President Donald Trump solidified his iron grip on the Republican Party on Tuesday by vanquishing one of his final GOP political foes, Rep. Thomas Massie.
The Kentucky congressman was one of the last members of the party serving in Congress willing to stand up to Trump in an age where the president demands personal loyalty above all else.
The seven-term congressman lost his primary to Trump-backed Republican challenger Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL and farmer who pledged to help the president advance his agenda.
The Associated Press called the race at 7:54 p.m., with Gallrein clinching 54.4 percent of the votes.
During his concession speech, where a crowd of his supporters frequently interrupted him with cheers of his name, Massie joked about his wife’s experience at the polls earlier in the day.
“She voted this morning, and she came out, and she said, ‘Well, that was a wild experience. That was great. I never imagined that would happen.’ And I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘I got to vote for my husband and my favorite congressman.’ I said, ‘That’s practically a throuple!’”
“When did bipartisanship become a dirty word in this country?” Massie said. “If the legislative branch always votes with the president, we do have a king,” he said, but if they follow the constitution, “we have a Republic.”
“We ran a race that you can be proud of,” the congressman continued before jabbing at Trump’s desperate efforts to undermine him. “When I was called a moron at the prayer breakfast, I said, ‘I’m glad I’m in his prayers.’”
“We weren’t running against Ed Gallrein. We weren’t running against Donald Trump. We were running for what we believe in,” he said.
Asked by reporters about Massie’s projected loss during his Congressional Picnic Tuesday evening, Trump said it “wouldn’t surprise me,” according to CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes.
“He was a bad guy,” he said of Massie. “He deserves to lose.”
Gallrein appeared on Fox News’s Hannity shortly after his victory to thank Trump and rail against the “radical left Democrats.”
“It was a David versus Goliath,” Gallrein told host Sean Hannity. “I was the underdog. I want to thank the president, I want to thank the conservative Republicans from this district, and my supporters and team because it sends a message that we the people are going to stand up.”
The president previously said that all he needed was a “warm body” to take out his Republican nemesis, but polling out of Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District remained tight for much of the race before millions were dumped on the primary in the final stretch.
It was the most expensive House primary in U.S. history as the president’s closest allies targeted the conservative lawmaker, who Trump deemed the “worst congressman in U.S. history.”
It was the latest in a series of GOP-on-GOP battles where the president recently aimed to take out Republicans he deemed not loyal enough to him. Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary in Louisiana on Saturday.
Trump has been out to get Massie for months as the Republican congressman has defied the president repeatedly and refused to fall in line like the vast majority of his GOP colleagues.
The Libertarian-leaning congressman has voted against Trump’s agenda a series of times, including against his tax law last summer. He has also been a vocal critic of the president’s military interventions and blasted Trump’s ongoing war in Iran.
But perhaps no issue enraged Trump more than Massie’s defiant push to have the Jeffrey Epstein files released. After the Trump administration refused to voluntarily release all the documents, the Kentucky Republican led the charge in the House to force the release of the files.
He and a bipartisan group of members held press conferences, met with Epstein survivors, and eventually gathered enough support to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
While Trump signed the legislation in the end, he’s been furiously gunning for Massie ever since. The Epstein effort also contributed to the president’s fallout with former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who ended up resigning from Congress earlier this year.
The president has repeatedly posted a series of attacks against Massie on Truth Social, including at times going so far as to lob personal attacks on his wife and marriage.
In a Monday post urging his supporters to oust Massie ahead of Election Day, Trump called the Kentucky Republican a “Weak and Pathetic RINO,” the “Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman in History” and a “totally ineffective LOSER” all in one post.
The president also posted a video from the Oval Office, urging voters to “put him out of business” and that Massie is “so bad.”
The president even traveled to Hebron, Kentucky, in March where he went on a diatribe against Massie and called Gallrein on stage during an event.
During his scorched-earth tirade, Trump called Massie disloyal, a loser and a disaster. He even said he was just looking for a “warm body to beat Massie” before praising Gallrein’s “big, beautiful brain.”
In an unusual move, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth traveled to Kentucky on Monday to campaign with Gallrein and blast Massie.
Despite the constant attacks, Massie has refused to stand down, trying to bridge his differences with the president while continuing to needle him on certain issues. The Kentucky Republican in the deeply red district even put out his own ad, where he claimed he needed to “address the elephant in the room” and touted the many instances where he agreed with Trump.
Massie ran uncontested in the general election in 2024. In 2022, he won the district with 65 percent of the vote. When he was challenged in the 2020 GOP primary, he came out on top with 81 percent of the vote.
But this primary has been dramatically different, with Trump-aligned groups spending millions on ads attacking Massie. The intense showdown is now the most expensive House primary on record, with nearly $33 million spent on ads.
Gallrein spent nearly $11 million while Massie spent $7.6 million. Nearly $8 million was spent on attacking Massie, while groups dropped more than $6 million on anti-Gallrein ads.
