By Siobhan Hughes

WASHINGTON -- GOP Rep. Thomas Massie, a major thorn in President Trump's side, wanted a peace agreement.

As the House struggled to finish Trump's "big, beautiful" tax-and-spending bill, the Kentucky libertarian was pulled into a room off the House floor for a meeting convened by House Speaker Mike Johnson. The president was on the speakerphone. All year long, Trump had been attacking Massie for breaking with Republicans. Now he needed Massie's vote.

Massie told the president he wanted the ads pummeling him on Kentucky television to stop. "I want the same deal you gave Iran: Quit bombing me, " Massie recalled telling Trump. When Trump asked who was running the ads, Massie said the mastermind was Chris LaCivita, a top political strategist for Trump. "Well, he works for me," Massie recalled Trump responding. "I'll tell him to quit."

Massie voted to let the bill advance to a House vote, where it passed. Nearly two months later, though, the attack ads against Massie -- funded by wealthy Trump donors -- haven't stopped, and Trump is openly calling for a Republican challenger to take Massie out.

A White House official said the president didn't commit to stopping the ads for good, but only discussed pausing them. The official also said Massie's vote wasn't ultimately needed to advance the bill.

Now the two men are in the middle of an even bigger confrontation -- over Jeffrey Epstein. The maverick lawmaker is trying to line up support to force a vote on a bill that would require the Justice Department to hand over more records related to the convicted sex offender, whose links to Trump came under renewed scrutiny this summer.

"If you can't get Republicans to care about an underage sex trafficking ring with hundreds of victims, how are you going to get them to care about the budget?" Massie said in a recent interview.

To overcome opposition from GOP leaders, Massie and ally Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) need to gather signatures from 218 lawmakers. To ratchet up the pressure, they held a press conference with Epstein victims in front of the Capitol on Wednesday. A White House official warned that backing Massie's petition would constitute "a very hostile act," with GOP leaders pointing to a separate House effort that has already led to documents being made public.

Only three other GOP lawmakers have signed on, short of the five Massie needs. All 212 Democrats support the measure. But special elections later this month are expected to fill two vacant seats with Democrats, putting Massie at the magic number if no one defects.

Johnson declined to comment, and LaCivita didn't respond to requests for comment.

In July, Trump told reporters that renewed interest in the Epstein files was a hoax "perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans." He has implored his supporters and congressional Republicans to move on, and has repeatedly said Massie should be voted out of office. "This is a Democrat hoax that never ends," Trump said Wednesday.

Massie is "actively working against his team almost daily now," Johnson told reporters Thursday. "He is deciding his own fate."

If Massie loses the Epstein battle -- and potentially his House seat -- it would serve as another warning to Republicans thinking about crossing Trump. The list of GOP lawmakers who have paid a steep political price for criticizing Trump includes Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and former Freedom Caucus leader Rep. Bob Good of Virginia.

If Massie prevails, though, it would send a different message: A Republican attack on Trump is survivable.

History of fighting

Massie, 54 years old, has an unusual background for a Washington politician. An engineering whiz with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massie lives on a farm in Garrison, Ky., where he grows peaches, raises chickens and powers his home partly with solar panels. He has a patent pending on a robotic device that moves his chickens to fresh pasture when he is out of town.

A fiscal hawk, he created a miniature debt clock that he and his friends on Capitol Hill wear on their lapels to highlight the dangers of the nation's mounting debt.

He and Trump have been sparring for years. Massie, who joined Congress after a 2012 special election, regularly resists pressure to fall into line behind the president. In 2020, he battled Trump's $2 trillion coronavirus-relief package as the pandemic was raging, forcing a majority of lawmakers to fly and drive back to Washington to approve it in person.

That prompted Trump's first effort to oust him. Massie defeated his GOP primary challenger by 62 percentage points, then cruised to victory in the general election in his solidly red district. Later, he endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis -- not Trump -- in the 2024 GOP presidential primary.

In November, after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was told by the Trump campaign that he would have a major role in health and agriculture policy if Trump were elected, Kennedy suggested Massie as a potential secretary of the Agriculture Department, people familiar with the matter said. Trump blocked the pick after his aides said Massie wasn't a team player, the people said.

During Trump's second term, Massie has aligned himself with the president at times, but he hasn't been shy about breaking with him, particularly on reining in federal deficits and cutting foreign aid to allies, including Israel. He is a rare Republican with an independent base of political support, spotlighted by the #sassywithmassie hashtag on social media.

In January, Massie tried to sack Trump's chosen House speaker, Johnson, saying he had "no Fs left to give" after the death of his wife of three decades. In March, he moved to block a Trump-backed funding bill, just as Trump was levying tariffs on Canada.

Trump posted that Massie "SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him." Massie responded that Trump is "spending his day attacking me and Canada. The difference is Canada will eventually cave."

Massie introduced a resolution to require congressional approval for military action in Iran. He became the fiercest GOP critic of Trump's tax bill, citing what he called its irresponsible deficit spending. Although he voted to allow it to proceed through the legislative process, in the final vote in early July, he was one of only two Republican "no" votes. Less than two weeks later, he introduced his Epstein measure.

MAGA target

No Republican has survived confronting Trump so directly for so long.

In Massie's district, a MAGA Kentucky super PAC is running ads that aim to soften support for him ahead of next year's primary. "What happened to Thomas Massie?" asks one ad that cited his votes against Trump-backed bills.

The super PAC, led by LaCivita and Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, receives funding from hedge-fund billionaires Paul Singer and John Paulson and a group funded by Miriam Adelson, federal campaign filings show. The group has reported $2 million in donations, and Massie said he believes it might ultimately run as much as $20 million in ads against him.

Massie is fighting back with his own ads. "It'd be really easy just to shut up and do what I'm told," Massie says in one. "I'm not folding, I'm fighting -- and I'm just getting started."

During a recent visit by a reporter to Massie's Fourth Congressional District in northern Kentucky, few voters were eager to talk about Epstein or their congressman's fight with Trump, particularly those with political ambitions.

"I really don't have a comment on that," said Boone County Judge Gary Moore, who faces his own primary challenge. Republican Daniel Cameron, a onetime protégé of Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell who is running to succeed him in the Senate, said "nobody really brings it up."

Outside a Kroger grocery store in Covington, a man driving a truck with a Trump bumper sticker said he "used to like Massie," but he questioned the push to release the Epstein files now, when Massie could have taken a similar action during Biden's presidency.

Massie's supporters see his work to release more of the Epstein files than what is being turned over to the House Oversight Committee as a matter of principle, consistent with his ethos of treating the federal government with skepticism. Massie has long fought against what he has described as a system rigged in favor of big government and big business, including a patent system he sees as tilted against small inventors and Agriculture Department regulations that he contends trip up small farmers.

"Epstein kind of smells like a coverup," said Chris Wiest, a Kentucky lawyer who is a Massie friend. Massie, he said, "isn't going to turn a blind eye, period, if he thinks it's wrong. That's just who he is."

Massie said he knows Epstein isn't the top issue for his constituents, but that neither are some of his other initiatives, such as his work on patents or his push to allow interstate sales of raw milk. He said his interest in releasing the documents isn't connected to Trump's criticism of him.

"I didn't do it because they were attacking me," he said. "But there was definitely no reason not to do it."

He had been pushing for months for the release of more Epstein information, including at an April dinner with Attorney General Pam Bondi and members of the House Judiciary Committee. Bondi led attendees to believe "it was all just a bunch of pornography," he said. "I thought to myself, 'No, there's got to be tons of documents.' I mean, I wasn't rude, I wasn't confrontational, but that was a big part of it."

A Justice Department spokesman referred to its July decision to make no further disclosures, pointing to an Federal Bureau of Investigation memo citing the volume of imagery related to minors and to child sex abuse.

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September 04, 2025 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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