“Maga does not want it, does not know him and does not respect him,” wrote President Donald Trump in a long tirade against Thomas Massie, a member of the Kentucky republican congress who criticized the president on a certain number of questions of war with Iran to the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
“It is a negative force that almost always votes” no “” no matter how good something can be. He is a “platform” of simple spirit who thinks that it is a good policy for Iran to have nuclear weapons of higher level, while shouting at the same time “ Death To America ” on every occasion they get, “Trump posted on Sunday.
He added: “Maga should drop this pathetic loser, Tom Massie, like the plague!”
Massie responded with an ironic position on X that the president “declared so much war to me today, this should require an act of the congress”. Massie joined last week with a number of democratic legislators to stimulate the alarm in relation to potential American military intervention in the Middle East without authorization from the congress recognized by the Constitution.
While Massie was not facing a re -election competition until 2026, Trump has already unveiled a plan to challenge it and further apply loyalty in the ranks of the GOP.
“The good news is that we will have a wonderful American patriot against him in the republican primary, and I will be very hard in Kentucky,” added Trump, without naming a potential primary opponent. “Maga does not concern lazy, large and non -productive politicians, of which Thomas Massie is certainly one.”
Massie, which is known for her free libertarian opinions, has already survived the main challenges and has declared to Axios, who reported the effort to ignore it, that “any serious person planning to run should spend money on an independent survey before leaving the marshy consultants to take them for an embarrassing ride”.
Who is Thomas Massie?
Massie, 54, was born in Virginia-Western and obtained a baccalaureate and a master’s degree in MIT engineering in the 1990s before turning to local politics in 2010, when he ran and won the race for Lewis County Executive Judge, Ky., In the middle of the tea wave.
In 2012, after the representative era. Geoff Davis announced his retirement in the 4th district of the Kentucky Congress, Massie, who described himself as a “constitutional conservative”, won the republican primary in a landslide. When Davis resigned early, Massie won the special elections of the same day and the general elections to succeed her, taking office two months earlier than his first -year compatriots elected in 2012.
One of the first Massie movements was to vote in January 2013 against the leader of the John Boehner party for the president, opting rather to vote for his Libertarian colleague Justin Amash. (Boehner narrowly won the speaker but was going to resign in 2015. Amash would continue not to present himself to the re -election in 2020 and to temporarily leave the Republican party after having won the anger of Trump for a constant criticism of the president and supported his indictment.)
Since then, Massie has made a name for himself by voting regularly against bills, often breaking with her caucus and sometimes the siege of Democrats. In 2013, Politico nicknamed him “Mr. No. “
In 2016, Massie said he would vote for Trump but would do everything he could to “brake it” if he acts unconstitutionally. In 2017, Massie tried to explain how the same movement that propelled him in office could also propel someone like Trump, saying to Washington examiner: “All this time, I thought they voted for libertarian republicans. But after a soul search, I did when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] And I, in these primaries, they did not vote for libertarian ideas-they voted for the craziest son of a B —– in the race. And Donald Trump won the best in class. “”
During Trump’s first mandate, Massie was part of a small group of Republicans who joined the Democrats to try to prevail over the veto of Trump’s law which would block its national emergency declaration on the border in 2019. Act.
In March 2020, Trump described Massie as a “third rate stands” and urged the Republicans to throw him out of the party after the Congress member tried to force a race for a pandemic relief of 2 billions of dollars. The stunt won the reprimand on both sides of the aisle, with the former candidate for the Democratic presidential election and former secretary of state John Kerry publishing on social networks: “Breaking News: the member of the Massie Congress was tested positive to be a hole of his.
But in a U-turn, Trump approved Massie in 2022, calling him “a first-rate defender of the Constitution”.
In 2022, Massie was the only “no” of voting on a symbolic measure condemning anti -Semitism, a decision which he defended as a position against “censorship” but criticisms described as a “performative contractualism”.
Why Trump wants Massie
Massie was again on the wrong side of Trump in 2023 when Trump shared articles on his social platform of truth which called the “wolf in sheep’s clothes” and said that he “helped to destroy the tea party and now he tries to destroy Maga”.
This did not prevent Massie from approving Trump in the 2024 general elections after having previously supported the Governor of Florida, Ron Desantis, in the republican primary.
But Trump finally had enough Massie in March, when Massie voted against a continuous resolution to finance the federal government until September when the Republicans worked to adopt a legislative tax and Trump expenditure package, the “Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB).
The President went to Truth Social to call on a main candidate to challenge Massie in 2026: “He should be primitive, and I will conduct the accusation against him. It is just another court, which has too many problems, and is not worth the fight. He reminds me of Liz Chaney [sic] Before his historic and record fall (loss!). The inhabitants of Kentucky do not support it, just look. Do I have takers ??? “”
Massie pushed criticism, saying to Politico: “I had Trump antibodies for a while – I needed a booster.” He said at the time that he did not intend to engrave Trump’s pressure and believed that the resentment of the president “would blow”.
When Massie continued to express strong opposition to the OBB, which should add billions of billions to the national debt, Trump said about Massie in May: “He does not understand the government” and “should be voted beyond power”.
The OBBB finally went to the House in May, when Massie was one of the two Republicans of the lower room to vote against. He has not yet succeeded in the Senate, in particular after Massie found a sympathizer to her concerns concerning the impact of the billionaire technological billionaire law.
Trump’s last Missive against Massie came when Massie became a leading voice against military intervention in Iran.
A few days after Israel launched an attack on Iran, Massie copardocated a resolution of war power with the representative Ro Khanna (D, California) aimed at preventing the United States government from engaging in “unauthorized hostilities”.
After Trump revealed American strikes on Iranian nuclear installations, Massie posted on X: “It is not constitutional.”
While some have categorized the Massie wing of the Maga base with regard to war as “isolationists”, Massie told CBS on Sunday that he rejects the label, preferring “non-interventionists”.
“We are exhausted,” he said. “We are tired of all these wars.”
How does Trump plan to beat Massie?
Trump devotes fire power to the campaign to oust Massie.
Axios reported that Trump’s main political advisers, Tony Fabrizio and Chris Lacivita, would launch a political action committee devoted to defeating Massie during the May 2026 primary.
Lacivita said that the CAP will pass “everything you need” to defeat Massie, which, according to the internal survey of the team, was lagging behind the president in terms of support.
To date, only one candidate, Niki Lee Ethington, has announced that she would compete for the siege of the Congress of Massie. The other names floated, by Axios, are the state senator Aaron Reed and the representative of the Kimberly Moser State.
“The long -standing opposition from Massie to the tax discounts of the family of President Trump’s families – and really everything to do with President Trump – ends,” Lacivita said in a statement. “The” little boy “of Thomas will be dismissed.”
