Donald Trump has called for a MAGA base in Kentucky during the 2026 campaign. to oust GOP Rep. Thomas Massie in the midterms.
“Third-level Congressman Thomas Massie, a weak and pathetic RINO from the Greater Commonwealth of Kentucky, a place I love and won SIX TIMES, must be removed from office ASAP! the president raged on Truth Social Friday night.”
Massie has been a near-constant thorn in the side of the MAGA administration since Trump took office for a second term in January. The Kentucky representative has often spoken out as a lone Republican voice opposing the party’s budget proposals, including, most notably, the president’s Big Beautiful Act earlier in July.
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But more recently, Massie has also appeared alongside fellow GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as a vocal House critic of the MAGA administration’s handling of the late disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case.
In his Friday night speech, Trump claimed that Massie currently has about 9 percent of the vote “because the great people of Kentucky are wise to him — he only votes against the Republican Party, which makes life a lot easier for the radical left.”
Trump issued a lengthy “True Social Dialogue” Friday night in which he threatened to support a primary challenger to Rep. Thomas Massie next year. / Truth Social/Donald Trump
Although it was not immediately clear where exactly the president got his 9 percent. numbers, a small survey of likely Republican voters conducted by Kaplan Strategies in June found that only 23 percent he was viewed favorably by voters, and support dropped to 14 percent.
The president appears to have taken advantage of these weaknesses. In his “Truth on Social Media” message, Trump threw his support behind Capt. Ed Gallrein, who ran unsuccessfully for the Kentucky state Senate last year, as Massie’s potential opponent in next year’s primary. He added a photo of himself smiling with a former Navy SEAL in the Oval Office.
Ed Gallrein ran unsuccessfully for Kentucky state senator last year. / Truth Social/Donald Trump
“Unlike the ‘easy’ Massie, the totally ineffectual INFANT who let us down so badly, CAPTAIN ED GALLREIN IS A WINNER WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN,” Trump wrote. “If he chooses to challenge Massie, Captain Ed Gallrein has my full and total support. RUN, ED, RUN – MAGA!”
If Trump wants to fight, Massie is unlikely to take the challenge lying down. His team reported a significant increase of more than 1.7 million.
The heat of the Oval Office hasn’t deterred Massie from pushing for greater transparency about the Epstein scandal. He reached out in another line to further press the Trump administration over its reluctance to release new documents from the case.
Trump has long aligned himself with far-right conspiracy theorists who believe that the crimes of Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell stemmed from their role in an international pedophile ring allegedly composed of high-powered actors across the US and around the world.
That courtship, which came despite Trump’s long friendship with Epstein, whom he once described as a “wonderful guy” who likes women on the “younger side,” ended in July after the Justice Department and FBI ruled that Epstein’s death in 2019 was a suicide in police custody and that he did not have a long client list of rumors and accomplices.
The president has since added fuel to the fire by refusing to pardon Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges. Critics slammed the move as payback for Maxwell’s comments that appeared to exonerate Trump during a meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former criminal defense attorney.
Massie has now teamed up with fellow Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna to launch a so-called “dismissal petition” to bypass GOP leadership and force a House vote to require the Justice Department to release further investigative documents. Trump’s name is reportedly widely publicized.
The Republican representative only added salt to the wound last week by publicly praising his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for rejecting a White House funding proposal tied to the implementation of several right-wing policies identified by the MAGA Department of Education.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.