How Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, toppled by Trump, charted his own way
PBS NewsHour – Politics — 2026-05-20 05:38:00 — www.pbs.org
There aren’t many lawmakers like Thomas Massie left in Congress. The renegade Republican who rose to prominence as an idiosyncratic and stubborn outlier in his party, popular in the Kentucky district that repeatedly sent him to the House, lost his primary bid for reelection Tuesday after a vicious and costly attack by President Donald Trump. The stunning outcome caps a career like few others and shows the extent of the president’s ability to badger, badmouth and eventually boot out his political adversaries — and that no lawmaker is apparently safe. Massie’s defeat comes after the Trump-led ouster of Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana over the weekend and the president’s endorsement Tuesday of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his challenge to Sen. John Cornyn, which sent chills through the Senate.
Trump had reserved his fiercest attacks for Massie, a quirky conservative who had become among the most powerful rank-and-file Republicans in the House because of his willingness to vote as he pleased, rather than as the party demanded. And now he’s been toppled like so many other Republicans who crossed the president.
“If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king,” Massie told cheering supporters Tuesday night. Massie was undaunted after losing to Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL handpicked by Trump. “If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king,” Massie told cheering supporters Tuesday night. But if lawmakers follow the Constitution, he said, “we have a republic.”
Massie also teased that his political career may not be over quite yet during the closing moments of his concession speech, as a raucous crowd broke into chants of “2028!” and “President!” “You’ve made a compelling argument,” he replied. “We’ll talk about it later.” Trump said of Massie’s defeat: “He deserves to lose.”
Massie rose from the House Republican backbench, charting his own path and showing again and again he was willing to buck his party and the president. He voted against Trump’s big tax cuts bill last year, worried the several trillion-dollar costs would add to the nation’s deficits. He rejected Trump’s military forays against Iran and Venezuela, opposed to U.S. intervention overseas, and he routinely voted against U.S. foreign aid, including to Israel, drawing millions of dollars against him from pro-Israel interest groups.
And perhaps most remarkably, Massie, in partnership with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, persisted in a long-shot effort to force the Justice Department’s release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. It was his work on the Epstein files, perhaps more than any of his repeated votes against spending bills and other party priorities, that elevated Massie’s profile. Trump lashed out at the “lowlife” Massie as the congressman pushed the issue last year, prolonging a political headache for the White House.
First elected in 2012, at the tail end of the GOP tea party wave before Trump’s Make America Great Again movement burst onto the scene, Massie stood out from the start. An engineer by training, Massie designed several patents — some on display in his office — as well as a debt calculator that blinks in flashing red numerals as the nation’s deficits pile up. He often wears a miniature version of the debt calculator as a lapel pin. He married his high school sweetheart, Rhonda, and joined her at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They raised their four children living largely off the grid in a solar-power home he designed himself, making him something of a legend among a generation of do-it-yourselfers. He raised cattle, drove an early Tesla and drank raw milk.
Inspired by fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul after having put up lawn signs for the senator’s election, the libertarian-leaning Massie ran for office himself. Once he won his own House seat, Massie declined to join the newly forming Freedom Caucus, his own far-right views not fully aligning with the conservative coalition.
Trump set his sights on Massie in 2020 during his first presidential term, when the congressman dared to object to a $2.2 trillion aid package to combat the coronavirus pandemic. At the time, Massie refused to allow the COVID-19 package to be approved without a formal roll call, forcing hundreds of lawmakers back to the Capitol. Trump called him a “third rate Grandstander.” Trump did not let up his criticisms, even after Massie’s wife died in 2024. Massie announced in 2025 that he had remarried, after proposing to Carolyn Grace Moffa, a former Paul staffer, on the steps of the Library of Congress. He said they planned to live on the farm. The president suggested that Massie got remarried too quickly, writing on social media that “his wife will soon find out that she’s stuck with a LOSER!”