If Rep. Thomas Massie is right, Republicans in Kentucky's 4th Congressional District are more loyal to Trumpism than to President Donald Trump — and think he is, too.
"People support Trump, but they also support what he campaigned on," Massie said in a phone interview with NBC News on Tuesday. "When people support me, they're supporting the things that Donald Trump campaigned on actually getting done. And when they support Donald Trump, they're supporting the man they voted for in the last election."
Massie's theory will get a major test Wednesday.
That's when Trump, who has called Massie a "moron," a "lightweight" and a "loser," takes their long-running fight to Massie's backyard with a visit to Hebron, Kentucky, just outside Cincinnati. Trump has endorsed Massie's primary opponent, farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, and the Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA KY has spent $2.6 million on ads for the May 19 election, according to AdImpact. The total is closer to $5 million in favor of Gallrein and against Massie when other outside political groups are included.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt sidestepped classifying the trip as political in nature when she was asked at a briefing Tuesday why Trump planned to make twin stops in Ohio and Kentucky, where he will speak at a packaging company facility.
"Why not?" Leavitt said. "The president will be joined by lawmakers from both states who he greatly admires and respects and supports. And he’ll be meeting with business owners in both of these places and talking about the economy, which is, of course, the utmost importance to him.”
But Massie has been feuding with Trump for most of the president's second term, most recently over a pair of issues on which Massie took a leading role: a successful effort to force the Justice Department to release Jeffrey Epstein files and a failed attempt to stop the Iran war. He sees Trump's arrival as political payback aimed at boosting Gallrein.
"My opponent is running a Joe Biden-type campaign from the basement — refuses to debate, won't show up at public forums — and I think the president's coming to try and resuscitate and prop up his campaign," Massie told NBC News.
An adviser to Gallrein's campaign said Trump asked Gallrein to run and is now "seeing it through," adding that Trump's "presence will galvanize his supporters for this race."
The main issue, the adviser said, is that Massie has been counterproductive for a president who has a limited window of time to implement his agenda before his term expires in January 2029.
"You have a district that voted overwhelmingly for the president, and they see Massie increasingly as an impediment to Trump," said the adviser, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Trump's endorsement has been the most valuable coin in the Republican realm for more than a decade. Last week, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the only Republican in Texas' House delegation who didn't get it, lost his renomination fight. And Texas Republicans are on tenterhooks as they await Trump's decision whether to endorse Sen. John Cornyn's re-election bid, Cornyn's runoff opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, or no one.
From time to time, Republicans have survived Trump's efforts to oust them, but many have not. Of the 10 GOP House members who voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, only two made it past their midterm primaries in 2022. Just one of them, David Valadao of California, is still in the House.
Massie's bank shot is angled at convincing voters that his departures from Trump result from his own consistency and Trump’s drift. In that way, he's claiming Trump in a different manner from Gallrein, who has a more straightforward argument that there's too much daylight between Massie and Trump for Republicans in the district.
After all, Massie was one of two Republicans who voted against Trump's signature One Big Beautiful Bill law, which, among other things, enacted a sweeping tax cut, provided for completing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and, in an earlier version that Massie also voted against, would have banned federal funding for transgender surgery for minors.
Massie, a longtime deficit hawk, opposed the measure because it was projected to add as much as $4 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.
Massie says his resolution on Iran, which would have required Trump to get authorization from Congress to continue to use military force, is consistent with the values Trump campaigned on when he touted his record of starting "no new wars" in his first term. Likewise, he says that demanding the Epstein files and pressing legislation aligned with Make America Healthy Again movement goals are in concert with the MAGA movement's sentiments.
But Trump isn't alone in portraying Massie as his adversary.
Hard-line pro-Israel donors have lined up to amplify Gallrein’s message, pouring money into several entities, including the Kentucky branch of MAGA Inc., which longtime Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Tony Fabrizio created last year with the express purpose of unseating Massie.
In one ad, featuring a photo of Gallrein in the Oval Office with Trump, the Republican Jewish Committee Victory Fund tells Kentucky voters they have a choice: “Gallrein and Trump or Massie, who stands with Iran.” The spot includes images of Massie alongside the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., who are Muslim.
Massie said there is more at stake than just his own re-election.
"If I can win this fight, it shows that we have a republic, that the legislature doesn't work for the executive branch," he said. "And I think it will embolden other members of Congress who right now are afraid, even when they believe what I'm doing is right, they're afraid to contradict the president."
He bristled at the outside spending, including spending from pro-Israel donors, and said his defeat would signal that elections are for sale to billionaires, some of whom have donated to groups advertising against him.
At the same time, he is trying to fight the perception that Gallrein is perfectly aligned with Trump.
In an ad released Tuesday that his campaign said would air on television in conjunction with Trump's visit, Massie displays voter registration cards showing Gallrein left the GOP around the time Trump secured the party's nomination in 2016 — re-registering as an independent — and then returned when Trump was out of office in 2021. The spot begins with a photo of Massie and Trump standing together giving thumbs-up gestures.
Gallrein said in a statement that his departure from the party wasn’t a snub of Trump.
"I was proud to vote for President Trump all three times and donate in 2020 and 2024," he said, adding that Massie "sides with the Democrats to vote against President Trump every week in Congress."
In the end, the size of Trump's footprint in the 4th District may be measured by both candidates' claiming different parts of him — Trump's agenda and the promises of Trumpism — as former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., observed in an X post accompanied by an emoji crying tears of laughter.
"Dang," Gaetz subtweeted a post with Massie's new commercial. "Two people who don’t like Trump are both hugging Trump in their ads."
But Trump is hugging only Gallrein back.
