Trump’s Attacks Never Appear to Hurt Massie
The president has repeatedly attacked the libertarian Republican, but none of his blows seem to land.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump called Republican Congressman Thomas Massie a “moron.”
This is not remotely new for Trump. The president has called Massie a “grandstander” for holding up the $2 trillion Covid relief bill in March 2020. Trump has called for Massie to be thrown out of the Republican Party multiple times. He chose a Republican primary challenger to oust Massie in the mid-terms. This month the president even went after Massie’s wife.
I’m missing some. There have been a lot.
But the results of these attacks? It took only three weeks for Massie to be proven right about the wastefulness of the Covid relief spending six years ago, almost instantly vindicating him.
Betting markets show Massie as twice as likely to win his Kentucky primary than his closest competitor, the Trump-backed candidate and neoconservative Lindsey Graham donor Ed Gallrein. While Gallrein has benefitted from $1.8 million in spending from pro-Israel lobbying groups, it is well known that Massie has received $0 from AIPAC. Massie claims AIPAC hires paid influencers to attack him online.
Massie has received money from over 17,000 small donors nationwide in this campaign and reported a haul of over $300,000 in just online donations in January alone—a good look for the libertarian agrarian.
Massie is also a popular figure in right-wing media among major populist and conservative personalities like Tucker Carlson, who remains friendly with the president. “Of all the members of Congress that I know, Massie is the most principled,” Carlson said in October to Marjorie Taylor Greene, then still a GOP member of Congress.
All of this positivity while the MAGA president is constantly going after Massie. Not too shabby.
Trump’s “moron” quip this week against Massie also comes as the president’s approval numbers have reached new lows and also on the eve of a possible war with Iran.
Massie has been steadfast in opposing the administration starting a U.S. war with Iran and also sending any American foreign aid to Israel. These are not unpopular positions with millions of Republican voters, including in Kentucky. A Quinnipiac poll from mid-January showed that 70 percent of American voters, including 53 percent of Republicans—a simple majority—oppose U.S. military action against Iran over the protests.
Most of the time Trump gets angry with Massie for being one of the few Republicans who votes against massive spending and other kinds of questionable bills that the libertarian Republican congressman believes betrays his constituents.
Massie always explains his votes. Sometimes he even answers Trump’s barbs.
He did this on Thursday, responding on X, “The President of the United States called me a moron at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning because I’m still fighting for what he promised the American people: Reduce big spending, DOGE, no new wars, end foreign aid, defend 1A 2A 4A, prolife, and expose sex traffickers.”
Massie responses are typically calm and collected, sometimes comically but also truthfully exposing hypocrisy in the administration.
After Trump attacked Massie’s wife, whom he characterized as a “Radical Left ‘Flamethrower’” (which is not true), the congressman replied, “So now he’s attacking my wife who voted for him three times. Maybe someone told him she’s actually the one who suggested I ask Pam Bondi in person at a dinner when we would get Phase 2 of the Epstein files. Bondi said there were no more files. As they say, the rest is history.”
Millions of the Epstein files that the administration long downplayed were recently released due in no small part to the leadership efforts of Massie.
Massie might be constantly under fire. So far, he has been bulletproof.
The White House attacks never seem to diminish his profile or popularity in his district or even nationally. Part of this could be due to this not being a case of a genuinely MAGA-principled Trump singling out some dissident moderate Republican. No, their dynamic is as Massie described: a contrast between the president with the Kentuckian who still focuses on reducing spending, free-speech rights, gun and privacy protections, defending the unborn, and exposing the people involved with the late convicted felon and sexual abuser, Jeffrey Epstein.
These were issues Trump once campaigned on and now seems to pretend he never did. Massie is a constant reminder.
That has to annoy the president. At a minimum. Carlson said of Massie in October, “I don’t think there are many people in the country who live out Donald Trump’s own stated principles more precisely than Thomas Massie does.”
That’s high praise and a fair point.
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Trump said of Massie on Thursday, "There’s something wrong with him,” Trump added. “We call him Rand Paul Jr. They love voting no.”
Massie’s fellow Kentucky Republican, Senator Rand Paul, also often votes no on legislation Trump favors, almost always for the same reasons and against the bulk of their party. Trump is fed up with both of them; Massie receives the bulk of his fire these days.
And no one really seems to care.
