Thomas Massie is “weak and pathetic”, a “lowlife”, a “loser”, a “moron”; a “RINO” (Republican in name only) who has been captured by his “radical left flamethrower” wife. You don’t have to read between the lines of Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts to know he takes a dim view of the 55-year-old congressman from Kentucky, one of a handful of Republican politicians willing to defy the president. On a rainy day in March, Trump travelled to the state to tell voters to reject their congressman in an upcoming primary. In front of thousands in a packed warehouse, the president denounced Massie as a “complete and total disaster as a congressman and, frankly, as a human being”. “Shameful!” someone shouted. Trump raised his voice: Massie was “disloyal to the Republican Party, the people of Kentucky and, most importantly…the United States of America.”

Massie has crossed Trump on numerous occasions, especially in the past year. He voted against the bill to end the government shutdown last November, and against the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s tax‑and‑spending package—in both instances one of only two Republican congressmen to do so. He has tried to revoke Trump’s tariffs on Canada and to block America from attacking Venezuela and Iran without congressional approval.

Massie sees the war with Iran as unconstitutional and an attempt to distract from the fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal (“Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away”, he posted on X in March). His greatest political triumph came last autumn, when he co-authored legislation compelling the Justice Department to release files related to the paedophile financier. Until then, Trump’s grip over the Republican Party had seemed absolute. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was backed by every Republican bar one, was a colossal act of defiance from a party defined, until that point, by its submissiveness.