Thomas Massie’s Loss and the President’s Wins
The GOP primary season so far has given us an important lesson: the base still stands squarely with Donald Trump. This should be the lesson incumbent congressman Thomas Massie takes away from his loss to Trump-backed Ed Gallrein in the most expensive U.S. House primary in history.
While Massie successfully parried Trump’s attacks in his 2020 primary, he couldn’t overcome the combined effort of the president and essentially the entire senior leadership of his administration in 2026. On voting day, Trump even utilized his seldom-used X account to reiterate his support for Gallrein, repeating his well-worn line that Massie is the “Worst Congressman in the History of our Country.”
The influx of money from billionaires like Paul Singer and Miriam Adelson clearly helped Gallrein. But contrary to the ubiquitous idea on the Left, campaign contributions aren’t the sole determining factor of who wins in politics. Massie was beaten because his constituents couldn’t look past the growing gulf between his concerns and those of the Trump Republican Party at large.
Many in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District likely admired his vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill—vintage Massie that harks back to his rise during the Tea Party wave in 2012. But in the 2026 race overall, his points of emphasis simply didn’t resonate with voters in his district.
Massie appeared to moderate on immigration and made his campaign far more about Israel’s influence on American foreign policy and Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged international pedophile cabal—topics that currently divide the televisual and online political coalitions on the Right, as Christopher Rufo has defined them. Going this route deflated Massie’s support with the MAGA base, which currently holds far more political cachet than online influencers.
Simply compare the vast differences between Massie’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s primaries. While Vivek is mostly despised on X, he easily bested his opponent. By contrast, Massie is mostly loved on X, but he decisively lost his race.
This doesn’t mean that there is no overlap between the digital and analog worlds. But it does indicate that Massie profoundly misunderstood our political moment. He breached the threshold of what his constituents were willing to entertain—and he demonstrated that their concerns about globalization, wages, and affordability took a back seat to those of the podcast class. Attacking Trump on a personal level—he’s called his administration the “Epstein Administration”—and holding press conferences with anti-Trump Democrats that went after the president is not the stuff of winning Republican campaigns.
The plaudits Massie received from the media and prominent leftists made matters even worse, especially with older MAGA primary voters in the Bluegrass State. He appeared to shift from being a Tea Party-esque principled libertarian standing up for his beliefs to someone eager to side with Trump’s many enemies.
As Massie became an increasingly outspoken critic of President Trump on both the public and personal levels, far-left individuals like California U.S. Representative Ro Khanna and Cenk Uygur voiced their support for him. As Daniel McCarthy has pointed out, garnering sudden new respect from Never Trumpers like The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and Bill Kristol—the man who went from neoconservative gadfly to being an open, proud Democrat—certainly didn’t help Massie’s campaign with the MAGA base. Neither did the constant stream of admiring profiles in the mainstream media, which is populated by journalists who aren’t good at hiding their disgust for Americans living in flyover country.
In all of this, Massie seemingly forgot one central fact: MAGA is a political phenomenon based around the politics and personality of Donald Trump. And the Republican Party is firmly Trump’s party in a way it wasn’t even in 2020. The president is the GOP’s kingmaker, and he remains the only conduit for a national revival.
Trump took over the Republican Party in 2016 and has never looked back. Meanwhile, the libertarian moment that Thomas Massie represents, which briefly surged with Ron Paul’s presidential campaign and his son Rand’s election to the U.S. Senate, has clearly passed. It was merely one of the many failed alternatives that couldn’t mount any credible opposition to the establishment Republicanism of the Bush era. That is, until Donald Trump came along and ignited the political counter-revolution that voters had been craving.
The message of immigration restrictionism, trade rebalancing, and putting a stop to endless war without victory—some of which have also historically been libertarian concerns—had a national constituency that balancing the budget, promoting free-market economics, and slashing entitlement programs never had. Trump found an unheard constituency and listened to their concerns—some of which mirrored his own over the previous decades—rather than waiting for the political elect to genuflect before his sterling political principles.
Trump repositioned many traditional Republican priorities, especially on trade, back at the center of the party’s national agenda. This means that given the realities of the Trump-dominated Republican Party, achieving political success necessitates working in concert with this realignment rather than against it. This is the key lesson that evangelical organizations such as the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission have forgotten. They have consistently signaled their anti-Trump bona fides rather than partnering with someone they didn’t care for to achieve good ends.
Despite all the noble efforts of the pro-life movement since Roe v. Wade, Trump was the efficient cause of the Dobbs decision in 2022. Perhaps another president would have theoretically nominated the right justices to overturn Roe, but that presupposes victory in a national election that not only energized the Republican base but also tore down the blue wall the Democrats had constructed. Only Trump could have done this.
This is an important lesson for Massie and other politicians and candidates who exist somewhat outside of the current Overton window. The era of individual politicians with their own brand cannot exist independently of the Trump-led Republican Party. Weak parties created an opening for the rise of individuals like Trump. But Trump has already taken that crown—and any attempt to subvert his rule of the party is doomed to political failure.
In a column analyzing Massie’s loss, Daniel McCarthy asks if this is the beginning of a “grand anti-MAGA alliance,” composed of “neocons, libertarians, and the establishment center-left” that will be competing in the Democratic primaries rather than the Republican ones. Although it is hard to contemplate Massie joining the Democrats, his loss could be an early foreshock of a much larger political shift in the post-Trump era.
The 2028 election will be the first election without Trump on the ballot in 12 years. And if polling of younger Americans is any indication, our politics will look quite different in the 2030s than it does under Trump’s GOP. A Republican agenda of the future will have to face head-on the problem of Total Boomer Luxury Communism at home and the U.S.’s relationship with a post-Netanyahu Israel abroad, among many other issues involving American foreign policy. Trump is only the first wave of the political realignment that began in 2016—a realignment that will far outlast his time in office.
As for Donald Trump’s political legacy, Massie’s defeat was one more arrow in a quiver that’s already quite full. Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial and is a foe of the MAHA movement, was the first sitting senator to lose his primary outright since Richard Lugar in 2012. Cassidy shockingly came in third place, receiving a lower percentage of the vote than Liz Cheney did when she was demolished in the 2022 Wyoming GOP primary.
In the Georgia governor’s race, Trump-endorsed current Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones is now in a runoff against Rick Jackson. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who battled with Trump after the 2020 election, didn’t get enough votes to advance to the runoff.
Add to this the loss of “principled” Indiana Republican state senators who opposed congressional redistricting efforts. Ryan Neuhaus rightly argued that “‘principles’ divorced from a constituency cannot elevate a movement; they give it a slow, painful death.” These state senators were beholden to norms that the Democrats had long since discarded.
So far in the 2026 Republican primaries, Trump’s sizable influence over the direction of the party has only increased.
The truth is that Trump remains the center of gravity in the GOP. Those who look to push the Overton window need to remember that crucial fact as our political realignment continues apace.
