Epstein, Iran and AI slop: inside the wild Trump vs Massie fight in Kentucky
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Thomas Massie, a renegade Republican who opposed Donald Trump’s Iran war and pushed for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, is facing the political fight of his life in the most expensive US House primary race ever.
The election, in a tight race to pick the Republican Party’s midterms candidate for Kentucky’s fourth district, is on Tuesday. Campaign groups have spent more than $30mn on advertising — a colossal sum to win a single seat in Congress.
Massie is up against Ed Gallrein, a former Navy Seal with the US president’s endorsement. The battle will test Trump’s hold over his Maga base, the power of his billionaire allies and the appeal of the libertarian congressman.
Trump’s campaign to stop Massie is a “big risk” for the president, the congressman told the FT on Friday.
If Massie wins, other Republican members of Congress will become “more vocal” in taking on “White House bullies”, he said. It was a reference to Chris LaCivita — who ran Trump’s 2024 campaign, and White House political director James Blair, dispatched by the president to Kentucky to deal with Massie.
“He stands to gain not much,” Massie added of Trump. “And he stands to lose a lot when they lose this race against me.”
Trump won Kentucky — a traditionally conservative state but one that elected Democrat Andy Beshear as governor in 2019 and 2023 — two years ago with about two-thirds of the vote.
The president has called Massie “the Worst ‘Republican’ Congressman we have had in many years” and “a true hater of Israel”. He has also attacked the congressman for remarrying just 16 months after his late wife died.
Blair told the FT that Massie would lose “because I know the numbers”. Votes would “disagree with his choice to consistently side with the Democrats in voting against every Republican priority”, Blair said.
An anti-debt crusader, Massie was one of two House Republicans to vote last year against Trump’s top priority in Congress, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, saying it would “significantly increase” the US budget deficit, “negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates”.
However, the congressman’s high-profile advocacy for the Epstein files to be released has also drawn the ire of the administration.
“They’re coming after me because I got the Epstein files released,” Massie told the FT. “I’m the most transparent congressman — that’s what they hate.”
Massie says his re-election race is less a referendum on Trump and more on the pro-Israel donors — like billionaires Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer and John Paulson — who have funded the political action campaigns against him.
He has argued the war against Iran is fundamentally against US interests, will further destabilise the region, prove morally and financially costly, and “radicalise new generations of terrorists”.
AIPAC, the US-Israeli campaign group, and the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Super Pacs are spending combined about $9mn on ads in the race, according to AdImpact.
RJC spokesman Sam Markstein called the congressman a “grandstanding disaster” and “a thorn in the side of President Trump, the Republican Party and the Jewish community writ large”.
Massie responded that they were running a “Boomer” campaign, claiming he was winning the votes of people below the age of 65. “When they lose to me, they’re done,” he said. Massie is 55 and Gallrein 68.
The Congressman noted that Trump said he wanted to recruit a “warm body” from “central casting.”
“It’s a referendum on Israel’s influence,” Massie said. “Can they buy a seat for a warm body in Kentucky?”
With days to go, the money has poured in. Over $30mn has been spent so far to sway the vote, according to AdImpact. The ad blitz has swamped the airwaves — even in neighbouring states — with smears against the candidates and their financial backers.
Massie says the ads are even on HGTV — something akin to Britain’s Grand Designs mixed with Gardener’s World — local radio stations and streaming outlets, and broadcast out to West Virginia and Ohio — all designed to reach the up to 90,000 or so voters in his district.
Some ads have sparked outrage. A narrator in one pro-Massie spot urges Kentucky to vote against “woke Eddie Gallrein and his billionaire club of LGBTQ weirdos”. It shows images of Singer — who has backed gay marriage equality — among drag queens and rainbows.
Another pro-Gallrein, AI-generated ad accuses Massie of being in a “throuple” with Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, showing them eating dinner and holding hands. A narrator says the congressman is “cheating with ‘The Squad’” and committing anti-Maga crimes that are “worse than adultery”.
Each side has called the other’s attacks a desperate distortion of the truth.
“Thomas Massie has had 14 years to convince Republicans that he’s interested in something other than his own self-promotion, but making himself the hero of his own story is all he cares about,” said Gallrein campaign adviser Tim Murtaugh.
Massie lives off the grid in the hills of north-east Kentucky in a home that runs off a Tesla battery. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained engineer and inventor of haptic interface devices sold his start-up company SensAble Technologies for an undisclosed sum. He won election to the US Congress in 2012 on the back of the Tea Party, the far right, pre-Maga movement.
Although Massie is being outspent over the airwaves, a Super Pac that has not yet disclosed its donors has spent over $6mn on ads to back him up, per AdImpact.
Massie said he didn’t know “precisely” who was funding it, but that he didn’t think it was Elon Musk, who said last year he would support Massie for opposing the “biggest debt increase in history”.
A spokesperson for Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
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