President Donald Trump said earlier this year all he needed was a “warm body” to beat Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), and it turns out Ed Gallrein was the man for the job. Gallrein, the former Navy SEAL Trump recruited to run against Massie, is the projected winner of the Republican primary for the fourth district of Kentucky. It was the most expensive House election in U.S. history, but it appears Trump’s endorsement may have been the deciding factor for Republican voters.
Even as the president’s popularity sinks among the broader electorate, and Republicans face a daunting midterm election, Trump has still got near-total control of his party. The race was nasty. Television ads accused both Massie and Gallrein of being disloyal to Trump, with one using AI-generated fake video to depict Massie going on a date with Democratic women, and another falsely showing Gallrein abandoning Trump on a battlefield.
In the waning days of the contest, Trump ally Laura Loomer posted an interview with an ex-girlfriend of Massie’s who claimed he had been emotionally abusive. Massie made Trump mad by repeatedly refusing to vote with the party on high-profile legislation, including bills to fund the government, to cut taxes and to extend warrantless spy powers. He also spearheaded the effort to force the Justice Department to release its files on sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, and Trump’s name appears in the documents thousands of times.
“Bad Congressman Tom Massie voted against Tax Cuts, the Border Wall, our Military and Law Enforcement. Actually, he voted against almost everything that is good,” Trump wrote in one of his many recent posts about Massie. “The Worst Republican Congressman in History.”
In interviews, Massie always insisted he could win, that Republicans in his district appreciated their representative having a modicum of independence from the president. “They don’t want a rubber stamp, and they appreciate that I might be the only dissenting vote occasionally, because you can have a favorable view of Trump and believe that 10% of the time he may be wrong,” Massie told HuffPost earlier this year.
Tuesday’s result suggests Republican voters actually do prefer Republican congressmen to do the president’s bidding at all times. The big question this year is whether the broader electorate wants Congress itself to be Trump’s rubber stamp, too.
