Donald Trump wants to keep Republican members of Congress in power through the rest of his term – but he also wants to use the midterms to punish those who deviated from the MAGA line. The Republican primary in Kentucky on Tuesday will show how far the president’s control over the party, its voters and the subsequent elections actually extends.
The race pits Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican who has represented Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District since 2012, against Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein – a former Navy SEAL.
“I didn’t see this coming, but my election has become a turning point for the entire country,” Massie wrote Tuesday morning as polls opened in Kentucky. “Today we are making history.”
Massie and Trump: old enmity
Massie – a staunch libertarian and former Tea Party member – has drawn Trump’s ire since his first term in office. For the first time in 2020, Trump called for consequences after Massie forced lawmakers to return to the capital during the Covid-19 pandemic – and demanded that Republicans “kick Massie out of the Republican Party!”
The rift between the two has only deepened since then. Last year, when Massie opposed passage of Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” – which included massive cuts to health care and social safety nets – the president wrote that “third-rate Congressman Thomas Massie, a weak and pathetic RINO from the great Commonwealth of Kentucky, a place I love and have won handily SIX TIMES, must be driven out of office as quickly as possible.”
Since then, Massie has become one of the few Republicans in Congress to publicly push the Trump administration to release the Epstein files and criticize American policy toward Israel and Iran. On Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller claimed on
Loyalty as the only benchmark
The Kentucky congressman has repeatedly rejected accusations of deliberate collaboration with Democrats made against him by Trump’s allies. He told a right-wing influencer on Monday that he “votes with the Republicans 91 percent of the time. And the nine percent where I don’t – they’re defending pedophiles, starting a new war or ruining our country.”
But Massie’s overwhelmingly Republican voting record means nothing to a president who sets unconditional, non-negotiable allegiance as his standard. Trump endorsed Gallrein as Massie’s challenger before he even entered the race, describing him as a “courageous combat veteran” and successful entrepreneur.
“Should he decide to challenge Massie, Captain Ed Gallrein has my complete and unconditional support. RUN, ED, RUN,” Trump wrote.
Gallrein’s backing from Washington
And Gallrein is running – with a political platform that promises unconditional loyalty to the president and his movement, as well as significant financial support from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is also pushing for Massie’s departure.
On Monday, Gallrein campaigned alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth – a sign of how directly the Trump administration is intervening in the attempt to get rid of a congressman critical of the president. Hegseth claimed he was there as a private citizen (hard to imagine such a distinction existing for a Cabinet secretary currently at war), and tried to link voters’ decision in the primary to support for the president. “President Trump doesn’t need more people in Washington trying to make a point, especially not from his own party. He needs people willing to help him win and vote with him when it really matters,” he said. “Thomas Massie’s record also speaks for itself: too much self-promotion, not enough good votes, years of acting as if difficulty were the same as courage. It’s not.”
In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump launched a detailed attack on Massie after attacking him over the weekend. “The great people of Kentucky have seen through Massie – he’s just voting against the Republican Party, making it very easy for the radical left,” he wrote. “Unlike the ‘Lightweight’ Massie, a completely ineffective LOSER who has so bitterly disappointed us, CAPTAIN ED GALLREIN IS A WINNER WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN.”
Trump is collecting victories – for now
Polls suggest Gallrein could actually wrest the nomination from Massie and reaffirm Trump’s control of the Republican base. So confident is Trump that his public pressure campaign against Massie will bear fruit that he has already set his sights on new targets.
On Monday, the president threatened his longtime loyalist Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) with a primary challenge of his own after she campaigned alongside Massie ahead of his primary. Boebert is one of a handful of Republicans not to side with Trump on the Epstein scandal and has refused to support providing additional funding for the war on Iran.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), once the human embodiment of MAGA politics, left Congress earlier this year after a public break with the president. Greene wrote Monday that only she and three other members of the Republican caucus – Massie, Boebert and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) – joined Democrats in signing the dismissal petition that forced a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Trump “instructed Speaker Johnson not to allow the vote, but we acted boldly against the President, did not back down, and overruled the Speaker to force the vote,” Greene wrote. In a separate post, she urged Kentuckians to “vote for Thomas Massie, who is the ONLY Republican who voted with me to defund Israel and who is against funding foreign wars!!!”
When primary election victories are not enough
It could be a futile attempt to keep Massie afloat. Aside from the polls showing Gallrein with the advantage, a number of Trump-backed challengers recently won their primaries in Indiana after the president threatened to give primaries to lawmakers who opposed his redistricting plan. Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost to Trump-backed challenger Rep. Julia Letlow (R-La.) and state Treasurer John Fleming, who advanced to a runoff. On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made the message to GOP members abundantly clear: “Anyone who tries to destroy President Trump will lose – because this is the party of Donald Trump.”
But while Trump is winning in these primaries, he could still be losing the war. The president’s approval ratings are at historic lows and continuing to fall. Americans are increasingly suffering from the rising costs of the war against Iran, which has driven up gasoline and fuel prices, fueled inflation and exacerbated an already fraught cost of living crisis. Democrats reject him more than ever, resentment within the Republican Party is growing, and the key independent voters who gave Trump victory in 2024 are running away in droves.
A MAGA candidate may do well in a closed primary with the president’s full attention — but Republicans tend to weaken when Trump himself isn’t on the ballot. Even if Massie’s congressional career doesn’t survive Tuesday, the consequences of two years of reckless governance could be presented in November.
