Trump has ‘alienated’ voters ahead of midterms, warns ousted Republican Thomas Massie | US politics
Donald Trump’s Republican party faces a damaging rejection at the ballot box in November, according to a maverick US congressman who was ousted by a rival handpicked by the president.
Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, became the latest of Trump’s targets to be defeated in the party’s primary this week. He has repeatedly broken with the president over military action against Iran, government spending and the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
With control of the US Congress at stake, Massie warned on Sunday that Trump was “disenfranchising” many of the Americans who voted for him and his parties in November 2024.
The libertarian congressman, who will remain in the House for the rest of the year, vowed to remain engaged in politics “even from the outside” and expressed no regrets for actions that angered Trump even as they helped defeat him.
“It was totally worth it,” Massie told Meet the Press on NBC. “And contrary to convention, I have seven more months to continue, which means voting for principles and people rather than party.”
In a nod to the “Trump derangement syndrome” label often used by the President to accuse his critics of being obsessed with him, Massie said: “There are a growing number of people on the right who have a form of TDS called Trump disillusionment syndrome.
“And I think what’s going to happen to the party this fall is they’re going to disenfranchise a large portion of the voters that Trump recruited to put us in the White House, the Senate majority, and the House majority.”
Massie highlighted several key constituencies, including “Make America Healthy Again” campaigners who he claimed had been “alienated” by the administration’s actions, fiscal hawks pushing for sweeping government budget cuts, and voters who did not want the US to get involved in wars. “And so I worry that this will cost the party a lot of money come November.”
Massie claimed in the interview that his “greatest crime” against the “swamp” was writing a bill with California Democrat Ro Khanna to release the Epstein files.
“This is probably the only bill that has passed Washington, D.C., in the last 10 years that wasn’t written by lobbyists,” Massie said. “That’s when they decided I needed to be eliminated; I was becoming influential, so they wanted to eliminate me.”
This week, he lost the Republican primary race to Ed Gallrein in the most expensive U.S. congressional primary race in history. Gallrein was hired by Trump to challenge Massie.
If the legislature always sided with the president, then “we would have a king,” Massie said Tuesday.
Massie now joins Republicans at odds with the president over the Epstein files and military action against Iran. Trump dismissed the primary race as a personal vendetta, calling Massie a “retard” and a “loser.” He also traveled to Kentucky to campaign against Massie, calling him “disloyal to the United States.”
The president was quick to celebrate Massie’s defeat on Tuesday, saying: “He was a bad man. He deserved to lose.”
