President Donald Trump thinks he has found his man to oust Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in next year’s primary contest. On Friday, the president called Massie a “RINO” and announced he was backing a combat veteran named Ed Gallrein.
Gallrein has not yet filed to run for the 4rth Congressional District’s federal representative seat, but three other Republicans and two Democrats have. The district leans heavily Republican, and the winner of the primary race will likely win the general race. The other three Republicans who’ve filed haven’t raised any money. Judging by Trump’s recent announcement, they have a low chance of winning against Massie, who has reported $1.8 million in his coffers.
Ed Gallrein
Ed Gallrein has an extensive and impressive military background. As Trump pointed out, he is a former Navy SEAL and Army Ranger. He also has ties to the national security complex, with top-secret clearance thanks to war-related advisory roles he has filled in the past.
Gallrein is a dairy farmer who ran for Kentucky’s Senate last year, but lost in the GOP primary to another former Navy SEAL, Aaron Reed.
Trump announced on Friday on social media that he was endorsing Gallrein. He called him a brave combat veteran who knows what it takes to defend our country and “ensure peace through strength,” perhaps a dig at the man he wants fired. Massie criticized Trump’s unilateral decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites as “unconstitutional” — one of multiple positions of the current congressman that have irked the president.
Trump’s Take on Massie
In his recent announcement, Trump called Massie a pathetic RINO (Republican In Name Only), an odd way of trying to discredit the Kentuckian. If being a Republican is to be gauged by the party’s stated ideal of limited government, Massie is a true and rare one, among the few who actually walk the talk. Since his entry into Congress in 2013, he has accrued a cumulative score of 99 percent in The New American’s Freedom Index. If, however, a Republican is to be defined as the collective behavior of contemporary Republicans, then Massie is indeed a RINO. He is among the very few Republicans in all of Congress who consistently casts votes that seek to reduce the size of government and its spending.
Judging by his rhetoric when he ran for state office, Gallrein sounds like he agrees with the neocon foreign policy Trump is largely implementing. In a conversation with local radio broadcaster WHAS, he indicated that he supports intervention in Iran and Ukraine. It’s perhaps telling that Gallrein donated to one of the most notorious warmongers in all of Congress, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham. Massie pointed this out in a social media post on Saturday.
Massie mocked this recent development, telling Politico:
After having been rejected by every elected official in the 4th District, Trump’s consultants clearly pushed the panic button with their choice of failed candidate and establishment hack Ed Gallrein. Ed’s been begging them to pick him for over three months now.
Massie’s Constitutional Record
Massie has always had a knack for straying from the herd and choosing constitutional ideals over party loyalty. But in 2025, he bucked his party’s saddle of uniformity enough times to prompt Trump, who has endorsed him in the past, to let loose the dogs on him.
Just days into the new year, Massie cast the sole Republican vote against Representative Mike Johnson (R-La.) for the role of House speaker. While complaints mounted that Johnson was no better as speaker than his predecessor, Massie was the only Republican to make good on a threat to vote against him.
Massie was also the only Republican to vote against the House Continuing Resolution budget measure in March, on the grounds that it perpetuated wasteful spending, a point of dissent he makes often.
And then a couple of months later, he voted against Trump’s prized One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) — twice. Massie’s main problem with the bill, again, was its sticker price.
Bucking the Establishment
Massie also disagreed with Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites on behalf of Israel. On June 21, when the president gleefully announced the bombing on social media, he reposted the president’s celebratory announcement with four words of disapproval: “This is not Constitutional.” He then went on CBS’s Face the Nation and pointed out why the president made a bad decision, saying it was “a good week for the neocons and the military-industrial complex, who want war all the time.” He pointed out that Iran posed no imminent threat to Americans. And, echoing the sentiment of the MAGA faithful who want an end to America’s perpetual participation in wars, he said:
We are tired from all of these wars, and we’re non-interventionists. I mean, this was one of the promises. I mean, are you going to call President Trump’s campaign an isolationist campaign? What he promised us was we would put America first.
Massie has also been working with Democrats on a discharge petition that would push a vote on a bill to release all Justice Department files on Jeffrey Epstein. Thanks to a special election in Arizona, he recently announced he had enough votes to make the vote happen. Trump has run into a lot of trouble with the MAGA base over his reluctance to support full transparency on the Epstein files.
Shortly after Massie rained on Trump’s bombing parade, news broke that the president’s people had launched a PAC named MAGA KY. According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), major MAGA KY backers include John Paulson, Paul Singer, and the Preserve America PAC, whose primary financier is Miriam Adelson. You can read more about the out-of-state billionaires working to remove Massie here.
If Gallrein files and runs, the race will serve as a litmus test for whether the Kentuckians of the 4th Congressional District value Massie’s constitutionally aligned representation, or whether they want someone who will do what Trump tells them to do.
