President Donald Trump has long been able to bend Republican lawmakers to his will with a single online post. The mere hint of a threat that he might announce a member “SHOULD BE PRIMARIED” is enough to bring most GOP members into line.
Not Rep. Thomas Massie.
The 54-year-old former robotics engineer brushed aside that precise threat from Trump Monday night, even with the president vowing to “lead the charge” against him after Massie made clear that he would not vote for the Trump-blessed spending bill pushed by House Republican leaders.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Massie met the threat with a bemused shrug and a well-practiced joke about the situation: “He’s going after Canada and me today. The difference is Canada will eventually cave.”
Massie has earned the right to his lighthearted reaction. The president used almost the same language five years ago, after Massie single-handedly forced his House colleagues to return to Washington and vote in person on a Covid-19 response bill at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.
Trump at the time labeled Massie a “third-rate grandstander” and said he should be thrown out of the Republican Party. Massie went on to handily win a primary challenge, helped in part by the fact that his opponent had a history of racist posts online.
After the spending bill passed Tuesday evening, Massie said it “feels just like” the day he opposed the pandemic bill and suggested that “the missives directed at me weren’t to get me to change my vote — I never change my vote.
“I think they were to try and keep the other Republicans in line until they get this over to the Senate,” he added.
In a follow-up post Tuesday, Trump again labeled Massie a “grandstander,” also putting his title of “Congressman” in quotation marks.
Since rebuffing the last MAGA onslaught, Massie only burnished his maverick credentials. He won a spot on the House Rules Committee as part of a deal hard-right members struck with former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. That gave him considerable sway over what legislation made it to the House floor.
Later he turned against McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, playing a leading role in trying to get him replaced as speaker when the new Congress met in January. He relinquished his seat on Rules, and amid it all, his high school sweetheart-turned-wife, Rhonda, died.
“I don’t know how to say this without cussing, if they thought I had no Fs to give before, I definitely have no Fs to give now,” he told the Wall Street Journal recently.
On Tuesday, Massie responded to Trump online, calling a post attacking him “misleading.” However, he didn’t directly blame the president and instead said it was a “tweet from Trump’s account.” He separately made clear that he thought the House legislation he was opposing was not part of “Trump’s agenda.”
Massie said in an interview that he thrived on the criticism from the most powerful Republican of the 21st century: “I had the Trump antibodies for a while — I needed a booster.”
Yet it’s far from clear that he is immune from an all-out political assault from Trump. The president, caught up in his own reelection, never really engaged in Massie’s 2020 race, and Trump went on to endorse him in 2022 as a “conservative warrior.”
This time, the presidential attack was preceded by critical posts from top Trump strategist Chris LaCivita — indicating that there potentially could be more political firepower behind a new effort to oust Massie.
Besides the spending bill apostasy, there’s other reasons for Trump and his political orbit to take aim at the Kentuckian: Massie was one of six members of Congress to endorse Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign; another, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), was forced out of Congress after Trump endorsed against Good in a tightly contested primary last year.
Massie has a reservoir of support among the libertarian-oriented, fiercely anti-spending Republicans who came up as part of the tea party movement and now have moved toward MAGA. A handful spoke up in his defense this week, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who said Massie “has worked harder than perhaps any member of Congress to bring federal spending under control.”
Johnson offered mild support for the maverick: “Look, I’m in the incumbent protection program here,” said Johnson. “Thomas and I have had disagreements, but I consider Thomas Massie a friend.”
“I just vehemently disagree with his position,” he added. “But I’ll leave it at that.”
The question is whether Trump will actually follow through with his political threats this time. There’s reason to be doubtful: Trump recently threatened primary challenges against other dissident Republicans, including Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), without following through with an immediate endorsement. And history has shown that Trump does not have an especially long memory when it comes to Capitol Hill grudges.
Massie seemed well aware when he asked if Trump would hold a lasting grudge. “It’ll blow over,” he said.
Meredith Lee Hill and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
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