Trump also called for Massie to be kicked out of the Republican Party. That suggestion went nowhere, and during the Trump interregnum tensions seemed to thaw, despite Massie initially endorsing Ron DeSantis for President in 2024. When Massie’s wife died, Trump reportedly left him a kind voice mail. After Trump regained the Presidency, there was even some talk of Massie becoming Agriculture Secretary—cow money, on a much grander scale. Last year, however, Massie defied Trump on spending packages, including his One Big Beautiful Bill, and on Iran and Epstein; by June, Trump was back to labelling him a grandstander (a “simple-minded” one this time), and demanding his ouster. Massie, for his part, projected confidence, insisting that no candidate would be able to outrun him to the right, because he is “the original America-first congressman.” He even predicted that Trump, after seeing polling from his district, might not bother getting involved after all. But close Trump allies were already standing up a super PAC to unseat Massie, and, in October, Trump urged Gallrein to jump in. (Around the same time, Massie remarried, and Trump Truthed, “Boy, that was quick.”)
The race is now the most expensive House primary of all time, fuelled, in no small part, by those who oppose Massie’s critical stance toward Israel. Polls have been scarce, but several recent ones have suggested that Massie might be in trouble, and reports from the trail suggest likewise. The campaign has become a circus, and Massie is an odd duck—unbelievably, it’s taken me five paragraphs to mention that he lives off the grid and wears a national-debt ticker on his lapel. But the race has turned into a proxy for a more prosaic question: Can a Republican defy Trump in this day and age and still expect to win?
This isn’t a new question, and the answer, intuitively, would seem to be no. Since Trump returned to office, he has been particularly uninhibited in his assertions of power and desire to avenge those who cross him. And he has, indeed, been influential in shaping the midterms primary map, at the congressional level and below. Earlier this month, five state senators in Indiana who had rejected Trump’s heavy-handed efforts to redraw the state’s U.S. House districts for partisan advantage lost to Trump-backed challengers; on Saturday, in Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, who earned Trump’s enduring ire for voting to convict in the post-January 6th impeachment trial, failed even to make the primary runoff in his reëlection bid. (This despite Cassidy, a medical doctor, having beclowned himself by voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services.) National headline writers clearly saw both as a major flex. And yet this recent picture is nuanced. Some observers in Indiana, for instance, have noted that local issues—a casino project, property taxes—fed into the races there.
Massie’s result will likewise be interpreted through the totalizing prism of Trump. But there, too, reality is a bit messier. In 2020, Massie easily won reëlection, despite Trump having attacked him. During the 2022 midterms cycle, Trump did back Massie, as part of a wave of endorsements across the map, from the critical Senate race in Ohio to Georgia’s election for Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner. Pundits widely beheld the outcomes as a metric of Trump’s ongoing power, given that he was supposed to be in exile, and yet, as I wrote at the time, this framing obscured a more complex tangle of local factors, not to mention the likelihood that, in at least some races, candidates weren’t winning because of Trump’s endorsement so much as Trump had endorsed them because they were winning. As Massie noted last year, “Ultimately, the president hates to lose.” Then again, so does Massie, who has lately sought to stress that he agrees with Trump on most matters, and that he doesn’t see himself as running against him. (One recent pro-Massie ad took aim at “TRUMP TRAITOR WOKE EDDIE GALLREIN,” before showing an A.I. version of Gallrein fleeing Trump’s side in battle.) In the event of a Massie defeat, local disputes—from recriminations over funding for a bridge to Massie’s responsiveness to his constituents—will have played at least some role. Even a Massie win, as one strategist told Salon, wouldn’t necessarily justify clean conclusions about the President given the idiosyncrasies of Massie’s district, which stretches from the Cincinnati suburbs to the West Virginia border.
