What Thomas Massie’s Race Says About Trump’s Influence
Trump also called for Massie to be expelled from the Republican Party. This suggestion came to nothing and during Trump’s interregnum, tensions seemed to dissipate, although Massie initially supported Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. When Massie’s wife died, Trump reportedly left her a kind voicemail. After Trump regained the presidency, there was even talk of Massie as Secretary of Agriculture – big money, on a much larger scale. Last year, however, Massie challenged Trump on spending programs, including his One Big Beautiful Bill, as well as on Iran and Epstein; in June, Trump was once again calling him a stand-up guy (a “simple-minded” this time) and demanding his ouster. Massie, for his part, exuded confidence, insisting that no candidate would be able to outrun him on the right because he is “America’s premier congressman.” He even predicted that Trump, after seeing the polls in his district, might not bother getting involved after all. But Trump’s close allies were already opposing CAP to unseat Massie, and in October, Trump urged Gallrein to intervene. (Around the same time, Massie remarried and Trump said, “Boy, that was quick.”)
The race is now the costliest primary ever, fueled, in large part, by those who oppose Massie’s critical stance on Israel. Polls are rare, but several recent ones suggest Massie may be in trouble, and trail reports suggest so too. The campaign has become a circus, and Massie is an odd duck — incredibly, it took me five paragraphs to mention that he lives off-grid and wears a symbol of the national debt on his lapel. But the race has morphed into a more prosaic question: Can a Republican challenge Trump these days and still hope to win?
This is not a new question and the answer, intuitively, seems to be no. Since Trump returned to power, he has been particularly uninhibited in his assertions of power and his desire to avenge those who upset him. And he was, indeed, instrumental in shaping the midterm primary map, at the congressional level and beyond. Earlier this month, five Indiana state senators who had rejected Trump’s heavy-handed efforts to redraw the state’s districts to gain partisan advantage lost to Trump-backed challengers; On Saturday in Louisiana, Sen. Bill Cassidy, who drew Trump’s lingering ire for voting to convict in the ensuing impeachment trial on Jan. 6, failed to even make the runoff in his re-election campaign. (This despite the fact that Cassidy, a physician, made his name by voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services.) National headlines clearly saw both as a major swing. However, this recent picture is nuanced. Some Indiana observers, for example, have noted that local issues — a proposed casino, property taxes — have fueled races there.
Massie’s result will also be interpreted through Trump’s totalizing prism. But here too, the reality is a little more complicated. In 2020, Massie easily won re-election, despite Trump’s attack. During the 2022 midterm cycle, Trump did supporting Massie, part of a wave of support across the map, from Ohio’s critical Senate race to Georgia’s election for state insurance and fire safety commissioner. Pundits largely viewed the results as a measure of Trump’s current power, given that he was supposedly in exile, and yet, as I wrote at the time, that framing masked a more complex tangle of local factors, not to mention the likelihood that, in at least some elections, candidates won not so much because of Trump’s support as Trump supported them because they won. As Massie pointed out last year: “At the end of the day, the president hates to lose.” Then again, so did Massie, who recently sought to emphasize that he agreed with Trump on most issues and couldn’t see himself running against him. (A recent pro-Massie ad took aim at “TRUMP TRAITOR WOKE EDDIE GALLREIN,” before showing an AI version of Gallrein fleeing Trump’s camp in combat.) In the event of a Massie defeat, local conflicts—from recriminations over bridge funding to Massie’s responsiveness to his constituents—will have played at least some role. Even a Massie victory, as one strategist said Living roomwould not necessarily warrant clear conclusions about the president given the particularities of the Massie district, which stretches from the Cincinnati suburbs to the West Virginia border.
