Thomas Massie’s loss in Kentucky this week was about more than one congressman getting crosswise with Donald Trump. It was an unignorable snapshot of the Republican Party’s values and priorities.
For decades, Republicans have been the party of limited government, fiscal restraint, constitutionalism and skepticism toward unchecked executive power. Massie, for all his quirks and all the times he frustrated both parties, was one of the few Republicans in Washington who consistently tried to act as if those principles still mattered.
And for that, his own party destroyed him.
Massie lost his Republican primary to Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein, a political newcomer, after becoming one of the president’s most visible internal critics. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth both campaigned vigorously — Hegseth perhaps in violation of the Hatch Act — against Massie in the days leading up to the election.
Massie opposed deficit-exploding spending bills, criticized military intervention in Iran and pushed hard for the release of the Epstein files.
These are also things Trump campaigned on as late as November 2024. (Trump endorsed Massie in the congressman’s 2022 bid, but the relationship has always been tepid).
Massie voted against Trump-backed legislation when he believed it violated his principles.
In older versions of the Republican Party, that kind of independence would have annoyed leadership, but it would also have been more respected as ideological consistency. Today, it is treated as heresy.
What makes the episode so politically revealing is that Massie was not some moderate Republican drifting leftward. He voted with Republicans the overwhelming majority of the time. He was deeply conservative on taxes, spending, regulation and gun rights. He was, in many ways, exactly the kind of lawmaker conservatives have claimed to want for decades.
He did vote against Trump’s One, Big Beautiful Bill because it didn’t adequately cut the federal deficit, something else Trump campaigned on. That is a valid reason to dissent.
But the modern Republican Party seems incapable of tolerating independent thought even built on ideological consistency. By rewarding only loyalty to Trump, it has become unserious about governing on any principle whatsoever.
Republicans are the only ones who are going to scrutinize spending bills instead of rubber-stamping them. Massie tried to remind his colleagues of that for years.
Massie is close to being an original founder of the Tea Party, the political movement that paved the way for the election of Trump in 2016.
For its faults, that movement was founded on a call to balance budgets, tackle debt, restrain executive authority, restore accountability in Washington and rwturn power to the people.
So why did they purge him?
Because that movement has cannabalized itself, replacing principle with politics built on grievances and obsessive loyalty.
With margins in the U.S. House that threaten to evaporate entirely for Republicans in November, Trump and team spent their time ousting a safe GOP representative not because it was the best use of resources politically, but because they can’t control him.
The same went for former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — an original MAGA and Trump fan who was excommunicated also for trying to hold the administration to its word on Epstein.
The Republican Party is Trump’s. That much is clear from GOP primary results nationwide this week.
But within his historic coalition, a schism has fully formed. A Republican Party that sees Massie as a threat to its power rather than a representation of the principle it once stood on is a party that has already lost sight of both.
kbuss@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Trump’s war on Massie exposes a GOP without principle | Buss
Reporting by Kaitlyn Buss, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
