Rep. Thomas Massie was a few days out from having a metal rod removed from the remaining bits of his thumb.
“The physician assistant told me to take some Tylenol and Ibuprofen before I come to that appointment,” he told NOTUS last week. “But I’ve taken no painkillers. So I think I’ll just do it without painkillers.”
Rattle rattle rattle.
“That’s my bone in a little box,” Massie said, shaking a severed thumb bone fragment like a maraca next to the phone.
Rattle rattle.
He smashed his hand with a post driver on his Kentucky farm earlier this summer and had been sporting a comically large bandage in Washington, D.C., in the days before August recess, giving him the appearance of a permanent thumbs-up — which is ironic because President Donald Trump is trying to push Massie out of Congress for always voting “no.”
His apparent high pain tolerance has left him unworried about his thumb, and about Trump. The president has vanquished most of his congressional critics, and now his sights are trained on Massie — making running for reelection a painful, expensive prospect. Most of the Republicans who’ve butted heads with Trump over the past decade have retired, lost elections or converted into faithful followers.
But Massie, one of the last Republicans in Congress willing to question Trump, does not plan on doing any of those things.
“A lot of my colleagues are waiting to see what happens to me,” Massie told NOTUS. “If I lose, they’re going to be even more scared than they are now.”
“When I do win,” he predicted, “there’ll be more Republicans who are emboldened to not be rubber stamps and to vote their conscience.”
A libertarian-minded Republican who often wears an electronic national debt tracker pinned to his suit, Massie has repeatedly faced down the president this year. He objected to Trump’s Iran strikes, calling for congressional authorization before entering foreign wars. He voted against the Republican megabill after nearly every other member fell in line, saying it wasn’t fiscally conservative. And he’s now pushing for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, teeing up a measure to force a floor vote on it after members return in September.
“Massie is weak, ineffective, and votes ‘NO’ on virtually everything put before him,” Trump wrote earlier this year. “MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!”
The president’s allies have launched a super PAC to oust Massie next year, and Kentucky airwaves are inundated with attack ads far in advance. His fight to keep his House seat will be another test of whether a Republican lawmaker can defy Trump and actually stay in politics.
He believes he’s earned enough goodwill at home to survive a primary, and that his more-than-a decade of confronting Republican leaders — often casting the sole “no” vote on legislation — has prepared voters for this showdown.
“The reality is, they can and might spend $20 million against me in a Republican primary,” Massie said of Trump’s allies. “And I can still win.”
He seems to be enjoying the chance to prove himself.
“I’ve joked that if they quit opposing me, it might get boring and I would just leave,” he said. “But there’s no hope of that.”
Massie has devoted part of his summer to fundraising, but he’s not focusing on the race as if his career is in peril. He told NOTUS he’s been mending fences on his farm so his cows don’t escape, hauling hay and putting it in his barns, chatting with neighbors at the grocery store and meeting with constituents.
His constituents, he says, aren’t fazed that he’s made an enemy of Trump.
“They like Trump and they like me,” he said. “If there’s a policy I disagree with, I disagree with the policy. And if he’s right about something, I congratulate him, the person. That was my strategy in the first Trump administration and my strategy in this one.”
Still, that approach seems to have bewildered GOP leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, who dismissed the House early this summer to prevent Massie’s Epstein files discharge petition from advancing — a tacit acknowledgement that leadership needed more time to convince members to vote against it.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand Thomas Massie’s motivation,” Johnson said. “I really don’t. I don’t know how his mind works.”
It’s true that Massie isn’t a typical member of Congress. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before going on to patent more than two-dozen inventions. He’s wired his house to be self-sufficient, and he’s designed a robotic chicken coop that allows the birds to wander his farm without being eaten by coyotes. As a young adult he married his high school sweetheart and fellow MIT graduate, Rhonda, who died suddenly just over a year ago.
Massie told NOTUS her death hasn’t substantially changed how he does his job, although he said he might be taking even bigger swings now if she were still alive.
“She’s the one who threw my socks, T-shirt, underwear and toothbrush in the car and let me use her SUV to go do it, because I knew I’d have to sleep in a vehicle,” he recalled of his gambit to force an in-person vote on a COVID-19 response bill in the early days of the pandemic, rather than allowing it to pass by voice vote.
“If she were alive, they’d probably be getting more of me than they are right now,” he said.
Former Rep. Justin Amash, who counts Massie as a friend and often aligned with him as another libertarian voice in Congress, told NOTUS he’s not surprised to see his old colleague refusing to back down on the Epstein files.
“He’s not going to be pushed around or bullied by anyone in leadership,” Amash said in an interview Tuesday. “He’s a very analytical person. If he has an idea about how he wants to vote on something, he has thought about it for a long time.”
Amash also found himself at the other end of Trump’s anger after disagreeing with the president one-too-many times during Trump’s first term. For Amash, that divide led in part to his departure from the Republican Party and his decision not to run for reelection in 2020. Five years later, he said he agrees that Massie’s race is a referendum on Trump’s ability to keep the party in line.
“He absolutely can keep his seat because he’s loved within his district,” Amash predicted of Massie. “He’s the smartest person I ever served with. And I have served with some smart people, I’ve served with a lot of dumb people. But he’s the brightest.”
When lawmakers return to the Capitol, a metal-rod-free Massie will be making plenty of trouble for GOP leaders. On Sept. 3, Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, plan to host a press conference with several of Epstein’s alleged victims to boost support for their bill with an event that will surely attract media attention.
“I hope that the risk that they take by going public won’t be in vain,” Massie told NOTUS. “I hope my colleagues will listen to them.”
If he wins 218 colleagues for his Epstein bill, which he expects he will, he’ll be able to force it to the floor. Massie told NOTUS his time serving on the House Rules Committee during the last Congress made him better at this kind of procedural combat.
“One of the things I wouldn’t have known how to do before I was on the Rules Committee is how to shrink 37 days for a discharge petition into 7 days by taking up a bill that’s already been in the hopper for 30 days and replacing every word of it,” he said.
He told NOTUS he traded text messages with Johnson earlier this month, but it doesn’t seem to have averted the impending clash.
“He’s acting like he’s a victim somehow and that he’s being persecuted merely because I want the Epstein files released,” Massie said. “He takes all these things personally, and I’m just doing my job.”
A spokesperson for Johnson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican who is friends with Massie but also supports Johnson, said nobody should underestimate Massie.
He’s “a chess player, not a checkers player,” Burchett told NOTUS this week. “He’s usually three moves ahead.”
Massie suggested he’s got a few procedural surprises lined up, just in case GOP leaders maneuver to halt his effort.
“They’re not going to see everything that’s coming,” he said. “They’re not going to get out of taking a vote.”