue to antagonize the lame-duck president. He’ll also likely focus on some of the same issues he’s been pursuing since he was first elected, such as making it easier for small farmers and ranchers to sell their beef across state lines.

Recently, Massie said he’d learned a lot from his successful effort to pass the Epstein Transparency Act using a discharge petition that can force a vote on a bill over the objection of the House speaker. That legislation “is a proof of concept that if you have enough people behind an issue, I now have the tools to get it passed,” he told me. “It’s one of the hardest ways to get a bill passed, but it’s the grassroots way. I would start with what I’ve learned and apply that going forward.”

Potential targets for such a strategy could include a bill he introduced recently to restrict law enforcement searches. Not only would it require the government to obtain a search warrant to access data held by brokers or internet companies, it would also bar law enforcement from using facial recognition, biometric tracking, and license plate readers tied to individuals without first getting a warrant.

And despite Trump’s proclamation that the shaky ceasefire in Iran means he doesn’t need congressional approval for the war, Massie says that current law requires Congress to hold a War Powers vote in the coming weeks on whether to allow Trump to continue the conflict. “It’s clearly a war,” Massie told me. “There’s gonna be a vote after my primary that requires a positive outcome.”

As an engineer, Massie understands how to interpret the odds better than most, and when I spoke with him earlier this year, he was realistic about his prospects in the primary—and sanguine about it. “I’d be perfectly happy going back to my farm,” he told me. “If I were to lose, my blood pressure would go down, and my quality of life would go up, so I’m okay with that fate. I think so many of my colleagues just so desperately want the job that they couldn’t imagine doing a single thing that would endanger having the job.”