By admin 
ERLANGER, Kentucky—Bruce Spears voted for Ed Gallrein for one reason: “Because Trump told me to.”
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The goateed retiree from Erlanger made clear that he had heard Gallrein speak (he was “better than I thought he would be”) and been growing skeptical of longtime incumbent Thomas Massie for a while. But the Kentucky Republican voter was a big admirer of Donald Trump (“he’s got balls”) and that was enough for him to switch from his support of Massie, whom he had backed in previous elections.
Gallrein is running to unseat Massie here in a Republican primary to represent Kentucky’s 4th District, but the challenger is basically an extension of the most powerful force in Republican politics: Trump’s endorsement. And rather than a race between candidates, the primary is mostly a referendum on Trump’s sway over the GOP today. With that question hanging over the ballot, the race has become the most expensive House primary in American history.
The race in northern Kentucky is hardly the only time Trump has targeted a disobedient Republican for replacement. It comes days after Sen. Bill Cassidy lost to a Trump-backed challenger in Louisiana, a half-decade delayed penance for the lawmaker’s 2021 vote to convict Trump after his post–Jan. 6 impeachment. And it comes weeks after Trump successfully ousted a handful of Indiana state senators who refused to accede to the president’s demand for a mid-decade redistricting.
But this race is different. Gallrein’s sheer anonymity makes him the ultimate test for power of Trump’s endorsement. The White House started a full-scale effort to recruit a primary challenger in the spring of 2025, long before the Epstein files had even become a major issue on Capitol Hill. None of their initial targets agreed to run. Eventually, they found Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL and failed state Senate candidate.
Gallrein has been a negligible presence on the campaign trail. His campaign signs feature his name, but in a font almost as large they remind voters he’s “endorsed by President Trump.” His website mostly contains b-roll for use by supportive super PACs. (Visitors to his page, before anything else, are also greeted by a pop-up that reminds them “Ed Gallrein Has Trump’s ‘Complete and Total Endorsement.’ ” When the candidate does appear, he emphasizes his support for Trump. Even when asked about the controversial conflict in Iran, he hails the president’s genius. In an interview with a local television station, the candidate described the president as “playing five-dimensional chess” in Iran and added that Trump is “resetting the entire global power structure.” Often, the only traces of a Gallrein appearance are posed photos shared afterward on his campaign Facebook page, the political equivalent of tears in the rain.
In almost any other matchup, Trump’s condemnation would basically doom the incumbent, particularly because the primary is tightly limited to registered Republicans. Kentucky has a closed primary, and independent voters had to change their registration by New Year’s Eve 2025 in order to participate. As one Republican strategist put it to Slate, “It’s obviously the most fascinating primary of the entire cycle: a sitting congressman with an independent brand going head-to-head with Trump.” The strategist noted that in almost any district, a sitting congressman targeted by the president would lose by 30 points.
But here, while Gallrein appears the favorite, the race is tight, and Massie is by no means out of it. Because although Trump has turned his ire on countless Republicans before, he’s never targeted any Republican quite like Thomas Massie. Then again, there is no Republican quite like Thomas Massie.
A congressional gadfly whose quirky libertarian politics sometime confound party lines, Massie has long been a burr under Trump’s saddle. Trump has railed at times against the Kentucky Republican going back to 2020, when Massie forced an in-person vote on an overwhelmingly popular COVID response bill at the start of the pandemic. Trump labeled him a “third-rate grandstander” and urged that he be “throw[n] out of the Republican Party.”
Since then, the relationship has ebbed and flowed. Trump even endorsed Massie’s reelection bid in 2022. However, it has gone downhill in Trump’s second term, starting with Massie’s refusal to back Mike Johnson in the speaker’s race (where Trump had to whip other recalcitrant members over the phone to finally get Johnson the gavel). Since then, Massie has repeatedly broken with Trump on other issues, including the president’s signature “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
One of the highest-profile rifts, however, is over the “Epstein files,” a catch-all phrase referring to information about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who served as a conduit between powerful men and their victims. Massie has been one of the loudest House voices prodding the Trump administration to release more information on the sex offender and his accomplices. Last November, Massie, with the help of three other Republicans and every single Democrat, succeeded in pushing legislation demanding more disclosure, which was passed almost unanimously.
Epstein has been a sensitive topic for Trump. The president was at least friendly with the offender, and the full extent of their relationship was, at least before the Iran war, one of the most-discussed questions in all of American politics. And while Trumpworld’s disdain for Massie long predates the Epstein files as a hot button issue (the White House was recruiting primary challengers last spring), it has added more fuel to the conflict between the two.
Massie’s bipartisan Epstein work and his defiance of Trump have made him something of a liberal darling du jour, with pundits and elected officials on the left openly rooting for him to beat Gallrein to keep his seat. (The Gallrein campaign has been more than happy to share such endorsements with the deep-red primary electorate). Massie’s fans on the left see the Kentucky libertarian as an avatar for the effort to break Trump’s grip on the GOP. But implicit in that effort is a hope that, when the Republican Party sheds Trump, it’ll return to something the center left finds more palatable.
That hope is hollow: Unlike other Trump targets, Massie is by no means a moderate. In fact, Massie is arguably even more extreme than Gallrein, who is simply running as a generic MAGA candidate. After all, the Kentucky Republican has long indulged in antisemitic tropes—such as claiming that Congress was more supportive of “Zionism” than “American Patriotism.” Massie is also an ardent anti-vaxxer.
An up-close look at Massie, and a week with some of his most fervent supporters, reveals that if the candidate succeeds in defying Trump, it won’t be a victory for anything close to the McCain-era Republican Party that establishment Democrats pine for. Instead, Massie’s political fortitude suggests that any anti-Trump coalition in the Republican Party will be led by a figure less like Mitt Romney—and more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Massie and Gallrein are running in a safely Republican congressional district shaped like a bat, centered around the Cincinnati suburbs south of the Ohio River. One wing stretches west along the river toward Louisville, absorbing some of its outer suburbs. The other stretches east to the West Virginia border, taking in a slice of Appalachia. Both candidates live at the far ends of the district. Gallrein is close to Louisville in a county that features multiple distilleries and a history of Confederate guerrilla violence during the Civil War. Massie’s home base is deep in Appalachia in a county that had a long history of moonshining during Prohibition and was so pro-Union in the 1860s that it has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only once since the Civil War.
The Louisville portion, where Massie has traditionally underperformed, includes voters just added to the district, further hurting his chances. To the extent that there are any country club Republicans in the district, they are there. It’s a place where Gallrein needs to not only win but win by real margins.
Massie should do well in his Appalachian base and turn out as many voters as possible. However, the population there is shrinking. Several counties there have smaller populations now than they did in the 19th century. The battleground is in metro Cincinnati. The three suburban counties of Boone, Kenton, and Campbell run in vertical slices, each taking part of the Cincinnati suburbs south of the Ohio River and running south through exurbs and eventually rural areas.
This area is the one of the most traditionally Republican parts of Kentucky, filled with conservative migrants from deep-red Cincinnati who steadily moved out of the city and into blue-collar and middle-class suburbs across the river. The influence of the Queen City is ubiquitous: The fast food is Skyline Chili, not Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Reds and Bengals are as important as the Wildcats. But, as Geoff Davis, the Republican who represented the district before Massie, described it, it is both socially and fiscally conservative. However, Davis also described the area as having “an independent streak that goes back to the post Revolutionary War period in Kentucky.”
Both candidates’ styles were on full display in the final days before the election.
Gallrein was a ghost. Slate tried to attend one Gallrein event at a near-empty sports bar in the suburban sprawl—but, per the restaurant manager—the campaign sent out an email pulling the plug on the rally shortly before it was set to begin. One disappointed man with a Gallrein sticker walked out, while a lone barfly looked at a broadcast of a PGA golf tournament.
Instead, much of the heavy lifting came from surrogates. Gallrein did make a major open press appearance Monday, when a Trump-allied super PAC held a campaign event at a hotel on the grounds of the Cincinnati airport. But the candidate was not the main speaker. Instead, it was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was there “strictly in his personal capacity” for what was billed as “a policy discussion.” The discussion was Gallrein and Hegseth each giving 15 minute speeches. Both were about why Gallrein should be elected to Congress, although Hegseth’s speech stayed more focused on that topic than Gallrein did.
The only discussion was when Gallrein wandered into the area where reporters were seated in the back of the room where he proclaimed, “Welcome to Kentucky, where we fry everything including dessert.” A reporter asked him how he was feeling about the race; Gallrein asked where the reporter was from. “The New York Times” came the reply. It prompted Gallrein to start berating the reporter because the New York Times had endorsed his opponent. (The paper hadn’t, but it had commissioned a favorable opinion piece by a libertarian journalist about Massie, which Gallrein’s campaign has repeatedly—and inaccurately—called an endorsement). Gallrein ended by chiding reporters: “Be fair and balanced, can we do that?”
Much of the heavy hitting for Gallrein has come from another surrogate: the conspiracy theorist and Islamophobe Laura Loomer. The MAGA influencer has spent days promoting a last-minute surprise attack. Loomer is touting a woman who alleges that she dated Massie and that he paid her “hush money” afterward. As the hours wound down to Election Day, the claims got increasingly sordid. Massie has denied any wrongdoing and called allegations political motivated. In a district with a significant evangelical population (there is a biblical theme park with a life-size re-creation of Noah’s Ark featuring depictions of humans mingling with dinosaurs), it works to create an extra element of doubt about the incumbent among those voters wavering between their long-standing support of Massie and their allegiance to Trump. But, in a campaign that has seen roughly $30 million in spending, it’s unclear just how much figures like Laura Loomer spreading rumors online will matter.
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If Gallrein might as well be invisible in the district and in the media, Massie is the opposite. The Kentucky Republican has never been press shy. In the home stretch, he’s been featured in a profile in the left-wing Mother Jones and been trailed by a posse of right-wing influencers, who have descended from across the country to attend Massie’s events and boost his campaign online. It is a combination that certainly appeals to those Republican primary voters with an independent streak.
Massie is a throwback libertarian who, in lieu of the standard lawmaker flag pin, wears on his lapel a national debt clock that he programmed himself. In his stump speeches, the Kentucky congressman spends time focusing on the type of quirky legislative accomplishments that he was once known for, including advancing legislation to make it easier for customers to buy meat directly from farmers. In Shelbyville, Kentucky, a historic town where one can still spot a handful of log buildings in an area first settled by Daniel Boone’s younger brother Squire, Massie spoke to a packed room of about 75 in a coffee shop. To the all-white crowd a block and a half from an historical marker commemorating a lynching, the Kentucky congressman went on at length about a bill he has championed to address racial discrimination against Blacks and Hispanics that has made it more likely for them to be wrongfully denied the right to buy a firearm. Massie trumpeted that his work on the topic made it one of the few pieces of pro-gun legislation to be broadly supported by Democrats.
He also takes pains to note his fondness for Trump (despite Trump’s obvious disdain for him). A staple of his stump speech is an impersonation of the president. To laughs, he mimics Trump calling him “a sharp cookie” and “a tough cookie” along with a trademark Trumpian meander about the president’s uncle who was a longtime faculty member at Massie’s alma mater of MIT. Massie spent several days before the election using Rep. Lauren Boebert—a Republican from Colorado—as a surrogate, hoping she could reinforce his credentials at a campaign rally, despite the president’s repeated attacks on him.
“I think it’s really important that Lauren Boebert is here because they’re trying to tell you that you can’t support the president and vote for Thomas Massie,” the Kentucky Republican said.
“They’re trying to divide everybody, and Lauren is here to show you that is not true. There’s no bigger supporter of President Trump than Lauren Boebert, but she is here supporting me as well. And when your neighbors say, ‘Well, I support the president. I don’t know if I can vote for Massie.’ Let them know they can do both.”
In campaign ads, Massie has even tried to turn Gallrein into the Trump skeptic, citing the fact that “Woke Eddie,” as the incumbent labels him, changed his party registration to independent after the 2016 Republican primary. The tagline in one Massie ad about Gallrein is “Not just a Trump hater but a Trump traitor”
Massie’s long bench of surrogates also features a bevy of local elected officials showing up to endorse him. At one event, Massie was introduced by a state senator and state representative. And he also drew ardent libertarians like Derek Wheeler, a longtime supporter from Indiana who doesn’t vote in federal elections. Wheeler, wearing a “Draft Lindsey Graham” T-shirt—a suggestion that the ardently interventionist senator should serve on the front lines himself—said: “I’ve always loved Massie. I’m a Ron Paul supporter from long ago and he is the new iteration.”
There’s also a parade of far-right personalities showing out to offer their support. Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people in a confrontation amid unrest in Wisconsin in 2020, was at a Massie rally on Saturday. Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his actions around the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, attended multiple Massie events but took it a step further: The Oath Keeper founder told Slatethat he was knocking on doors for the Kentucky congressman.
It contains even uglier elements as well. One campaign rally was livestreamed by Alex Jones’ new podcasting network from a cavernous coffee shop and tchotchke store set in a La Grange, Kentucky, strip mall just off the interstate between a church and a Dollar Tree. One prominent antisemitic influencer walked around in an American Reich T-shirt, another attendee wore an America First hat tied to far-right personality Nick Fuentes.
It also brought in people like Matt, who recently moved to the area from Louisville and said that he “didn’t care about politics at all, but [Massie] had inspired him to hear a little more.” Matt was wearing a sweatshirt saying, “Didn’t Kiss the Wall, 11-22-63, America First” on the front and then a picture of John F. Kennedy in photoshopped sunglasses and the “Didn’t Kiss the Wall” phrase again on the back. It is a reference to the conspiracy theory that Israel was responsible for the assassination of Kennedy because he was not properly subservient to the Jewish state (as demonstrated by not going to the Western Wall). Matt said he found the shirt scrolling through TikTok and thought it was funny. He did add, “I do believe that Israel has control over our politics.” Matt later had his picture taken with Massie in that sweatshirt in a photo line after the event.
But there’s a reason why some of the right’s most noxious creatures see a home for themselves in Massie’s broad coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians, and MAHA fans. He taps into the primordial isolationism within the Republican Party and Old Right resistance to the modern party that dates to the 1950s. It is a strain on the right that has long been comfortable with conspiracy theories, including antisemitic ones.
While Massie’s national pitch focuses on the malign influence of Israel on his election, he tends to be more restrained in the district. Often, instead, to voters, he uses more coded language about the globalist Epstein class’s influence on the race and says those donors opposed to him are mad simply because he “doesn’t vote for foreign aid.” The one exception was when, at a campaign rally on Saturday, Massie took a shot at Gallrein’s support, joking that he’d been given a way to contact Gallrein for a potential concession speech.“Just in case I lose, they gave me the number to call. The area code is Tel Aviv though.”
However, if Massie loses, a concession call might be better placed to the White House than to Gallrein. The former Navy SEAL was by no means Trumpworld’s first choice to run for the seat. Instead, Gallrein simply functioned as an anthropomorphized biography. He checks the boxes as a farmer and combat veteran, and has simply been blown up as an avatar of Trump’s disdain for the incumbent.
As Boebert told a crowd on Saturday, “This race will set a precedent for every other race for our entire country. This race will determine the future of all other races.” Needless to say, only hours after she made those remarks, Trump called for a primary challenge against her online. After all, if Trump’s endorsement, and the financial resources allied to it, can take down an incumbent as entrenched as Massie, it leaves almost every Republican in Congress vulnerable.
And that seems to be the case.
At an early voting location in Erlanger, inside a Catholic church hall set among late 20th-century suburban sprawl, those who showed up midafternoon on a weekday to cast their Republican primary ballot were almost invariably pro-Gallrein.
With the exception of one voter who thought the Jews were evil, Trump was being blackmailed by Benjamin Netanyahu, and the CIA was spreading diseased ticks across the country, there was no support for Massie. (The voter in question declined to give his name, saying he wanted to stay under the radar, noting what he described as the connection of the Antichrist to flock cameras.)
Steve Hicks said he was a Trump supporter but not a diehard. “I don’t wear Trump merchandise, you know, have an altar at home to him or anything,” he said. For Hicks, Massie had lost his support with the votes that he had taken against the Republican agenda in Congress. “He’s not supposed to vote his principles. He’s supposed to vote for his supporters’ principles, and he’s getting off base with that.”
Others shared the sense that Massie had gone off track. Chris Fields of Erlanger shared her dismay that the six-term congressman was not voting with his party. “He’s Republican or slash libertarian, but he’s been voting with the Democrats, and so I don’t like that.” She also echoed anti-Massie campaign ads noting that the incumbent violated a term limits pledge that he took when he was first elected.
Mimi High of Erlanger just simply expressed her disappointment that Massie “was not who we thought he was.”
Massie himself gibed to Slateon Saturdaythat no one is actually voting for Gallrein because almost no one in the district knows him. “He won’t show up to a debate, he’s not doing large rallies. … He’s trying to avoid any hard questions.”
Instead, the Kentucky Republican said, “this is a referendum. People are either going to go vote for me or they’re going to go vote against me.”
He added, “I think the other X factor is this: You can get inspired to vote for somebody like you saw at this rally today, but you don’t have an anti-Massie rally, where voters say, ‘Boo, take him out, let’s get some pitchforks and go to the polling locations.’ That energy doesn’t exist.”
The problem for Massie may be that while Republican primary voters in his district don’t hate him, they just love Donald Trump more.
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