President Donald Trump was furious when conservative/libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) made it abundantly clear that he was a firm "no" vote on the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, vowing to remove him from Congress via a GOP primary. While much of the bill's criticism came from Democrats, Massie attacked it from the right — arguing that it would add to an already-huge federal deficit. And in 2026, tensions between Trump and Massie continued when the Kentucky Republican criticized Trump's war with Iran as a betrayal of his "America First" platform of 2024.

Trump is more determined than ever to see the 55-year-old Massie voted out of the U.S. House of Representatives. And Massie, Bloomberg News' Joshua Green reports in an article published on April 23, is responding that Trump is out of touch with his own MAGA voters.

"Unlike virtually every other GOP politician," Green says of Massie, "he routinely defies his party and his president, conducting himself as if he's impervious to threats, criticism or electoral consequences. That defiance was why a Japanese camera crew was in northern Kentucky. Massie, a committed libertarian, is the rare Republican willing to publicly criticize Donald Trump — over domestic spending, the war in Iran, the president's efforts to bury the Jeffrey Epstein files. And he's done this while running for an eighth term in Kentucky's deep-red 4th Congressional District, which gave Trump two-thirds of the vote in 2024."

Green adds, "Trump has never had much tolerance for critics, and for Massie, he harbors something closer to outright contempt."

In the 2024 GOP presidential primary, Massie endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis —not Trump. And after Trump returned to the White House, Massie demonstrated that he wouldn't automatically rubber-stamp his policies.

"Last year, he cast the lone GOP vote against a Trump-backed spending bill to avert a government shutdown," Green notes. "In March he helped force a congressional vote —over the president's vehement objections — that ultimately compelled the Department of Justice to release most of the Epstein files and their thousands of references to Trump. And he's been the loudest Republican critic of the president's unpopular decision to launch a war against Iran."

Green continues, "In response to all this, Trump has waged a WWE-style vendetta campaign, blasting Massie on social media as 'terrible,' 'sanctimonious,' a 'lowlife' and 'the Worst Republican Congressman we have had in many years.'"

Massie, however, argues that he is campaigning on "the things that MAGA was for, like no foreign aid, no foreign entanglements, no wars, release the Epstein files."

"MAGA is split right now," Massie told Bloomberg News. "I have half of MAGA, and I think the president has the other half — not that I'm running against him…. I'm still for free markets, personal liberty and constitutionally limited government."

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• People of praise
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