Thomas Massie Is Testing Whether a Trump Nemesis Can Win a Republican Primary

FLORENCE, Ky. — Thomas Massie was about halfway through a reelection speech when he started mocking Donald Trump.

The president first threatened to end his political career in 2020, the Republican congressman said Saturday — Trump called him minutes after he voted against a COVID-related spending plan.

“He said, ‘I’m coming at you like you’ve never seen,’” said Massie, exaggerating Trump’s sneering accent. “‘Never in your life before have you seen the way in which I will come at you. I’m more popular than you in Kentucky, and you know it. I’m backing your primary opponent, and you’re going to looooose.’”

The audience — a crowd of a few hundred die-hard supporters who couldn’t all fit under one tent for the launch of Massie’s campaign headquarters — laughed. They applauded again a few moments later, when the congressman reminded them that he won reelection that year anyway. And they cheered louder still when he said that Trump’s most recent threat to defeat him this year wouldn’t work either.

“I say I’ve got the Trump antibodies from a natural infection,” Massie said. “I guess my antibodies are waning, so we’re getting a booster shot this election. Hopefully, I survive this one.”

Massie might be the only Republican member of Congress who would publicly mock Trump while running in a Republican primary. He’s also only one of two GOP incumbents whose primary opponent has received the president’s endorsement.

Massie is running for reelection to Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District — a sprawling district in the commonwealth’s northern half that includes the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio — in open defiance of Trump. Trump’s repeated vows to defeat him came after a congressional session in which Massie voted against the president’s signature legislation (the “one big, beautiful bill”), opposed his top economic policy (global tariffs) and successfully forced the release of federal files associated with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump has called an unnecessary distraction. The Epstein push has won Massie international acclaim, toppling key figures in foreign governments and exposing a web of impropriety among the global rich and powerful.

Massie has emphasized repeatedly that he voted with the president 91% of the time. He says his campaign is not about opposition to the president but about implementing the type of agenda that Trump promised on the campaign trail.

“My constituents already know I’m ‘America First,’ I’m not for starting another war,” Massie told NOTUS in an interview. “I’m not for deficit spending. And I led the charge to expose a bunch of rich and powerful and politically connected men in the Epstein files. Those are the areas that I’ve differed with the president. So where I differed with the president, my constituents understand why I’ve differed with the president.”

But it was hard to miss Saturday, watching Massie speak, how adversarial his campaign can feel toward Trump. Mentions of FBI Director Kash Patel and Trump adviser Laura Loomer received boos, the congressman called Republican colleagues who opposed releasing the Epstein files “cowards” and he criticized an executive action from the White House calling for increasing the domestic production of the chemical glyphosate.

That defiance is why Trump has denounced Massie as insufficiently loyal to the MAGA movement, has promised to spend millions of dollars against him and has personally attacked both the congressman and his wife. The president endorsed Massie’s primary opponent, Ed Gallrein, a onetime Navy SEAL and Army Ranger with deep ties to northern Kentucky through a family farm.

Massie provides “aid and comfort” to Democrats who oppose Trump, Gallrein told NOTUS.

“He sided with the Democrats and the Squad,” Gallrein said. “He’s their MVP. He’s their swing vote. He’s their national treasure.”

Massie, first elected in the antiestablishment Tea Party days of 2012, has always been willing to buck his party’s leadership. The question this election is whether Republican voters in the district think he’s taken his maverick streak too far and done too much to thwart a president many of them support fanatically.

The congressman’s allies say that this year’s primary is his toughest race since first winning election, and acknowledge that even issues like the Epstein files draw as much criticism as support from Republicans.

“This race has come down to Trump vs. Massie,” said Shane Noem, chair of the Kenton County Republican Party, one of the 4th District’s largest counties. “And it’s really become a pick-a-side moment for a lot of voters.”

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Gallrein wants voters to know that Trump looks younger up close. The challenger in the race arrived Friday morning in the back room of a coffee shop in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, to talk with a group of veterans.

Gallrein received Trump’s endorsement in October after meeting with the president in the Oval Office, a day he eagerly recalled for the group.

“I want to tell y’all something about President Trump: He looks 20 years younger in person,” Gallrein said. “I don’t know what the heck is going on with them cameras. I don’t know if the Chinese or somebody is doing something behind the scenes.”

Gallrein has a tailor-made background for a Republican candidate. He grew up on a family dairy farm he now runs, became a Navy SEAL and Army Ranger and has an apparent love of Americana. That love occasionally results in show-and-tell around the state: Just for the coffee shop trip, Gallrein brought along his military shadow box with his medals and rank insignias from his time in the armed services, two framed, full-size Norman Rockwell prints (one of them, “American Citizen,” is a near-ubiquitous meme on social media) and a Make America Great Again hat sealed in a plastic case that he said Trump had signed when the two met.

He showed no hint of disagreement with the president.

Asked about the president’s tariffs — a policy that has roiled the agricultural industry and that Massie has criticized Trump over — the longtime farmer said they were a “temporary measure” the president was using to “play chess” with foreign countries.

And even as the federal deficit increases, Gallrein said the president’s plans to reduce the debt need time to work, much as they did for former President Ronald Reagan.

“He doesn’t take a salary. Did you know that?” Gallrein said of Trump. “This is a president who doesn’t need this job. He understands how to balance the books. He understands what a deficit is. We need to support the president.”

The fact that Massie doesn’t support the president is almost the entirety of Gallrein’s message to voters beyond his own background.

“I’d call him a Judas,” he said. “You can’t even call him a Benedict Arnold.”

Gallrein, who unsuccessfully ran for state Senate in 2024, faces the same issue of name recognition that most challengers to longtime incumbents do. The first time many voters in the district hear of him might be from the well-funded negative ads from Massie’s campaign, which accuse Gallrein of supporting diversity, equity and inclusion policies and gender-affirming surgeries for youths in the past (Gallrein denies both accusations). Massie’s campaign has spent $1.7 million already in the race, according to AdImpact.

But even though Gallrein may be trailing Massie, there are signs that a significant chunk of those that once supported the incumbent have decided to vote against him this May. NOTUS spoke with five Republican voters who were members of the veterans coffee club Gallrein spoke to Friday, all of whom said they had backed the congressman in past primaries.

All of them said they would vote for Gallrein now.

“I just think Massie has lost touch with reality,” said Bob, who declined to give his last name. “You need to be a team player sometimes.”

The group described Massie’s effort to release the Epstein files as a clear negative, part of a contrived attempt to hurt Trump or a distraction from what Massie should be working on.

“How do the Epstein files help me? In no way, shape or form. It doesn’t reduce taxes,” said Todd, who asked to be quoted by his first name only. He said he grew tired of news about them years ago.

These voters have high-profile company. Erick Erickson, the conservative media figure, said last week on his show that although he was a longtime Massie defender, he now thought that Trump had “broken Thomas Massie’s brain.” Other critics say Massie’s independent streak has taken him away from the district’s most pressing issues.

“I just feel like he’s becoming less focused on the basic job and more interested in these broader issues,” said Steve Frank, the Republican former vice mayor of Covington, Kentucky. “And I feel like what he’s doing is probably alienating any relationships he has with the party and the president, so that if our region needs a new road or an improvement at the airport, we’re going to be orphaned.”

Frank, who like most others interviewed for this story said he thought the primary would be an exceedingly close race, said he thought Massie would still win in the end. But time and time again, detractors described a lawmaker whose independent streak had morphed into something larger and more unhelpful in recent years.

“I’m not saying he’s a bad guy,” said Frank, who said he planned to vote for Gallrein despite knowing little about him. “I personally like Thomas, still. But maybe I’d like him doing something else.”

Back at the coffee shop, Gallrein kept finding new ways to praise Trump, describing him as not just someone with the right policies but as someone of strong and generous character.

“If you ran into him in the parking lot right here, he’d be asking you what fish fry you’re going to tonight and ‘Oh by the way, how’s the family, I saw you at church last Sunday but didn’t have a chance to talk to you,’” Gallrein said. “That’s as nice as he is. That is authentically the president that we have supported.”

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Thomas Massie poses with his supporters in Florence, Ky., on Feb. 21. Alex Roarty

In November, Trump insinuated that the timing of Massie’s marriage to his new wife was suspicious, calling the congressman a “loser.” Massie’s wife of three decades died in 2024, and the congressman remarried last year.

The president again attacked the congressman’s wife in February, suggesting she was the reason he had, in Trump’s view, taken a leftward political turn. A week later, he called Massie a “moron” while speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Massie said at his rally that he and his wife have a theory about why Trump is so fixated on their union.

“This is a true story: She told me I should invite Trump to the wedding,” Massie said, drawing laughs. “And I didn’t, and look what happened.”

Massie’s rally attracted a boisterous crowd of about 225 people, according to a campaign official. It was an eclectic group of former Democrats who had registered as Republicans to support Massie, men in “Make America Healthy Again” T-shirts and a group of young men wearing “End the Fed” shirts with Massie’s face on it, his eyes lasermaxxing.

Massie’s superpower in the election might be the support of a die-hard base of voters attracted to his brand of uncompromising politics. Those voters — many of them adherents to the libertarian-inspired Liberty Republican movement popularized by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — will turn out en masse no matter what happens between now and the primary.

“No member of Congress is more consequential than Thomas Massie,” said state Rep. Steven Doan, an avid Massie supporter who spoke at his rally Saturday. “How many have led the international prosecutions of pedophiles?”

Massie said he knows that not everyone is thrilled with his focus on the Epstein files. He said he understood that would be the case when he started pursuing their release.

But he rejects the criticism that his approach to politics changed last year.

“I’ve heard these criticisms from the White House that I’m a grandstander,” Massie said in an interview. “I say, if exposing an international pedophile sex-trafficking ring is grandstanding, then everybody should be a grandstander. Is it going too far to be effective?

“Politely asking for the Epstein files is one thing, but actually getting them released is going too far?” he asked. “I just don’t see it.”

Massie spoke to NOTUS at a gun store near his new campaign HQ, next to a display case of several different calibers of AR-15-style rifles. The candidate had stopped by a local National Rifle Association event to tout his support of the 2nd Amendment, articulating myriad ways he would like to see gun rights expanded in the coming years.

Massie is a hard-line conservative on many issues traditionally important to the movement, including the national debt (the congressman on Saturday wore a handmade debt clock on his sport coat) and abortion rights (he touted an endorsement from an anti-abortion-rights group during his rally).

And in TV ads, his campaign actively praises the president, crediting him with “crush[ing] the woke agenda.” A mailer from Massie’s campaign touts how Massie is “America & Kentucky First.”

Massie’s primary messaging does less to stress his independence than tout his conservative principles and casts doubt on Gallrein’s commitment to the cause. It can feel like a throwback to a pre-Trump era in the GOP when Republicans would battle over who was more deeply committed to the Constitution and less willing to compromise with Democrats.

It seems to have worked for him so far: Massie said at his rally he was up 17 percentage points in his campaign’s polling, and some neutral observers agree that he has a lead. In an interview, Massie said Trump’s own approval among Republicans in the district had slipped to 75%, according to his polling. (Massie’s campaign did not provide NOTUS a copy of the poll. An official with Gallrein’s campaign dismissed the results, saying Massie must have polled with “left wing donors.”)

But to most longtime incumbents, a 17-point lead with plenty of time left to campaign would be a cause for concern, not celebration. And Massie knows the next three months of campaigning could push his campaign to the brink. The congressman said he expects a super PAC formed specifically to oppose his candidacy will spend another $10 million in the race. Many Republicans in the 4th District also anticipate that Trump himself could campaign there before the primary — a major media event that could give Gallrein a late boost.

“It’s a dogfight,” Doan, the state representative, told NOTUS.

Ultimately, Massie is still making a bet that voters will reward his willingness to be independent, and reject Gallrein for being too quick to fall in line.

“I respect his military service. He used to report to the commander in chief, but that’s not how Congress works,” Massie said. “You don’t report to the commander in chief. You don’t report to the speaker of the House. When you’re a congressman, you report to the people.”

At his rally Saturday, Massie spent a big part of his speech talking about the Epstein files, saying that the level of impropriety they had revealed was a surprise even to him. And he excoriated his male Republican colleagues who declined to support the documents’ release, calling them “cowards” who were afraid for their political futures.

“And they’re still afraid,” Massie said. “By the way, they’re watching this race to decide whether to be afraid or whether to be bold. That’s why we need to win.”