Trump vs Massie in Kentucky: Is Israel breaking MAGA?

The to the highest degree expensive primary feather election in US story is underway in bluegrass state, as chair Donald Trump and the Israel lobby try to unseat Representative Thomas Massie, a hardline conservative who broke with the president over Israel, Iran, and Epstein.

Pro-Israel groups have pumped more than $10 million into Tuesday’s primary, which pits Massie against Ed Gallrein, a military veteran who ran an unsuccessful Senate campaign in 2024.

The election is a flashpoint in a wider battle being waged on the American right, with an ever more neoconservative Trump embracing the Bush-era interventionism of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Senator Lindsey Graham, and publicly denouncing former ‘America First’ allies such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson.

Massie is firmly in the latter camp. In his 14 years in Congress, Massie has opposed every gun control measure that has come before the House of Representatives, pushed to abolish the Department of Education, and voted to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. On foreign policy, he has backed the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, voted against multiple military aid packages for Ukraine, and in October 2023 was the only Republican to vote against a resolution guaranteeing American support for Israel’s war on Gaza.

Trump endorsed Massie in the 2022 Republican primary, calling him a “conservative warrior” and a “first-rate defender of the Constitution.” However, the two had an uneasy relationship, with Trump branding Massie a “third rate Grandstander” and suggesting he be thrown out of the GOP for opposing the president’s $2 trillion Covid-19 bailout bill in 2020.

The relationship worsened during Trump’s second term. After Massie opposed Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ spending package last year, Trump described the Kentuckian as a “negative force who almost always Votes ‘NO’,” and promised that “we will have a wonderful American Patriot running against him in the Republican Primary.”

Massie’s opposition to Trump’s war on Iran and his insistence that Trump release the full, unredacted Epstein files further angered the president. At a rally in March, Trump gave Gallrein his “complete and total endorsement,” describing him as a “true American hero.”

Trump’s endorsement of Gallrein is illustrative of the president’s recent embrace of the ‘Never Trump’ neocons who despised him a decade ago. Gallrein left the Republican Party after Trump secured the presidential nomination in 2016, vowing not to rejoin the GOP until the party was rid of him. Now, with Trump cozying up to the interventionists, Gallrein is once again content to associate himself with the president.

Gallrein is a relatively unknown figure. His campaign website lists a series of generic Republican policy priorities – “unleash our economy,” “secure the border once and for all,” “end the woke agenda” – and Trump seems to have chosen him not on any specific virtues, but because he is anyone but Thomas Massie. At the endorsement rally in March, Trump devoted more time to attacking Massie than promoting any of Gallrein’s policies, telling the crowd “he’s got to be voted out of office as soon as possible.”

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