Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) lost Tuesday night’s House primary to President Trump’s hand-picked challenger, delivering another victory to the Make America Great Again movement.
Trump-endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein, a farmer and retired Navy SEAL, triumphed over Massie in the Bluegrass State’s Fourth Congressional District, 54.4% to 45.6%, with 74% of the vote counted when the Associated Press called the race a little before 8 p.m.
“For the same reason I entered as a Navy SEAL officer in 1983, because I had the audacity to think I could make a difference,” Gallrein said in a speech after winning. “I will serve this district, my party and my nation with that same audacity.”
Trump repeatedly urged his supporters to oust the seven-term congressman after Massie broke with the president on key votes and led the charge to release the files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday’s primary day, Trump took to X to call Massie a “Horrible Congressman” and praised Gallrein as “a true American Patriot.”
Massie’s defeat came on the heels of Trump’s successful intervention in the Louisiana Republican Senate primary against Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who had voted to convict the 45th president following his impeachment for incitement of insurrection following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
And Trump has already signaled that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) could be next on his target list by the time the Centennial State holds its primary June 30.
The Kentucky contest will go down as the most expensive primary race in US history, with more than $32 million spent on political ads, according to the firm AdImpact.
Trump-aligned groups like MAGA KY as well as pro-Israel groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) have spent millions of dollars seeking to unseat Massie over his votes against support for the Jewish state — as well as the president’s agenda more broadly.
Gallrein, who unsuccessfully ran for Kentucky state Senate in 2024, challenged Massie after the president and his allies made the seven-term incumbent a target for removal over his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s signature tax-and-spending legislation.
The MAGA KY super PAC even paid for an artificial intelligence-created ad accusing Massie of being “caught in a throuple” with “Squad” Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for voting against Trump’s tax cuts and funding for his border wall. Massie responded by calling the spot “defamatory.”
In recent years, Massie has voted with “Squad” pols against billions of dollars in US funding for Israel’s missile defense systems and against resolutions condemning Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 in Israel — including dozens of US citizens.
“I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” Massie lashed out during his concession speech in Hebron Tuesday night.
“There is a yearning in this country for somebody who will vote for principles over party,” Massie added, before addressing his supporters: “You all don’t like bullies, and you don’t tolerate them, and I love you for it.”
“If you always vote with the president,” Massie said elsewhere in his remarks, “you have a king.”
Trump has touted Gallrein, a retired captain in the US Navy, as straight out of “central casting” and “a true America First Patriot” and lashed out at Massie for “making life very easy for the Radical Left.”
“He is the Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman in History, voting against Tax Cuts, the Wall, Law Enforcement, and in favor of the Transgender Mutilization of our Children, Men playing in Women’s Sports, and so many more horrible things,” the president said in a Truth Social post Monday.
The president’s ire against Massie stretches back to at least 2020, when the Kentucky rep was the lone opponent of a $2 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, earning him the Trump moniker “third-rate Grandstander.”
Massie also made worldwide headlines last year when he spearheaded legislation compelling the Justice Department to disclose investigative materials on Epstein, the accused sex trafficker who died while awaiting federal trial in 2019, and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump gained support in the 2024 presidential election based on pledges to release the Epstein files, but the issue quickly became a political headache for the administration due to the 47th president’s past association with the deceased sex offender in the 1990s and early 2000s — even though no evidence has emerged that Epstein blackmailed wealthy or prominent individuals or that any others were implicated in his crimes.
Massie had responded to Trump’s onslaughts by positioning himself as more aligned with Trump’s agenda than Gallrein, needling his opponent as “Woke Eddie” and noting how the challenger shifted his political affiliation from Republican to independent after the 45th president won the White House.
Gallrein then changed his party registration back to the GOP after former President Joe Biden was elected in 2020.
“I’m not running against President Trump. Most of the people voting for me support President Trump, like I do,” Massie told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” hours before the polls closed.
“What endorsements I’ve gotten are from the pro-life groups, the pro-Second Amendment groups, because my opponent, he won’t debate,” Massie went on. “He won’t fill out the forms to say where he is on abortion, where he is on gun control … I’m running against an ‘AI’ candidate without the ‘I’. He’s created AI ads. He does his social media posts with AI and he hasn’t been to a single debate. He skipped all eight of them. He’s terrified of debating, and people don’t know who he is. There’s no enthusiasm for him.”
