Thomas Massie Thought He Was Fighting a King. He Was Facing a Cult.

Kentucky Republicans just spent $32 million to prove that loyalty to Trump matters more than record, principle, or independent thought.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

Thomas Massie stood before a crowd of supporters at the Marriott Cincinnati Airport in Hebron, Kentucky, last week, and delivered one of the more remarkable concession speeches in recent political memory. He cracked jokes. He quoted the Constitution. He drew a clean, direct line between a republic and a monarchy, telling the crowd that if the legislative branch always votes with the president, what you have is a king.

The crowd chanted his name. Some of them shouted that he should run for president. And somewhere in that room, almost certainly wearing a MAGA hat, was a voter who had just helped remove him from the seat he’d held since 2012 — not because of anything Massie did wrong, not because his record was a disaster, not because he failed the district — but because Donald Trump told them to. That voter heard Massie’s speech about kings and republics and constitutional architecture and thought: yeah, but the king said vote for the other guy, so.

Before we get into all of that, and we are absolutely going to get into all of that, let’s give credit where credit is due. Because I would lose my journalistic credibility if I didn’t keep it real, and my credibility is one of the few things I’m not willing to sacrifice for a good paragraph. Thomas Massie ran. He didn’t quit. He didn’t pull a Marjorie Taylor Greene and sense the heat coming and hop off the train before it could run him over. He didn’t try to appease Trump like John Cornyn, who was crushed anyway in the Texas runoff this week.

Massie stood at the edge of the cliff, looked straight down, and said — fine. Let’s find out. The country needed that. We needed the most expensive House primary in American history — $32 million in ad spending, Pete Hegseth stumping for his opponent the night before what was reportedly a planned military assault on Iran, Trump calling him the worst congressman in the Republican Party on the actual day of the vote — we needed all of it, because we needed to know exactly where things stand. And now we know. We will get to what we know in a moment. But first — the receipts.

Massie has been in Congress since 2012. Eight terms. In that time he built one of the most consistent libertarian records in the House — pushed back on foreign aid, the national debt, executive overreach, and the kind of blank-check war-making that Republicans used to pretend to oppose before opposing it became a threat to their primary survival. He co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna. He voted against Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill over its impact on the national debt. He said out loud that the president did not have the authority to bomb Iran without congressional approval. He was, in short, doing the job. And for that, he got buried.

Now. Before I go any further, I have to be honest with you in the way that only someone who genuinely respects you can be honest with you. The Thomas Massie who stood at that podium Tuesday night — thoughtful, principled, quoting the Founders — is not the Thomas Massie who has occupied that seat for the last several years. Because that Thomas Massie was, for a significant stretch, a card-carrying member of the very movement that just ate him alive. He was a true believer. He didn’t wander into MAGA by accident. He set up a tent and made himself comfortable.

Exhibit A: December 2021. Days — not weeks, not months, days — after the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan, where four students were killed, Massie posted a family Christmas photo on social media. In the photo, every member of his family — his wife, his children, all of them — is holding an AR-15-style rifle. Every single person. The family is grinning. The caption asks Santa for more ammo. The photo was posted four days after four teenagers were shot to death at their high school. Now, I am a political scientist. I try to approach things with a degree of analytical distance. But I have to be honest with you: that is some of the most aggressively weird shit I have ever seen from an elected official, and I have been watching elected officials do weird shit for a very long time. That is not a Second Amendment statement. That is a performance. That is a man looking directly into the camera and saying: I know exactly who I am performing for, and I want them to know I am one of them. Merry Christmas. Please pass the ammunition.

He was, at that point in his career, a true believer. Not a cynical operator using the movement as a vehicle, but an actual participant who had marinated long enough in the MAGA sauce to think that the Christmas rifle photo was a good idea. He and Marjorie Taylor Greene had more in common than either of them would probably like to admit today.

So what changed? The Epstein files changed him. Or more specifically: Trump’s response to the Epstein files changed him. When the files became a serious political pressure point and Trump — the man who had promised to drain the swamp, expose the powerful, and finally deliver accountability to the people who had been running the game in the shadows — waved the whole thing away like it was a minor scheduling conflict, something cracked inside Massie. You could almost see it happening in real time. Imagine spending years inside a movement, genuinely convinced that the leader shares your values and your outrage, and then watching that leader look directly at the thing you’ve been fighting for and say: nah, we’re good, moving on.

It was like watching a man get slowly doused with cold water. First a drip. Then a trickle. Then a full bucket. By the time Massie was standing in front of the Senate demanding Pam Bondi answer for the files, the spell was broken. He had wandered out of the MAGA fog — blinking, slightly disoriented, looking around at the landscape like a man who had just walked out of a three-year movie and was trying to remember what sunlight felt like. The principled libertarian had been in there the whole time, apparently, just waiting for the moment the cult did something too stupid to rationalize. For Massie, that moment was Trump calling Jeffrey Epstein’s victims a hoax. For a lot of people, that moment never comes. That’s kind of the whole problem.

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And that brings us to his primary. And to Ed Gallrein. And to what may be the single most clarifying political story of the 2026 primary season.

Ed Gallrein beat Thomas Massie 55% to 45% — a nine-point margin in a district Massie had dominated for over a decade, a district where he won his last primary with nearly 76% of the vote. This was not some foreign territory he stumbled into. This was his district. He knew these counties the way you know the layout of a house you’ve lived in for thirteen years — where the squeaky floorboard is, which neighbors wave back, which roads flood in the spring. He had shown up. He had done the work. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he probably believed that meant something. That being principled, being present, being the guy who actually read the bills and asked the hard questions — that all of that would be enough. That his people knew him. That knowing him would matter more than a Truth Social post from a man who has never spent a night in Boone County.

That is, if you are keeping score at home, one of the more painful ironies of the entire MAGA era: a congressman undone in his own house by followers who chose the man they’d never met over the one they’d known for over a decade. Principle, it turns out, does not come with cult immunity. Gallrein is a retired Navy SEAL, a fifth-generation Kentucky farmer, and a man who ran an entire congressional campaign without debating his opponent a single time. Not once. Zero debates. His explanation for this was that he was already debating Massie “every day” by talking directly to the American people, “just like the president does, with no middleman.” He literally campaigned on the promise of being a middleman-free vessel for whatever comes out of Mar-a-Lago. No filter. No independent analysis. No pesky personal opinions getting in between the Dear Leader’s instructions and the congressional voting record. He offered himself up as a human rubber stamp and the voters of Kentucky’s 4th said: yes, that’s exactly what we want, thank you, where do we sign.

I want to be very precise about what Ed Gallrein is, because it matters. Ed Gallrein is a mall Santa.

Stay with me. You know how this works. When you’re a kid and you’re old enough to start asking questions about the logistics of a man delivering presents to every child on earth in a single night — and one of the adults in your family takes you to the mall and there’s a Santa sitting in a big chair surrounded by fake snow and a line of children — and you lean over to your uncle or your grandmother or whoever drew the short straw that day and you say, quietly, “that’s not the real Santa” — they look at you and say: no, but he works for Santa. The real Santa is at the North Pole getting ready for Christmas. This man is just here to take the wishlist back.

Ed Gallrein is the mall Santa. He has no independent existence as a political figure. He is a proxy. A representative. A man in a red suit sitting in a chair, collecting wishlists on behalf of someone who never had to leave his compound to make any of this happen. Trump is at Mar-a-Lago — his North Pole — and he sent his guy down to Kentucky to take the orders. And the congregation showed up in line like well-behaved children, told the man in the suit what they wanted, and trusted completely that the message would get back to the man upstairs. Gallrein didn’t need a brain of his own. The job doesn’t require one. The job requires the suit and the chair and the ability to smile and nod and relay the message faithfully. Anything more would be overqualification.

Now, Massie stood at that podium and said what you have is a king. And constitutionally, textually, historically — he’s right. But I need to gently correct the diagnosis, because getting the diagnosis right actually matters if you want to understand what you’re dealing with. What he’s describing is not a monarchy. A king rules through law and institutional authority. People obey a king because they have to. What Massie is describing — what Tuesday night actually demonstrated — is a cult. And the difference is everything.

The proof is not theoretical. The proof has a name and a goatee and lives in Erlanger, Kentucky. His name is Bruce Spears, and he is a retired voter who told Slate that he voted for Ed Gallrein for one reason: “Because Trump told me to.”

I’m going to need a moment with that sentence.

Bruce Spears is not an uninformed voter. He had voted for Massie before. He acknowledged that Gallrein was better than he expected when he heard him speak. He is a grown adult human being who has navigated the world successfully for long enough to retire. And when asked why he switched his vote from a thirteen-year incumbent with a documented record to a man who refused to debate that incumbent a single time, his complete and total answer was: because Trump told me to. Not because of Gallrein’s policy positions. Not because of Massie’s record. Because the leader issued an instruction and he followed it. He said it with the same casual certainty a man uses when he says he takes his coffee black. No embarrassment. No hesitation. Because inside the movement, that answer makes complete sense. Inside the movement, that answer is not a confession — it’s a statement of loyalty.

This is what a cult looks like when it votes.

And I want to be precise here, because I have written about MAGA’s cultish architecture before and I stand by the framework: this is not a brick-and-mortar cult. There is no compound. There is no Waco. There is no ranch in the desert where the faithful gather and wait for the signal. A cultish movement in the modern era doesn’t need a physical headquarters. It needs a leader with a microphone, media willing to prop that leader up to near-messianic status, and millions of followers whose sense of self has fused so completely to the movement that deviation from the leader’s instruction doesn’t feel like a political disagreement — it feels like self-erasure. Mar-a-Lago is the closest thing to a compound, but even that’s optional. The church is wherever Trump is posting.

Think about Michael Jackson fans in the 1980s and ’90s. People were fainting at his concerts. Hyperventilating when they got close to him. Weeping at the sight of him from across an arena. That level of devotion — that complete dissolution of individual self into the gravitational pull of another person — is the raw material of a cult. The Beyhive has the same infrastructure. The Swifties have the same infrastructure. And here is where I need you to really pay attention, because this is the part that should make you uncomfortable. The difference between those fandoms and MAGA is not the intensity of the attachment. It is not even the willingness to act. We already know what happens when a beloved figure’s fanbase decides someone is an enemy — and nobody even had to give the order.

Keri Hilson said something mildly unflattering about Beyoncé one time. One time. Nobody sent a memo. Beyoncé did not hold a press conference. The Beyhive mobilized on its own, out of pure devotion, and Hilson’s career has never fully recovered. That was an accident. That was unsanctioned. That was fans operating on instinct with no instructions from the top. Now imagine Beyoncé actually pointed. Imagine she looked at her fans and said: go after her. Stalk her. Harass her. Make her life impossible. You would be genuinely sobered by how many people would comply before the sentence was even finished. Now replace Beyoncé with Trump. Except Trump does not have to imagine it. He has told his followers to rough up protesters at his rallies and offered to pay their legal fees. He told them to march to the Capitol and fight like hell. He has sicced his base on individual critics, judges, prosecutors, and private citizens by name. The difference between the Beyhive and MAGA is not the architecture of devotion. It is that one leader has never weaponized it, and the other has made weaponizing it the entire point.

The cracks in this movement are real and Tuesday showed us where they are. In Georgia’s 12th Congressional District, a woman named Tori Branum — whose primary qualification for Congress appeared to be that she called ICE on Latino day laborers doing landscaping work and had them detained as a political stunt — got 16.6% of the vote. Sixteen point six percent. In a deep red Georgia district. Incumbent Rick Allen beat her 83.4% to 16.6%, which means that even in a district that went heavily for Trump, the voters looked at a woman whose entire brand was performative cruelty against working people and said: no thank you, we’re good. That’s a crack. That’s not nothing.

In Alabama, Trump-backed Barry Moore led the Senate field but couldn’t clear 50% and is heading to a June 16 runoff — a win for the machine, but a messy one. In Georgia, Trump-endorsed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones is also going to a June 16 runoff for governor against a billionaire who crashed the race without the official endorsement and still forced overtime. Jon Ossoff is sitting on $32 million in cash waiting for whoever survives. All is not lost. The spell, in places, is wearing thin.

But cultish movements take time to run their course. They don’t collapse from a single primary loss or a single scandal or a single moment where the leader does something too stupid to defend. They erode. They fray at the edges. They lose members one rationalization at a time, until one day the congregation is smaller than the mythology suggested and the power is less absolute than everyone pretended. Massie’s loss — and Branum’s loss, and the runoffs that Trump couldn’t close outright — are data points, not conclusions.

What we can conclude is this: Massie, like MTG before him, danced a little too close to the sun. The difference is that Greene sensed the heat and jumped before she got singed. Massie stayed in, ran on his record, took his medicine, and lost to a man whose entire pitch to the voters of Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District was: I will be your acolyte. I will carry the wishlist back to the North Pole. I will never have an independent thought that inconveniences the man who sent me here. Vote for me and I will be the most obedient mall Santa this district has ever sent to Washington.

And they did. By nine points.

Thomas Massie stood at that podium and talked about kings. He was right about the constitutional diagnosis and wrong about the political one. You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You cannot quote Madison at a congregation that has already decided the pastor’s word supersedes the text. The man who said “because Trump told me to” was not making a policy argument. He was making a statement of identity. And until enough of those voters find their own Epstein files moment — their own point where the leader’s behavior becomes too expensive to rationalize — the mall stays open, the line stays long, and the man in the red suit keeps taking the wishlist back to Mar-a-Lago.

The real Santa, they will tell you, is at the North Pole.

He’s getting ready for the midterms.