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Last summer, President Donald Trump orchestrated a primary challenge against Rep. Thomas Massie, who’d become the lone House Republican willing to occasionally stand up to the president—at least the only one who wasn’t retiring. But the race has turned into a proxy fight over, well, just about everything.
It’s a referendum on Trump. It’s a fight over Israeli influence in American politics. And the final frenzied days of the campaign, expected to be the most expensive primary in US history, have also set the stage for a MAGA vs MAGA showdown, providing a new opportunity for grifters, podcasters, and a cast of wannabe influencers to join in the fray—or leverage it for a comeback.
Ahead of today’s primary vote, Trump has used the full power of his office and his surrogates in right-wing media to pummel Massie in an unprecedented campaign against a member of his own party. On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took a break from the Iran war and attacking civilian vessels in the Caribbean to fly to Kentucky to rally against Massie. Trump himself issued a video:
As the election has become closer, Trump’s media surrogates have ratcheted up the absurdity as they reach for any possible angle they hope might weaken the MIT-trained Kentucky farmer and inventor. Right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer posted a video interview with Cynthia West, a woman who claims she dated Massie shortly after his wife died.
Loomer spent much of Monday promoting her two-hour interview with West, in which they seem to have spent most of the time discussing Massie’s sex life. West’s story has grown increasingly salacious, as she claimed that Massie possesses a “boner phone” that he allegedly used to communicate with women secretly. And Loomer posted texts in which she claims he refers to his penis as “pinecone,” a virtual campaign whose impact on Kentucky voters was hard to measure.
Massie has denied any wrongdoing and called the whole episode politically motivated. A libertarian hero with a cult following among young conservative men, Massie has his own band of irregulars who’ve rallied to his aid. Corralled by Matt Kibbe, an early organizer from the same tea party movement that produced Massie, they flooded into Kentucky this weekend to hang out at his farm. Massie showed them how he could mow the lawn, make pizza in his wood-fired oven, and play the banjo, while they made podcasts about it all.
Massie did bring in a few big names as well. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) made the pilgrimage, as did Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). After Boebert’s appearance, Laura Loomer promptly boosted West’s claims that Boebert had had sex with the candidate. Trump subsequently called Boebert “weak-minded” for campaigning for Massie and suggested that “anybody who can be that dumb deserves a good Primary fight!”
Then there was Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people, killing two of them, during the 2020 George Floyd protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse had been previously scheduled to appear at a pro-gun campaign event for one of Massie’s acolytes, State Rep. TJ Roberts, on May 16. But while he was in town, Rittenhouse volunteered for Massie, whom he called “the greatest congressman, I believe, in a very long time…He supported me from the beginning.”
Rittenhouse’s endorsement prompted an outpouring of hate on social media, where other MAGA Trump supporters now decided that their one-time Second Amendment champion was a “douchebag.”
Massie also drew support from Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia group. Rhodes boldly appeared at a campaign event with Trump’s nemesis, despite the fact that he would still be serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 riot at the US Capitol if Trump hadn’t commuted his sentence last year. He also probably stands to profit from Trump’s new $1.7 billion slush fund for victims of “government weaponization,” which he may not have considered when he wrote a full-throated endorsement for Massie on his Substack:
“In a Congress full of career politicians who bend the knee to establishment party leadership, special interests, and the Deep State, Rep. Massie stands on principle,” he wrote. “He actually reads the bills. He votes against unconstitutional spending, endless undeclared wars, surveillance overreach, and the erosion of our God-given rights. His loyalty is to the Constitution and to the American people, not to the swamp.
That is why I drove all the way from Texas to Kentucky to knock on doors for him.”
Trump’s self-proclaimed “Secretary of Retribution,” retired Green Beret Ivan Raiklin, joined the fray, coming in to support Massie against the president he’s found insufficiently committed to payback. “It is Thomas Massie vs the entire War Machine, Deep State, and Foreign Lobby,” Raiklin declared on social media. He spent part of Monday antagonizing CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was also on hand.
While you wouldn’t know it from all the competing factions, Massie is not running against Trump but against an actual candidate, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. His campaign handlers have largely kept Gallrein away from any reporters who might ask an unscripted question about something other than his devotion to the president. Even Raiklin, a fellow veteran, couldn’t get him to engage.
Gallrein also refused to debate Massie. “Some people have said that it may be the smartest decision he’s ever made,” Massie told me recently about a man that Trump backhanded as a “warm body” when he first endorsed him in his last-minute addition to the race in October.
Journalist Ken Klippenstein observed that Gallrein has explained his reticence by declaring his background “classified.”
“Gallrein’s campaign touts endorsements from unnamed military officers, their identities and other supposedly sensitive details redacted to burnish the security theater,’ he wrote. “The strategy seems to be to let Trump’s endorsement and the SEAL mystique do the work—and to avoid as much public scrutiny as possible. In the few appearances Gallrein has made, his message to voters is consistent: the most important things about him are classified, the president has seen the file, and that should be enough.”
Despite all the national interest, the money—the primary is expected to cost up to $35 million—and the political theater, the outcome of the Kentucky primary is likely to come down to the votes of the same tiny sliver of the Kentucky electorate that always picks the primary winner. In 2024, a presidential election year, only 17 percent of registered Republicans voted in Massie’s last primary. The highest turnout came from those 62 and older—that is, the Fox News crowd. Only six percent of the more youthful Republican podcast audience, those between 25 and 34, cast a ballot.
Trump has made sure that his sycophants on Fox stay on the anti-Massie message. Once a frequent guest on the network as one of the most conservative members of Congress, Massie hasn’t appeared on any of its shows since March 2025, just around the same time Trump first called for his ouster from Congress. Massie told me recently that the media blackout has been damaging. “Fox is the biggest source of information about this race,” Massie said, “given the viewing habits of people in my district.”
Recent polling indicates that this demographic is indeed all in for Gallrein, or at least, for Trump.
In a new poll released Monday, nearly 15 percent of likely voters had no opinion about Gallrein, compared with 6 percent with Massie. Nonetheless, he’s up by 7 points.
Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Gage Skidmore/ZUMA; Jaime Carrero/ZUMA; Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/ZUMA; Andrew Leyden/ZUMA; Marco Bello/AFP/Getty; Kenny Holston/Pool/CNP/ZUMA