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Thomas Massie’s Defeat Could Come Back to Haunt Trump

The president’s successful campaign to remove the rebel congressman has a real chance of backfiring.

Thomas Massie speaks with supporters after his concession speech on May 19, 2026, in Hebron, Kentucky.

Ever since he joined Congress in 2012, I’ve probably disagreed with Representative Thomas Massie at least 90 percent of the time. But I can’t help but feel that his defeat in the GOP primary for his Kentucky congressional district on Tuesday night was both a tragedy and a travesty.

Massie has always had an insurgent streak. He joined national politics as a Tea Party Republican, strongly affiliated with the Rand-and-Ron-Paul libertarian wing that so unnerved the GOP establishment. Ever since, he’s shown a consistent willingness to buck his party.

Often, this defiance has been in service of bad ideas, such as trying to push Republicans to be even more opposed to the welfare state. But in Trump’s second term in office, Massie has put his rebelliousness to good use. He has emerged as a major thorn in the president’s side, playing a key role in pushing for the release of the Epstein files and being one of the few Republicans who is an outspoken critic of the Iran War.

Unfortunately for Massie, open opponents of Donald Trump rarely survive long in today’s GOP, which has made fealty to the president its overriding principle. Trump made removing Massie from Congress a key priority in this year’s midterms. So did AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group opposed to his anti-war politics. Trump and AIPAC threw their support behind Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL who promised to toe the party line.

The combined forces of Trump and AIPAC proved insurmountable, even though Massie was well-liked by Republican voters. Because of the involvement of AIPAC and other pro-Israel donors, this primary was the most expensive in American history, with at least $32 million spent. Massie ultimately lost in a landslide; while votes are still being tabulated, early results suggest Gallrein won by 55 percent to Massie’s 45 percent.

Massie joins the long list of GOP politicians who have had their political careers cut short because they stood up to Trump, often for conflicting reasons. This roll call of vanquished Republicans includes Mark Stanford, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Jeff Flake.

As Mother Jones notes:

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........

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