President Donald Trump is unhappy with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) for impeding short-term spending plans, vowing to “lead the charge against him” in a Republican primary and even likening the Kentucky lawmaker to former Rep. Liz Cheney “before her historic, record breaking fall (loss!)”
“The people of Kentucky won’t stand for it, just watch,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president also called Massie a “third rate Grandstander” and said the GOP should “throw Massie out of the Republican Party!”
Actually, those last two Trump quotes about Massie come from 2020, when the Kentuckian bucked the White House by pressing for a recorded vote on a COVID-19 emergency spending bill. The legislation ultimately passed. “[Trump’s] bill signing happened right on time,” Massie told me at the time.
Trump didn’t actually end up endorsing Massie’s primary opponent in the next election. But Cheney, then the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, donated money to lawyer Todd McMurty’s anti-Massie campaign.
Many Republicans have ended their political careers by fighting with Trump, who is now at the zenith of his political power. Few in the party want to do anything to stall the momentum of Trump’s second term, with a government shutdown adding to the narrative of economic uncertainty amid stock market unease with the tariff blitz. The stopgap funding bill Massie opposed passed the House on Tuesday despite the congressman voting against it.
There are nevertheless many reasons to think Massie is in a different category than Cheney, which would make him more difficult to primary than the former Wyoming Republican congresswoman and Never Trumper.
First, Massie has a base of libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives nationally. Cheney had some Republican support she had inherited from her father, the former vice president who was well past his political prime by the time she was challenged by now-Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY). But her real base was in the media and among Never Trump operatives, neither especially helpful in a Republican primary.
Second, Massie’s base has considerable overlap with Trump’s. Both come out of the tea party movement of more than a decade ago. Both are substantially populist. On moving toward a less interventionist, “America First” foreign policy, combatting the deep state, and pursuing DOGE-style spending cuts, Massie wants to go further than Trump does.
Massie later came up with a theory of how the tea party powered both libertarian and more government-friendly national conservatives, including Trump. “All this time,” he once told the Washington Examiner, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race.”
That wasn’t the spirit Cheney was channeling at the end of her stint in Republican politics.
Third, cutting government spending still animates much of the Republican base, even if GOP presidents and Congresses have generally failed to deliver while in office. The national debt has blown past $36 trillion. Conservatives have been especially willing to fight these battles, even when it means risking government shutdowns or standing up to Republican leadership.
The same simply cannot be said for Jan. 6 and various Trump-as-threat-to-democracy concerns. It was not where very many rank-and-file Republicans were coming from.
Relatedly, Cheney became monomaniacally focused on opposing Trump in one of the states where he was most popular. Trump broke 70% of the in Wyoming in 2024 and came close in both 2016 and 2020. In two of the last three presidential elections, Wyoming was Trump’s best state.
It is therefore not surprising that Cheney would lose a Republican primary by 37.4 points in such a state while repeatedly attacking Trump and, by implication, many of his voters. Massie has bucked Trump on occasion, but has never positioned himself as aggressively anti-Trump, even in contrast with a fellow libertarian like former Rep. Justin Amash, much less Cheney. A 2020 Trump campaign official said Massie sought reelection that year as a “Trump Republican.”
Massie endorsed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in the 2024 presidential primaries while Cheney backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the general election, appearing with the Democrat on the campaign trail.
None of this is to say Trump couldn’t pose a real problem for Massie, or any Republican, in a primary. Jeff Sessions went from running unopposed in a 2014 general election for Senate in Alabama to failing to break 40% of the vote in a Republican primary runoff six years later following his break with Trump.
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Loyalty to Trump is important to the MAGA base. Trump also wants to weed out lawmakers who make it difficult for Republicans to govern with their narrow House majority as much as he seeks any particular ideological conformity within the party.
Massie is nevertheless a different political animal than some of Trump’s past intraparty foils.