This Republican is a 'dying breed' falling victim to Trump’s 'personality cult'

Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, there may be no member of his own party who has drawn more of his ire than Senator Thomas Massie (R-KY). Now, with polls showing that a Trump-backed primary challenger may end up kicking Massie out of Congress, Reason magazine editor in chief Katherine Mangu-Ward argues that America would be worse off without the leadership of this “dying breed” Republican.

As Mangu-Ward explains, while Trump has called Massie “a complete and total disaster,” “Their falling-out wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Mr. Massie votes with his party 91 percent of the time. He shares MAGA’s distrust of the administrative state and MAHA’s suspicion that federal health and agriculture bureaucracies are too cozy with the industries they regulate. He was drinking raw milk before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made it cool.”

But Massie has managed to butt heads with Trump over a number of key issues, perhaps most notably, his refusal to give the president what he wants above all else: unquestioning loyalty. While Trump has accused him of being “disloyal to the United States of America,” what he really means is that Massie is not sufficiently loyal to Trump himself.

And according to Mangu-Ward, Massie’s “independent streak is what makes him so irritating to his party, and so useful to it. A movement that cannot tolerate a Thomas Massie has become exactly what its critics say it is — a personality cult with principles grafted on after the fact.”

Now as we increasingly see the cost of putting the cult before principles, Mangu-Ward describes Massie as a “vanishing breed” of Republican who stands on ideals rather than conceding to the mob.

In describing Massie, Mangu-Ward paints the portrait of an individualist Libertarian thinker who lives a pastoral life inventing electrical gadgets for farmwork. She writes, “This is not exactly the standard résumé for a member of the House Judiciary Committee. ‘I’m on the Judiciary Committee because I know about patents,’ he told me. ‘Not because I’m a lawyer — because I’m not a lawyer.’ He is there, he says, to represent ‘small tech and garage inventors.’”

Massie was educated to be an electrical engineer, which Mangu-Ward says is integral to his approach to politics, explaining, “Once Mr. Massie locks in on the technical details of a topic, it’s hard to shake him out of it, a common trait in an engineer and an unusual one in a politician. ‘In electrical engineering, if you have a circuit board,’ he said, ‘if it’s got a thousand wires in it, and one of them’s not connected, then the whole board is junk.’ That focus, he added, is ‘how we get the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed.’”

It was precisely his involvement in pushing for the release of the Epstein files that made him Trump’s target.

While for years he’d thought of the Epstein case as little more than “an internet conspiracy,” he became skeptical when the Trump administration refused to release anything noteworthy. As Mangu-Ward writes, “Why are they going to these lengths to pretend they’d released something they hadn’t? he wondered. The question stayed with him. So did the testimony of Epstein survivors. It ‘was like a level of evil I hadn’t even contemplated,’” he said.

Another of Massie’s tendencies that has attracted Trump’s anger is his propensity for voting no. As Mangu-Ward explains, “Mr. Massie has frequently been the lone no vote on sanctions, foreign-policy resolutions and symbolic condemnations that most members would rather pass quickly and forget… His theory is that the lone no vote forces everyone to ask what was in the bill or resolution, or ask questions about, say, spending, as in Mr. Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill. He was one of two House Republicans to vote against it.”

As a consequence, Trump has not only made many personal attacks against Massie — as Massie noted, “He found a way to insult my late wife and my new bride and me at the same time.” — but endorsed Massie’s primary challenger, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein.

The primary is next week, and while Mangu-Ward cites a poll that shows Massie in the lead, newer numbers are not so positive for the incumbent. Trump won the district with 68 percent of the vote in 2024, so it was at least then deep MAGA territory.

Massie says that if he loses, “’nobody will ever hear from me again.’ He will not run for president, or Senate, or governor. He will disappear back to the farm to work on a few new patent ideas.” Were that to happen, says Mangu-Ward, “Congress, and the Republican Party, would be worse off without the friction and clarity Mr. Massie provides.”