The Thomas Massie Lesson

National Review Online

Thursday, May 21, 2026

 

It turns out that trying to appeal to the audience of left-wing podcaster Cenk Uygur is not the way to win a Republican primary.

 

Representative Thomas Massie made a last-minute appearance with Uygur for a friendly interview before losing a bitterly fought reelection battle widely considered a referendum on the future direction of the GOP. While it’s always dangerous to overinterpret the result of a single primary, Massie’s defeat certainly cuts against the idea that there is a large, real-world market for his brand of conspiratorial right-wing populism and isolationism.

 

Obviously, the most important determinant of the race was President Trump’s unremitting opposition. The Kentucky Republican had crossed Trump enough times for the president to make defeating him a priority. On some issues, such as his opposition to tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill, Massie’s stances could be defended on principled libertarian grounds regarding free trade and fiscal restraint. But he also became a thorn in the side of Trump by pushing unfounded conspiracy theories revolving around Jeffrey Epstein. He led a push to force the Department of Justice to foolishly release files from its investigation of the deceased child sex offender, which unfairly tarnished people merely mentioned in the files, while revealing nothing to support the representative’s lurid theories. Massie took it further by affirmatively smearing innocent people. This disgraceful escapade alone meant he deserved to lose.

 

Yet the simplest way to view the race is that Massie has joined a long list of Republicans who got on Trump’s bad side over the past decade and no longer have jobs in Republican politics. Put in the context of the recent defeats of Indiana state senators targeted by Trump and Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted for the second Trump impeachment, Massie’s demise is the norm, rather than an exceptional event.

 

On foreign policy, Massie opposed Trump’s war against Iran, and was rabidly and obsessively anti-Israel. He not only opposed aid to Israel, which again, could be explained on libertarian grounds, but regularly accused supporters of Israel of having a nefarious influence on America and of displaying dual loyalty. A few months after the October 7 attacks, Massie posted a meme ridiculing U.S. support for Israel, accusing Congress of turning its back on American patriotism in favor of Zionism. He dismissed colleagues who supported Israel as paid puppets of the pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. When the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated group, poured millions into the campaign to defeat him, Massie made opposing AIPAC a centerpiece of his campaign. In defeat, he couldn’t get Israel off his mind, ungraciously saying of his opponent, “I would have come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent to concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

 

All of this engendered the opposition of pro-Israel groups, which has created another grievance for Massie and his supporters. But there’s no reason that virulently anti-Israel advocates should be immune from pushback from their fellow citizens who disagree with them. One would think a good libertarian would at least understand this.

 

Who knows how much the contention over Israel moved the district’s voters one way or the other. The outcome demonstrates, though, that the mindless anti-Zionism that has become popular with podcasters is not a ticket to success in Republican primaries.

 

The same is not true on the Democratic side. So far this cycle, Graham Platner, a socialist anti-Israel activist who for decades had a Nazi tattoo, drove Maine’s sitting governor out of the Senate primary. On Tuesday night, the Hasan Piker–endorsed Chris Rabb, who made opposition to Israel a key part of his campaign, coasted to the nomination in a Philadelphia-area district.

 

The top Democratic vote-getter in a San Antonio–area congressional district in Texas was Maureen Galindo, who has pledged to write legislation to turn an ICE detention center into a prison for “American Zionists.” She will now face a run-off against the saner candidate, Johnny Garcia. In contrast, Ken Paxton, a Senate candidate on the Republican side who has won Trump’s endorsement, is staunchly pro-Israel and fought antisemitism as attorney general.

 

These data points suggest that among Democrats anti-Zionism has become a litmus test for successful anti-establishment candidates, but that’s not the case in the GOP. Let’s hope that Cenk Uygur Republicans never become a thing.