I’ve been meaning to write this story — with this exact headline — for at least seven years now. It’s been so long that the entire point of the parable has flipped.
I first met Thomas Massie some time in 2013, when I was just a young congressional reporter writing stories that no one outside the Capitol would read. Massie made an impression on me.
He was, inarguably, an independent voice. He was principled on spending, and obstinate when Republican leaders wanted to use the same old broken processes lawmakers had used for decades to ram through legislation.
As people tend to say about Thomas Massie when they’re trying to be polite: I may not have agreed with everything he said, but I appreciated that he spoke his mind.
Only I wasn’t just being polite. When I interviewed him, I found myself nodding along at his points, and chuckling at the jokes coming from a baby-faced congressman who was almost twice my age.
We got to know each other better over the years. At some point, a leadership staffer tipped me off that Massie — a proud double graduate of MIT — was basically the godfather of “dildonics,” which is exactly what you think it is.
I read his graduate thesis, and having absorbed roughly 0% of it, I confronted him on whether the practical application of all these patents he owned was in the field of advanced sex toys and virtual reality. (The answer is, no, it’s not really true, but it’s not entirely false either.)
Massie was just delighted someone had bothered to read his scientific work, and he implored me to get my hands on his bachelor’s thesis. That was where the good stuff was, he said. The graduate paper was just to get his degree.
I didn’t end up writing the story, but I learned all about “freedom force-reflecting haptic interfaces.”
When lawmakers returned from August recess in 2015, Massie bet me dinner that Speaker John Boehner would be gone by the end of September. I thought it would take longer. I was wrong, he was right — at least technically. (Boehner announced his intention to retire in September, but it took until the end of October for him to officially resign.) We went to some Thai restaurant on Capitol Hill and drank cheap beer.
A few months later — I think it was early 2016, at least — Massie was my guest at a congressional correspondents’ dinner. After driving us over to the event in his Tesla and hitting 100 mph on Independence Ave., he parked and asked me if he should put on “The Precious.” Massie had used the line many times before, and he would use it many times after. (Real Massie-knowers recognize that he tends to re-use his favorite quips.)
“The Precious” referred to his congressional members’ pin. And just like in The Lord of the Rings, Massie contended that if you keep it on too long, it would start to turn you into a worse version of yourself — like Smeagol transforming into Gollum.
“The Precious” referred to his congressional members’ pin. And just like in The Lord of the Rings, Massie contended that “The Precious” had special powers. It can get you around security lines, and out of speeding tickets and a drink faster at the bar. But keep it on too long, Massie liked to joke, and it would start to turn you into a worse version of yourself — like Smeagol transforming into Gollum.
It was a line I returned to often over the years, particularly as I watched Thomas Massie, the principled libertarian most likely to vote “no,” turn into Rep. Thomas Massie, the Trump-supporting good soldier who voted “yes” with every other Republican.
I watched Massie become a strong advocate for Speaker Kevin McCarthy. I watched him vote for spending bills that the old Massie would have been screaming about. I watched him construct tenuous explanations as to why the latest Trump outrage wasn’t really that outrageous. And, having kept his Twitter on alerts for at least a decade, I watched him accuse people over and over again of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — a disease which only those who give the diagnosis actually have.
In short, I watched him become just another Republican, with a subcommittee chairmanship and a staff of people making sure he had a good seat on the plane back to D.C.
At some point, Massie unfollowed me on Twitter (as we called it then). And I stopped texting him. I stopped really talking to him at all. This version of Thomas Massie wasn’t really amusing to me anymore, and I’m sure I had stopped amusing him years earlier.
I didn’t think about Massie much, but when I did, I thought about the irony of “The Precious”: It had turned Frodo Baggins.
Massie spent years warning about the power of the congressional pin, the trappings of being a congressman, only to become the thing he railed against. It seemed worthy of some words, but I wasn’t in a rush. I’d write about Thomas Massie at some point — eventually, when I got around to it.
But it turns out that wasn’t the end of the story. There was, as it happens, a third act. And this one, like many other great stories, started with a death.
***
In June 2024, Massie’s wife Rhonda unexpectedly passed away. They were high school sweethearts. If you had ever seen them together — and I had — you could tell they were truly in love. And if you had talked to anyone for the next year about What’s Going on With Thomas Massie These Days — and I did — they likely would have brought up Rhonda’s death.
Massie himself dismissed that explanation. He didn’t seem to think his attitude — about life, about death, or about Congress — had really changed. But from the outside looking in, Massie clearly wasn’t as enamored with being a congressman as he once was. He was less filtered. More … himself.
The changes were physical, too. Not long after his wife’s death, one former member remarked to me that Massie looked like he had aged a decade. It was a thing people were talking about. But then, perhaps around the time he started dating his second wife, the aging turned into something else. He was growing into himself. Those rosy, cherubic cheeks finally disappeared. After seemingly waiting for five decades for his first facial hair to appear, he woke up one day with a decent beard. At 55, he finally went through puberty.
My theory is Rhonda’s death kind of shook Massie from his establishment torpor. For all his changes, for how lost I’m sure he felt after his wife’s death, what he found was his most authentic self. Thomas Massie, the Thomas Massie I knew so well, was back.
He wasn’t afraid to say the wrong thing — just as long as he occasionally said the right thing. He spoke his mind. He called out his own party.
He called out the entire Congress for its unwavering support of Israel. He voted “no.” He was the only Republican to vote against Mike Johnson taking the speakership again. He voted against the reconciliation bill at every step of the way.
And most recently, he’s been standing athwart a Republican Congress — a Republican Congress whose truest passion is following Trump’s orders — and inconveniently reminding his GOP colleagues that only Congress has the power to declare war.
Perhaps most aggravating of all for Trump, Massie used his time in the GOP fever swamps to find an issue that would resonate with the #tcot crowd: Jeffrey Epstein.
I can’t say Massie saw the Epstein issue solely as something that might pierce the veil on Trump. I actually think he was at least partially motivated by a genuine desire to expose the truth. But once he sensed the pushback from the administration on releasing these files, he knew he had something.
He saw that as much as his voters like Trump, it was nearly impossible for anyone to argue against releasing the Epstein files. And the more Trump and Republicans pushed back against transparency, the more voters saw through their obfuscation.
That’s the thing about Massie, the thing that makes him really difficult for Republicans: He gets their voters better than they do. He knows the issues that make them tick. Many of them, at least. The truth is the GOP today is probably mostly composed of voters who want to do whatever Trump says.
But for the Republicans with an ideological identity, Thomas Massie is kind of their id.
You want to talk about the national debt? Massie is just about the last Republican in Congress who takes that issue seriously. You want to preserve individual freedoms? Massie is the one annoyingly pointing out that your government surveillance bill would allow the NSA to collect reams of data about your telephone calls. And, in the case of Epstein, you want to expose sex traffickers? Massie led the charge on the GOP side to release the files.
Massie hasn’t actually run away from Trump.
In many ways, he’s is doing something more damaging.
He hasn’t actually run away from Trump. In many ways, Massie is doing something more damaging: He’s pointing out how Trump and Republicans are undermining Trumpism, how they’re betraying their own voters, how Trump’s governing prose is very different — sometimes antithetical — to his campaign poetry.
As NBC’s Jon Allen put it recently, Massie’s primary is a test of whether voters are more loyal to Trumpism than they are to Trump.
This is a point worth lingering on, because if Massie wins on Tuesday, it’s not because he torched Trump. You’d struggle to find one instance when Massie openly and directly criticized the president. (Believe me: I tried.)
If you saw his primary campaign ads, he branded his Trump-endorsed opponent, Ed Gallrein, as “Woke Eddie Gallrein.” He flooded the airwaves with messages that “you can’t spell Eddie without D-E-I.” Massie spammed voters with a picture of himself standing next to Trump, with both men grinning and doing the president’s patented thumbs-up pose. And he painted Gallrein as the actual anti-Trump candidate, playing up how his main opponent switched his party affiliation from Republican to Independent after Trump won the presidential primary in 2016.
Whatever the lesson of Massie’s primary — whether he wins or loses — I don’t think it’s that voters are repudiating Trump. At least not directly.
Which leads me to my next point: The lesson of Massie’s primary — the parable of Thomas Massie — won’t hinge on the results. It’s one of the reasons why I’m comfortable publishing this piece before the election.
Whether Massie succeeds or fails, the margin is likely to be only a few thousand votes. And the lesson we take from this incredibly close election shouldn’t hang in the balance of whether a few thousand Massie voters in Kentucky outweigh the geriatric voters with whom Gallrein is dominating.
I know this much, however: In the Jimmy Stewart version of this parable, Thomas Massie wins on Tuesday. He demonstrates to Republicans that it’s OK to speak out when Trump acts contrary to the country’s interests. He prevails over the billionaire donors who have spent millions to take him out, proves that there is room in Congress to criticize Israel, and shows that devotion to Trump isn’t the only thing that matters in a GOP primary.
But I don’t think that’s really the lesson. This whole escapade of making a primary in Kentucky’s 4th district the most expensive House primary of all time has already had a chilling effect on any Republican thinking about speaking out. And in my cold, cynical heart, I suspect that Frank Capra’s not walking through that door.
I don’t even think Massie believes he’s going to win.
***
At this point in this story — 1,916 words in — you may be asking yourself whether I actually talked to Thomas Massie for this piece. I did.
I didn’t think he’d agree to a sit-down, so my plan was just to catch him after votes one day. But I had to catch him in the right mood, and without any other reporters around. (I promise you, after literally thousands of interviews with members of Congress, this is an art and a science.)
For all my experience, however, I am very out of practice. In early 2021, I became an editor, and I had basically hung up my congressional press badge a year earlier during COVID. I don’t think Massie and I have talked in six years.
That changed last Tuesday, after the House quietly debated and passed a bill Massie wrote. It was the perfect time to interview him.
After seemingly trying to dodge me — he took a circuitous route out of the Capitol that had me jogging down the stairs and running around the House chamber — I finally caught him outside walking back to his office.
I approached him, out of breath and starting to sweat, and tried to explain that I was writing a long piece about his congressional career, that I started writing this piece seven years ago about how “The Precious” had turned him and I wanted his take.
“Oh, OK…” he said, as if it’s not normal to tell a congressman that you’ve spent years writing a story about how you think they’re a fraud.
But then I explained that I didn’t write that story, and that I think the parable has flipped. After my long speech, I finally arrived at a question: What do you think the lesson would be for other Republicans if you lose?
Massie paused.
“What’s the story you’re gonna write and I’ll give you the quote you want, ‘cause that’s usually how these things work,” he said.
I told him that’s not what I wanted. I told him I didn’t know what the lesson was anymore. He seemed convinced enough to start engaging with my question.
“The story would be Israel controls this Congress,” Massie said.
We talked about the money that’s been flowing into his race, how most of it is coming from pro-Israel billionaires. And Massie started opening up. At some point, just before the entrance into the Rayburn House Office Building, Massie stopped walking and decided to post up.
He suggested that, among the roughly 220 Republicans in the House, there are 30 that are “just bad people.”
Over the course of about 30 minutes, we had the conversation we needed to have. He laid out his case as to why he actually represents a number of key constituencies of the GOP — MAHA voters, anti-spending crusaders, privacy hawks, war hawks, even voters who wanted transparency on Epstein — and how, if he loses, that’s a “large part of the coalition that’s gonna be disenfranchised.”
Massie claimed that if the National Republican Congressional Committee could secretly determine this race, the House GOP’s campaign arm would eagerly make him the winner, lest a major part of the GOP base feel like it has no representation in Congress.
That’s the thing, Massie said, that many Republicans don’t understand about his presence in Congress. When he’s the lone Republican voting a certain way, he’s often representing, as he estimated, 40% of the GOP. “And I’m the only vote that represents that 40% on that issue that day,” he said.
We talked about his wife’s death, his “misfortune makeover,” as he called it. “I lost weight, you know, because I lost my wife. And I quit shaving because she didn’t tell me to shave,” he said.
(When I told him I write in the piece that he finally went through puberty, he shot back, “When are you going through puberty?”)
When I pressed him again on the lesson of this race, he said the lesson would be, if he wins, that there is hope.
“Maybe you can vote your way out of this,” he said. “Maybe you can vote your way out of the debt. Maybe you can vote your way out of all the constitutional infringements. People should be hopeful.”
And if he loses, he said Republicans would “learn that lesson in November.”
He gave me his “operating hypothesis of what’s going on in the Republican conference.”
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He suggested that, among the roughly 220 Republicans in the House, there are 30 that are “just bad people.”
He said those 30 people were motivated by money or helping special interests. “Totally grifting, or totally owned by a corporation, that are gonna come back and be a lobbyist for Monsanto,” he said.
And then, he said, there are “30 people who wake up every day and they’re principled.”
“They want to do the right thing,” he continued. “They still believe in what they campaigned on. They’re up here trying.”
“That leaves 160 that are NPCs,” Massie said, referring to Non-Player Characters. “They are following whoever prevails. They salute the speaker. And they are onboard every day. You don’t have to worry about those votes.”
But the good news, Massie said, was that if “the 30 good guys can become predominant and capture the speakership, we get a 160 for free.”
“Thirty trying to do the right thing. Thirty trying to do the wrong thing. And 160 along for the ride,” he said, though he clarified that, among the 30 principled Republicans, most of them “get their lunch money stolen before lunch.”
As for the premise of this story — that Massie transformed into just another loyal Republican before finding his independent roots again — Massie rejects it. He thinks he’s never changed.
“What’s happened is the terrain has changed,” he said.
He argued that when Kevin McCarthy was speaker, there was a different way to do this job. “When you have a Mike Johnson, whose main feature is to do whatever Trump wants, then you do the job differently,” he said.
What’s curious to me about that distinction is that Massie seems to understand that both men are just presiding over the House in the most politically expedient fashion. When McCarthy was in charge, there were different rules to the speakership than there are now. And when I told Massie I thought McCarthy would do whatever is politically expedient, he asked a question central to the entire paradox of Thomas Massie:
“But is that wrong?”
***
I concede that all of this may be overstated. Massie was probably less of an independent voice than I remember during the early part of his career, maybe a little more independent than I give him credit for during the middle, and less independent now than I and many others project. During this latest campaign, Massie has repeatedly touted that he votes with the GOP more than 90% of the time.
But he can’t convince me there hasn’t been a shift.
The real genesis of this story was that during the first Trump presidency, I saw Massie’s old best friend in Congress, Rep. Justin Amash, going one way, and I saw Massie going the other. When I initially started reporting out that story, neither congressman really wanted to play ball. They were still close friends, no matter if, as I suspect, they both thought the other was headed in the wrong direction.
The people who now see Massie as this principled, clear-eyed voice on Trump should remember Amash — a man who was actually a principled, clear-eyed voice on Trump. Amash voted for Trump’s first impeachment and eventually left the Republican Party over its “partisan death spiral.” But the truth is, Massie tried to talk Amash out of his impeachment stand.
As Massie argued with me last Tuesday that he’s the same independent voice he’s always been, I brought up the impeachment conversation he had with Amash and another likeminded Republican, then-Rep. Raul Labrador.
But again, Massie corrected me. He and Labrador didn’t have a “conversation” with Amash. It was, in Massie’s words, “an intervention.”
If Massie is truly the unfiltered and independent ideologue he portrays, I don’t think he would have been trying to talk Amash out of his impeachment vote. Massie can argue Trump didn’t deserve impeachment over seeking a quid pro quo from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He may even believe that. But if that was Amash’s assessment, why not let him vote his conscience?
Instead, I think Massie saw the political implications of that vote and argued it wasn’t worth the trouble. And I’m sure Massie has seen Trump do things that he thinks deserves criticism. He’s made a political calculation — like every other elected Republican — that speaking out isn’t worth it. It’s just that Massie draws the line a little differently than most of his GOP colleagues.
Years ago, Massie told me his voters put up with his quirky votes — the 420-1 roll calls — because he can explain his opposition. And voters are usually willing to listen because they generally agree that Washington has lost its mind. It’s possible everyone else got it wrong when the House voted to extend sanctions on Iran and Massie was the only one who got it right.
If Thomas Massie loses on Tuesday, he’ll be OK with it.
But, Massie said, if he came out against Trump and argued to his voters that they had that one wrong, that was the moment when they’d think he had lost his mind.
When I brought up this little anecdote to Massie last Tuesday, he didn’t remember saying it. But I remember it distinctly. We were at that congressional correspondents’ dinner, we weren’t off the record and I’ve thought about it ever since.
All this context, the murkiness of Thomas Massie’s Trump opposition, just complicates this story. It’d be an easier lesson if Massie was unapologetic about his Trump views — one way or the other.
But the real lesson of Thomas Massie is not that he consistently resisted Trump, or consistently submitted to him. It’s that he spent years trying to navigate the space in between — trying to remain his own man while also convincing Republican voters he was actually more loyal to Trump than anyone else. And for all the balancing acts and rhetorical gymnastics, Massie is now being treated like any other Republican who breaks with Trump. He may ultimately pay the same political price.
Still, I know this much: If Thomas Massie loses on Tuesday, he’ll be OK with it.
Massie doesn’t need “The Precious” anymore. He told me he hasn’t even taken the newest congressional pin out of its wrapper.
Whatever the draw of being a member of Congress, Massie argued he’s “never been one who cares about having the job that much.”
“And I can tell you I had friends who were ideological companions here, or were, who cared very much about having the job,” Massie said.
I confirmed that Massie was referring to Amash. “I think he liked the job more than I did,” Massie said.
But that may just emphasize my point — the original point that actually started this piece years ago — that Amash was truly consumed with doing what he thought was right and Massie was more willing to play politics, even at the expense of a job that Amash cared more about.
Of course, in potentially the last days of his political career, Massie may be looking at his time in Congress through some renegade-tinted glasses, but it’s true he was more of a renegade than just about all of his GOP colleagues. And he’s at peace with how he’s performed this job, even if I (and many others) have reservations.
That’s really the parable of Thomas Massie — that if you vote your conscience, you can hold your head up high at the end of your career and say, ‘Fair enough.’
To some extent — and I’m certain Massie would hate this comparison — the lesson of Thomas Massie is the same lesson as Bill Cassidy.
Cassidy also carefully navigated his opinions on Trump. He didn’t necessarily regret voting for impeachment and incurring Trump’s wrath. But it did cost him a future in Congress. And it did teach Republicans that there is no real place in the GOP for Trump criticism.
Massie is testing whether there is any place for that criticism, whether Republicans can couch their critiques as fidelity to the principles Trump campaigned on. To me, that’s what Massie is actually testing — whether Republicans care more about Trump than Trumpism, and whether a candidate can be successful simply by running on ‘Because Trump said so.’
Massie said he personally views the race as “a coin flip.” And while he was clear “winning this would be very sweet,” he’s at peace with either outcome.
We discussed what he might do if he loses.
“I’m not gonna be a lobbyist,” he said, “although it may be fun to be a gun lobbyist.”
He seemed genuinely excited at the prospect of life after Congress. “I would go back to my farm, raise peaches and grandkids, and invent stuff again,” he said.
He talked about this moment being “the golden age of invention,” how he could go up to the third floor of his farmhouse — where he keeps all his spare electronics and science experiments — and execute ideas, how inventing things now would be so much easier because he has “40 assistants called ChatGPT and Grok.”
He pointed out that he actually invented the first wearable debt clock, claiming that 4,000 had already been sold. (It seems pretty fitting that he’s replaced wearing his congressional pin with a gimmicky debt clock that he invented.)
He talked about robotics and Artificial Intelligence and how there’s going to be “a separation of haves and have nots pretty soon.”
“I’d like to be a have-something,” he said.
And Massie’s idea to be a have-something is to invent robots that can perform functions, like a tiny little Death Star for his orchard that “zaps oriental fruit moths and coddling moths and plum curculio.”
Finally, I asked about his advancements in the field of dildonics, just in case I never truly understood that master’s thesis. Like I had concluded all those years ago, it seemed like there was at least some truth to his research having some practical applications in that field — but, again, he’s far from the godfather.
Massie made it clear that, whatever happens on Tuesday, dildonics will not be part of his future.
“That is not what I would go back and do,” he said.
