The Principles of Thomas Massie
The Kentuckian is taking his stand, come what may.
President Trump couldn’t wait to announce the big news. Amid a stock market collapse he promised would only happen if Joe Biden was reelected, Donald and his team of online cheerleaders were hyping the re-release of 20-year-old episodes of his reality show The Apprentice on Amazon Prime Monday night.
Meanwhile, a man from Kentucky was focused on the key issues at hand, namely, the ever-increasing national debt and its dire consequences for the American people. Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑KY) was a firm “no” on another bloated, hastily written, last-minute continuing resolution that stands to further the desperate malady of debt that has suffocated our American enterprise this last half century.
For those who have followed the ebbs and flows of the Trump-led Republican Party, it would be hard to characterize Massie’s stand as anything other than principled, correct, and true red MAGA. After all, it was only 16 months ago that a highly contentious and politicized tug-of-war spearheaded by Trump’s initial AG pick Matt Gaetz removed the gavel from Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s hands at the behest of budget hawks who decried the McCarthy-led passage of another bloated, reckless CR.
“I’m not voting for the Continuing Resolution budget (cut-copy-paste omnibus) this week,” Massie wrote on 𝕏 Monday morning. “Why would I vote to continue the waste fraud and abuse DOGE has found? The CR is a UNIPARTY deal. It doesn’t fund the wall. It does fund USAID.”
Many of the very Republican congressmen who so loudly accused McCarthy of siding with the “DC Uniparty” for pushing through a similar CR in 2023 are suddenly silent now that Trump is in the White House. But not Massie—because Massie has a spine.
“The electoral mandate given to the President and Republican Congress dissipates with every day that passes since the election,” Massie noted. “Within a year, Congress will be totally ineffectual, paralyzed by concern about the 2026 midterm elections.”
Massie is right. The clock is ticking on Trump’s mandate. The tariffs, the sliding economy, the egg prices, the unaffordable houses. Whatever momentum Trump inherited in late January has largely dissipated. And by this time in October, the entire political machine will be churning toward the midterms, and any promise of a red wave mandate via Congress will be drifting speedily away into the distance. Trump’s team of flamethrowers was focused on a very different type of clock Monday evening.
“Tick-Tock Timmie,” threatened Trump’s campaign manager, Chris LaCivita, in response to Massie’s promise to vote “no” on the CR.
What began as an intraright brush fire had escalated into an all-out turf war by evening when Trump weighed in. In typical Trump fashion, he went for the scalp. The president compared Massie to neocon bootlicker Liz Cheney and demanded the Kentuckian “BE PRIMARIED.”
“I will lead the charge against him,” Trump promised. “He’s just another GRANDSTANDER, who’s too much trouble, and not worth the fight.”
At a time when many within the MAGA movement see Massie as the logical choice to take over Mitch McConnell’s seat upon the long-time senator’s retirement, Trump and his closest allies wanted war. But then, something that rarely occurs among the mostly-lockstep MAGA movement took place. One after another, critical coalition members stepped up to protest Trump’s battle cry against Massie as LaCivita’s tweet was ratioed into the deep rings of 𝕏 hell.
“Seems increasingly like the only people interested in fulfilling Trump and Musk’s promises are Thomas Massie and Rand Paul,” read one viral tweet in response to the fracas. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said Trump was “wrong about Massie” in another viral post.
“Calling Massie a ‘rino’ is asinine,” Walsh opined. “Accusing him of not being America First is even dumber.”
Ron Paul, the man who was lionized for leading the charge against reckless government spending during his decades of service, was dumbfounded by Trump’s threat.
“Thomas Massie earned the wrath of the president because he said ‘there’s no way I can vote for this,’” Paul said on his Tuesday show. “He happens to believe that you’re supposed to follow your oath of office; it’s no more complicated than that.”
“Whoever told Donald Trump to post about Thomas Massie just now should be fired,” read a comment that garnered nearly 20,000 likes on 𝕏. “I’ve never seen this quick of a push back and condemnation against something Trump has said by his most loyal followers.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R‑KY), a politician as principled as any in the Republican coalition, agreed with Massie’s assessment of the CR: “The bill continues spending at the inflated pandemic levels and will add $2T to the debt this year.”
In an extra show of support on Tuesday morning, Paul’s wife Kelley posted an image of the Paul and Massie families at Christmas with text that read “[Thomas and Rand] have analytical minds and vote on principle. We need more of them!”
If anyone was surprised by the swift condemnation of Trump’s attempt to oust Massie from a seat he has solidly held for 13 years, it may have been the president himself. Though Massie has left no questions about his difficulties working with Trump, and though the Kentucky Congressman initially backed DeSantis in the Republican primary for president, Massie is beloved by many of Trump’s most ardent supporters, those who see Trump as a vessel for economic and anti-war positions that once sat uncomfortably on the fringes of the Republican Party.
The good people of Kentucky have never voted for Massie because Trump instructed them to, and it’s doubtful they’ll pull their support now. For in Massie is a premise and a promise not often found amongst the traders and fame-hounds who occupy our Congress—a man of principle. A politician who believes in the substance of the ideas he put forward on the campaign trail.
Massie’s hard “no” on the CR is exactly why he has so easily retained his Congressional seat despite attempts by well-funded primary opponents to unseat the MIT grad. The very constituency that makes up Trump’s base has explicitly called for and voted for politicians who will make the hard choices to eliminate government waste and spending. If anyone has disappointed the MAGA base, it’s the go-along, get-along members who gleefully bend the knee at the president’s call.
“If it passes this week, the CR obligates Trump (from now until September) to spend the same amounts of money on generally the same things Biden spent money on in his last 15 months in office,” Massie wrote to 𝕏. “The election was the war. You won it. Now Congress is squandering that victory.”
On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R‑LA) refused to call for Massie’s ouster when asked about Trump’s threat.
“I’m in the incumbency protection program,” joked the Louisiana representative. “I consider Thomas Massie a friend. He’s a thoughtful guy. I guess he’ll tell you he’s doing what he thinks is right, but I vehemently disagree with his position, and I’ll leave it at that.”
The key phrase in that statement is “he’s doing what he thinks is right.” It’s a phrase not often uttered in Washington.
Massie’s allegiance is not to himself or his bankroll. As of this writing, he has yet to cash in on a memecoin to enrich his family. He takes no money from AIPAC, the “babysitters” of Congress. He doesn’t wheel and deal at the drop of a Silicon Valley billionaire’s hat. When it became clear the Covid pandemic would destroy the world we knew, he didn’t run to his stockbroker and place bets on options or fire-sell his portfolio to the advantage of his immediate kin. Others did. And as they did, Massie stood in the fire of the House chamber and demanded a recorded vote on the passage of a $2 trillion Covid relief package. He received scorn and hatred from both parties at that moment but earned something much more prized—respect from millions of MAGA voters who struggled to understand the absolute mania sweeping the Western world and its ineffectual and absent leaders.
In many ways, the troubling economic conditions we are living through today began the very moment that absentee voting roll was called. Had Trump stood in the breach with Massie and called for Republicans to rout another reckless, hurried spending measure that led to a runaway printing machine, it is likely the severe stagflation numbers we are seeing now might have never happened.
At the very core of the MAGA movement sits the reasonable and well-founded belief that the vast majority of congressional members are in it for themselves, not the people who put them there. It’s where the term “Uniparty” originated. The idea that while members of Congress may say the right things on the campaign trail and in softball TV interviews, rarely do they come through when the bright lights are on, when it matters, when the votes are counted in Congress. It’s why the wars never end. It’s why the relief never comes. It’s why every year we all helplessly watch as another rushed omnibus or CR bill, so thick they would take weeks to actually parse, are voted through with ease to pile on more and more debt threatening the economic security of our nation’s future.
But the principles of Thomas Massie refuse to bend. MAGA, America, and her people are all a better nation because of it.
The post The Principles of Thomas Massie appeared first on The American Conservative.