The Axe Finally Falls upon Thomas Massie

By Jeffrey Blehar

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

 

Thomas Massie is gone, and in the end it wasn’t even terribly close. As of this writing, he has lost his race for renomination to Trump-backed Ed Gallrein by a nearly ten-point margin, 54.4–45.6 percent. Those in the media who wished to write a story about how a beloved local politician held on against the Trumpist onslaught will need to revert to a much more predictable lede tomorrow morning: Within the party itself, Trump reigns supreme.

 

And although my many libertarian friends have found nice things to say about Massie over the years, I will miss him significantly less. Many of my colleagues are convinced he is a barely veiled antisemite; I merely think him crazy, and have grown tired of crazy people in Congress. What Massie called “principle” ended up expressing itself in little more than mindless oppositionalism. Massie famously said that he was initially mistaken about his voters; he thought they wanted libertarian “Tea Party” economics, but realized soon they wanted him to be the “craziest son of a bitch in the race.”

 

But you can’t out-crazy Donald Trump in a one-on-one matchup. (Unless you’re a mullah.) For the last several weeks, I watched as the mainstream media sought to portray this race as a jump ball. It certainly was fiercely contested — $32 million has now been flushed down the toilet to fight out the results of one safe-seat primary — but I never thought Massie would survive direct presidential intervention, especially not after having genuinely enraged many of his own constituents by conspiring with Democrats to force a release of the so-called “Epstein files.” It was one step too far, one too many spanners tossed into the works.

 

Don’t weep too hard for Thomas Massie. He has long promised that, if he ever lost, he would be happy to idle away his days on his hand-built home on his secluded estate, appreciating the beauties of life off the grid and away from the hugger-mugger of it all, and now he will get his chance. Instead, weep for the tens of millions of dollars squandered in internecine warfare, and all to prove a point nobody disputes: Even amidst his national political ruin — November is now shaping up to be a butchering of World War I–level proportions — Donald Trump still commands the loyalty of his troops.