March 12, 2025 - 6:30pm
Donald Trump managed to get his preferred spending bill passed in the House of Representatives without Thomas Massie. The Kentucky Republican’s was the only vote Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson lost in their bid to send the bill to the Senate and avert a government shutdown on Friday. In the process, though, MAGA subjected one of the Right’s best ambassadors to a fresh round of abuse in a doomed pressure campaign that never had a chance of succeeding.
âPOTUS is spending his day attacking me and Canada,â Massie posted online yesterday afternoon. âThe difference is Canada will eventually cave.â
Massie is an eccentric libertarian budget hawk who rarely comes to the table on deals like this one, and his principled position on spending is an asset to Republicans â even when it’s frustrating. Libertarian Sen. Rand Paul is already voting against the legislation as well. Massie agreed with an X post from Paul on Monday that said: âThe bill continues spending at the inflated pandemic levels and will add $2T to the debt this year. Count me as a hell no!â
As nervous Republicans tried to whip votes, Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday: âThomas Massie is a GRANDSTANDER, and the Great People of Kentucky are going to be watching a very interesting Primary in the not too distant future!â This threat, by the way, came as Trump’s former campaign manager Chris LaCivita posted âTick tock Tommieâ that same day.
Other budget hawks, including Rep. Chip Roy of the House Freedom Caucus, got on board with the bill by putting faith in DOGE, Russ Vought, and Trump’s intent to use impoundment power. Massie and Paul find this argument for adding to the national debt unpersuasive, though it managed to sway many of their fellow conservatives whose argument for slash-and-burn DOGE cuts is mostly predicated on the county’s dire fiscal health. They were willing to take a leap of faith, but MAGA insiders weren’t willing to let Massie be Massie. That is amusing, since they often benefit from his sharp edges when, for example, the congressman challenges Democrats on the events of 6 January 2021.
House sources arenât at all surprised by Massieâs decision on the CR. One senior staffer put it thus: âTrump doesnât really care about the ideological tribe affiliations. Some people just saying âHey, Massieâs a good guy, whatcha doing?â are putting themselves in the Conservatism First camp. LaCivita is interested in being the Trump First camp. Trump doesnât seem to prioritise one over the other, he just knows that each serves a purpose. And thatâs healthy.â
This is a smart way to handle party dynamics, but Trump’s lieutenants don’t seem to have understood the memo.
Massie, who’s never been afraid to oppose the President, was MAGA and MAHA before either movement was popular in the GOP. Attacking the nation’s debt pile, bureaucracy, intelligence agencies, and imperial foreign policy are all priorities Massie pursued before Trump forced the GOP to care.
Disagreeable as Massie is, the Kentucky Republican is a perfect brand ambassador for the Right on social and independent media, where his unique personal story and consistency appeals to younger voters distrustful of virtually all politicians. That explains why he has over a million followers on X, and over 100,000 on Instagram.
Want to Make America Healthy Again? Massie, an MIT-graduate, gave up lucrative work in the corporate world to build a thousand-acre homestead on his family’s land. As one site put it, his âoff-grid house is powered by solar panels and Tesla batteries run by a custom-programmed computer. Peach and apple trees grow next to a fully automated chicken tractor, complete with its own rain catchment systemâ.
Back in 2017, Massie told me that as he campaigned with Ron and Rand Paul, heâd pick up on a lot of excitement among voters. âAll this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans,â he reflected. âBut after some soul-searching I realised when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they werenât voting for libertarian ideas â they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.â
Trump is negotiating, so it’s fair not to put much stock in his stance on Massie this week. He’s taken a similarly hot-and-cold approach to Chip Roy. It’s hardball. But LaCivita and others like to impress Trump by talking tough and negotiating on his behalf, when the President is the one with all the leverage. In the process, they end up convincing supporters that a powerful weapon in MAGA’s arsenal like Massie is a damaged brand, not to mention needlessly pitting people against one another over a vote that was never going to change.
It’s short-sighted and self-serving. Indeed, Massie posted earlier today that he was raising money off the primary threats.
Roy and the Freedom Caucus have a great argument, but Massie was never going to vote for this bill. That’s part of his charm. When it comes to curiosities like the congressman from Kentucky, MAGA can’t have its cake and eat it too. Trump likely knows that, but does his army of consultants and influencers? The answer appears to be no.
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SubscribeFaith and money shouldnât mix.
If they do doge right and they have huge income from tariffs, they need to have a plan to get to balanced.
I donât think that is unreasonable.
Donât dig the hole deeper.
.
As a Kentuckian, I would love that, especially if Rand Paul supported and encouraged Massie to run for the office, because that would close the circle of humiliation for Mitch McConnell, who is in the runaway lead for most hated politician in the country. Rand Paul ran in the primary and defeated Mitch McConnell’s choice for the state’s other Senator back in 2010. McConnell wanted a sidekick and a yes man, and Rand had the audacity to oppose the self appointed ruler of Kentucky Republicans. McConnell has hated him since and barely even disguises it. He hates him even more now because Rand has far eclipsed Mitch in popularity and prominence in Kentucky and nationally.
Therefore, having Rand declare his support for Massie and having Massie win the primary would complete the circle of humiliation (the general election is all but a foregone conclusion unless things change drastically as Kentucky is deep red). McConnell is likely to back Daniel Cameron, who failed in his run for governor. Cameron will probably kneel and kiss the ring to get Trump’s endorsement as well. I’d love to see them lose and see Mitch handed the ultimate insult as he unceremoniously exits the political fray.
Yes, diversity of voices/opinions within the Republican party is a strength. And yet the MSM paints every disagreement between Rubio and Musk as if it were a fault rather than a healthy debate.
But, of course, they prefer the calm unanimity of a brain-dead president and drone Congresscritters. No diversity for them!
The Libertarian wing of the Republican party is old and entrenched in rural America. It is a reserve of that Jeffersonian spirit of America as a nation of independent farmers, ranchers, craftsmen, and other sorts of entrepreneurs. They come largely from highly rural districts where they are generally well known and well liked by their constituents, who are simply putting voting for the people who reflect their values. From his story, Massie seems to embody that tradition better than most. What he’s doing seems pretty typical of that wing. Historically, they have been apt to engage in this sort of obstructionist tactic. Trump isn’t wrong when he calls it grandstanding. They have a history of this.
The libertarian wing has almost always clashed with Republican leadership, sometimes quietly, and sometimes loudly. The Tea Party movement was a major boon for them as it brought many libertarian leaning Republicans to the House and Rand Paul to the Senate, strengthening their political faction to a degree not seen since before WWII when they were still rural, but mixed between the parties. The New Deal and WWII pushed isolationism out of politics for a long while and the civil rights movement that turned the South Republican conspired to put them almost exclusively in the Republican camp, but they were a fairly weak faction until the Tea Party. They then had enough members and collective pull to block a narrow Republican majority from passing legislation and forcing concessions that the leadership often opposed. Since that time, there have been fairly regular conflicts between the more libertarian leaning House Republicans and the leadership. They even formed their own “freedom caucus” within the House to lobby collectively for small government issues. McConnell and the old guard hate them perhaps more than Trump. McConnell has a particular grudge with Rand Paul because Paul beat McConnell’s hand picked choice for Kentucky’s other Senator. We might well Mitch get further comeuppance by having Rand pick a candidate, like Massie, to run for and win McConnell’s seat. I can’t imagine anything more infuriating to the man, and it makes me smile.
The rise of Trumpism shifted the dynamic considerably. There were still conflicts between the libertarians and the leadership under Trump, but the conflict is much reduced from what it was, as Trump’s version of conservatism is much closer to theirs than the old guard’s was. More than that, the libertarians savvy enough to navigate American politics in the globalist era, are not fools. They are aware that their recent success and Trump’s is ultimately derived from the same source, and they back him far more often than not. Rand Paul, for example, is often outspoken when he disagrees with the President, or anyone really, but during the primaries, he backed Trump over Haley unreservedly and unequivocally, echoing the old guard never Trumpers by declaring himself “Never Nikki”. He understands the political situation. For his part, Trump does seem to tolerate them to a greater degree, probably because their voters are his voters as well. He’ll blow smoke at Massie for opposing him because that’s basically his default reaction to anyone opposing him for any reason, but he won’t likely do much and probably knows he can’t. Massie’s district is not going to put in any candidate on the say so of any President, even one they mostly support. I doubt Trump will remember this when the primary comes round. He might not remember it two weeks from now.
Massie is the future.
No reference to Massie’s views on Israel? Wow…talk about an elephant in the room