What happens when a Republican congressman turns his primary election into a referendum on Donald Trump? What happens when he turns it into a referendum on Israel?
The answer to those questions should be stunningly obvious. There was never a reason to expect Kentucky to return a different verdict than anywhere else. Quite the contrary – it’s a staunchly red state. Asked to choose between Trump and a congressman who’d lately been garnering favorable coverage in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Republican voters were not about to abandon the president. The very things Thomas Massie’s newfound friends liked about him made him unacceptable to the people who actually vote in Republican primaries.
His campaign showed that neocons, libertarians, and the establishment center-left can put aside their differences in a grand anti-MAGA alliance
By the end of Massie’s re-election campaign, his coalition of supporters beyond his own congressional district included Democrats, anti-Zionists, and anti-MAGA libertarians. Even neoconservatives developed a strange new respect for Massie. On a podcast for the Bulwark, the webzine founded by William Kristol, Tim Miller noted Massie’s support was weakest among the older voters and urged, “If you have a Mawmaw in Kentucky 4, please bring her back from the edge. Turn off the TV, turn off the Newsmax, and let her know that Tom Massie’s been a good representative for her.” Cohost Sarah Longwell then quipped, “I don’t think they have anyone who’s between 18 and 34. Those people move out of Kentucky.”
Massie was something of a “Ron Paul Republican” when he was first elected to Congress in 2012, at a time when the Tea Party was the primary manifestation of GOP populism. Massie, like Paul, has been a consistent critic of foreign wars and foreign aid, as well as a vigilant deficit hawk. And like Paul, he was treated only with disdain, when he was noticed at all, by the ideological gatekeepers of the pundit class. During Trump’s first term, Massie continued to be viewed as a fringe character, though his periodic clashes with Trump – and the president’s furious responses to them – attracted some notice.
Unlike Justin Amash, another strongly libertarian-leaning Republican congressman elected in the Tea Party era, Massie did not vote for either of Trump’s impeachments. And unlike his fellow Kentuckian Senator Rand Paul, Massie ultimately endorsed Trump in the 2024 general election, though Massie had been an early backer of Ron DeSantis in the contest for the GOP nomination. Over the past decade, Amash, Massie, and Senator Paul have represented three variations on a post-Ron Paul libertarian theme within the Trump-dominated Republican party.
Amash was the least populist of the three, and the most idealistic, or simply naive. He chose not to seek re-election in 2020 and finished his time in Congress by defecting from the GOP to become the only Libertarian party member ever to hold federal office. He subsequently sought a Republican nomination to the US Senate and, predictably, didn’t get it. Senator Paul and Massie, by contrast, toughed it out in the GOP.
But even as Massie emphasized his points of agreement with MAGA, he increasingly defined himself by his differences with the second-term President Trump. Before his fatal primary contest brought him a heretofore unprecedented degree of notoriety, Massie was probably best known outside of his district as a champion for releasing the Epstein files. When Trump put the full force of his influence within the GOP behind passing the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was essential to making Trump’s first-term tax cuts permanent, Massie resisted, objecting to its impact on the national debt. The Kentucky congressman was above all a deficit hawk, even as the GOP prioritized tax cuts and spending on the military and immigration enforcement.
Massie was also a dissenter on Republican support for Israel. AIPAC had always opposed him, but this year Massie’s primary became a proxy for feelings toward Israel, with the congressman presenting his opponent, Ed Gallrein, as a shill for a foreign power. But Republican primary voters like Israel: this is a basic fact, one that Trump has always acknowledged, even at his most critical of the US foreign-policy establishment. The more pro-Israel donors poured money into the race, the more Massie’s online fanbase insisted that only Jewish money made the primary competitive – and since Massie seemed to agree, supporters of Israel invested even more in defeating him. Ordinary Kentucky Republicans, presented with what both sides regarded as a referendum on Israel, unsurprisingly chose to be pro-Israel rather than anti-Israel.
If the fight had merely been over the war with Iran, the outcome might have been different, even with the degree of support the war finds among older Republicans. But the Iran war was subsumed by the Israel discourse, and while some Massie supporters considered him an antiwar hero, others actually agreed with his opponents in framing him as first and foremost an anti-Zionist. Massie’s critical views of NATO were more aligned with MAGA’s sentiments, but didn’t feature prominently in the race.
Ironically, Massie’s defeat may be the beginning of something – a birth pang of a new coalition. His campaign showed that neocons, libertarians, and the establishment center-left can put aside their differences in a grand anti-MAGA alliance. That alliance was soundly beaten by the Republicans within the Republican party, but it may have better prospects in Democratic primaries, where hating Trump and/or Israel is already a requirement. There’s a perverse kind of populism there, too. Yet it would be a tragedy if that’s where the remnants of the reformist movement Rand Paul once hoped to lead within the GOP wound up. The senator can still save his brand of libertarian populism by making peace with MAGA. If he doesn’t, he’ll suffer Massie’s fate in his own re-election contest in 2028 – assuming he doesn’t follow Amash’s example and give up. More than his own future is at stake, however. Paul’s liberty movement can help bring out the best in the new Republican right –but the worst in itself if it aligns with the Frankenstein coalition that tried using Massie to beat MAGA.
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