Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said Monday that he isn’t bothered by President Trump’s latest push for his ouster after the lawmaker criticized the U.S. strikes against Iran, claiming he’s grown immune to the president’s attacks.
“In some sense, I have the Trump antibodies,” Massie said in an interview with MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.”
He added, “There are a few people here who are consistent and don’t sway in the wind when it’s your president or somebody else’s president, and I’m just trying to be consistent here in this case.”
In their latest skirmish, Trump urged his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement to ostracize the Kentucky Republican after he blasted the president for sidestepping Congress to order airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities Saturday. Massie called the move unconstitutional.
“MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” the president wrote Sunday in a post on Truth Social. “The good news is that we will have a wonderful American Patriot running against him in the Republican Primary, and I’ll be out in Kentucky campaigning really hard.”
“MAGA is not about lazy, grandstanding, nonproductive politicians, of which Thomas Massie is definitely one,” he added.
Trump and Massie have been feuding over the president’s agenda-setting “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which the Bluegrass State lawmaker voted against when it narrowly passed the House last month.
Massie countered that he’s just trying to stay true to his beliefs.
“I’m more of an ideologue than a populist, I’ll admit that, but at least if you’re an ideologue, you know what your ideas are, and with populism, you can blow in the wind,” he told Hayes. “I’m worried that in the first six months here, we’ve already sort of gone astray of what was one of the basic principles of putting America first.”
The congressman, a libertarian-leaning engineer and inventor, wears a digital badge that constantly keeps track of the federal debt in real time, but he recently joked on social media that he should reprogram it “to display the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since [Trump] has tweeted at me last.”
Trump’s team reportedly has been mulling potential challengers for Massie, who was first elected in 2012 and is seeking a seventh term next fall.
He easily won reelection last year, fending off two primary challengers in Kentucky’s ruby red 4th Congressional district.
The GOP lawmaker also faced MAGA world backlash near the end of the president’s first term in 2020 after he opposed the sweeping COVID-19 aid package early in the pandemic. Trump ultimately endorsed Massie in 2022.