Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world. • JD Vance will inherit Trump’s America in 2028. We still don’t know who he is• The radical philosopher inspiring Vance and Trump’s descent into despotism• The Bronx real-estate hustler who proves Trump is the boss from hell• The most powerful woman in the world you’ve never heard of• The ‘swamp creature’ eclipsing JD Vance in the race to succeed Trump

Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world.

• JD Vance will inherit Trump’s America in 2028. We still don’t know who he is• The radical philosopher inspiring Vance and Trump’s descent into despotism• The Bronx real-estate hustler who proves Trump is the boss from hell• The most powerful woman in the world you’ve never heard of• The ‘swamp creature’ eclipsing JD Vance in the race to succeed Trump

At early February’s National Prayer Breakfast, a chance for Washington to come together, President Donald Trump used his time to call northeastern Kentucky congressman Tom Massie a “moron” for consistently voting against him. The crowd laughed. Massie shook it off. “I’m glad to know,” Massie said the next day, “I’m in the President’s prayers.”

Indeed, Massie, 55, has emerged as perhaps Trump’s annoyer-in-chief. In the pair’s most recent major spat, Massie managed in November to pull off a rarely used congressional procedure called a discharge petition to force the release of the case files involving convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, documents whose significance Trump had dismissed as “a big hoax.”

Massie, though, is no liberal foil to Trump. He’s one of Congress’s most doctrinaire libertarians. Nor, on paper, does he have much authority. In January, Massie lost his seat on the House of Representatives’ powerful rules committee after he refused to vote to re-elect Speaker Mike Johnson.

It’s possible to see Massie and Trump’s feud as a fight over shared stylistic ground. Both regularly indulge in extreme anti-elite rhetoric. During Trump’s improbable first successful bid for the White House in 2016, Massie said he realised that while he had long thought that he and other libertarians attracted support for their distaste of concentrated government power, it turned out “they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.” In July, Trump posted on social media a wall of text railing on Massie, saying he’d throw his weight behind another Republican willing to challenge Massie as he attempted to win a ninth two-year term. Massie shot back with a meme.

But more than that, Massie poses an existential threat to Trump: showing it’s possible to stand up to him from the right and survive. So far.

To Massie’s critics, he is stubbornly bound by his view of how the world’s supposed to work. To the point of being a real jerk. In March of 2020, lawmakers had fled Washington amid worries over Covid. Massie demanded a recorded in-person vote on a $2trn pandemic relief bill, forcing his colleagues back to work. It was a rare moment of bipartisan unity. “Congressman Massie,” said former Democratic Senator John Kerry, “has tested positive for being an asshole.” Trump dismissed Massie as a “third rate Grandstander.”

If Massie often seems to see himself as the smartest person in any room, he’s got a decent claim to it. Born in West Virginia, Massie picked up two engineering degrees from the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting with his high-school sweetheart a company called SensAble Technologies, specialising in haptic feedback. It’s a skillset that Massie’s parlayed into extreme self-reliance.

After relocating to Kentucky, he built his own home by wedge-splitting stone he found laying around the property. He engineered a self-propelled chicken tractor he called the “Clucks Capacitor” after a device in Back to the Future. Massie gives off a convincing sense that rather than angling for a spot on cable news, he’d happily retire back to the farm.

That’s leverage in a closely divided Congress, where Republican leadership can hardly stand to lose a vote and still hope to get anything done, turning Massie from a gadfly into a power player — one that regularly perplexes Trump’s allies in Congress. “I don’t understand Thomas Massie’s motivation. I really don’t,” Speaker Johnson has lamented. “I don’t know how his mind works.”

Massie’s perhaps been the most powerful when he’s willing to team up with Democrats. Starting in 2017, Massie has regularly joined with California Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna to try to rein in Trump’s attempts to go to war, arguing that per the Constitution, it’s Congress’s job to decide whether to go to war or not.

Last spring, Massie joined with just one other Republican and every Democrat to vote against Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, with its $4.5trn in tax breaks — a major affront when it comes to the first-year spending package of a president of your own party. This fall, Massie joined with Khanna to force the release of the Epstein files, and after the United States attacked Iran in late February, Massie said he’d be pairing with Khanna again to challenge Trump’s war powers. “The Constitution,” argued Massie, “requires a vote.”

Matthew Glassman is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. “He doesn’t have much tolerance,” says Glassman of Massie, “for going along to get along.”

The question now is how much tolerance Republicans in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district have for bucking President Trump. Trump has endorsed a former Navy SEAL named Ed Gallrein. The primary isn’t until May. But if Massie pulls out a victory, it proves that there is life in the Republican party beyond Trump. If he loses, it solidifies what many on the American political right already suspect: there isn’t.

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