How I Got Past Massie Derangement Syndrome
He’s no big-tent moderate, but he’s fearless on Trump, Epstein and Iran.
Rep. Thomas Massie is the opposite of a lightning rod. Instead of conducting electricity harmlessly into the ground, the Kentucky Republican conducts controversies upward and outward, igniting conflagrations of news and social media headlines.
This talent is invaluable in his crusades with progressive Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna. They’ve been trying to pry the Jeffrey Epstein files from the Justice Department since last year. Now, with President Donald Trump preparing for armed conflict with Iran, they intend to force a House vote this week to limit his war powers.
I fully support both of those goals, but it’s complicated.
Massie first got noticed by me and many others outside his House district when he posted a 2021 Christmas card of his family. Lovely tree, lovely family, seven guns. As if that were not enough, Massie added, “ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” And, as if THAT were not enough, he posted the card a few days after a teen-ager killed four students at a Michigan high school using a gun his parents had given him as an early Christmas present.
Did Massie catch holy hell from across the political spectrum? Yes and no. Democrats were appalled, and they weren’t the only ones. “They’re not handbags. They’re machines used to kill people,” wrote libertarian Billy Binion, then an editor at Reason magazine. Then-GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the card suggested “a gun fetish.” But Rep. Lauren Boebert a Colorado Republican, quickly posted a Christmas scene of herself and four sons holding weapons: “The Boeberts have your six, @RepThomasMassie. (No spare ammo for you, though).”
Tone-deaf Christmas greetings like these have subsided in recent years, at least on public platforms. But Massie remains a font of provocations and positions that most Americans oppose.
I’m not talking about split-the-difference math on taxes or spending. A House member since late 2012, Massie has introduced recent bills to withdraw the United States from NATO and abolish the Department of Education. He supported a 2017 bill to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. He is a vaccine skeptic, opposes public health mandates, backs Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial Make American Healthy Again movement, and told podcaster Theo Von last year that he consulted with Kennedy in October 2024 about becoming agriculture secretary if Trump won.
There was one problem: He had campaigned for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the primaries that year and had not endorsed Trump. So, Massie called to arrange the endorsement, and Trump himself answered the phone. “It was like oh shit, that’s his cell number,” Massie told Von. Then, doing a pitch-perfect impression of Trump’s voice and vocabulary, he explained how it all went down.
Massie did not get that agriculture job. Instead, after years of good times and bad with Trump, he’s evolved into a high-profile nemesis. Last May, he was one of only two Republicans to vote against his party’s giant tax cut bill, citing “Biden levels of spending and bigger deficits.” Trump called him a “grandstander” who doesn’t understand government and should be “voted out of office.”
Their relationship is still rocky. In a typically loony “Merry Christmas” message on Christmas Day, Trump referred to Massie as a “low-life Republican.” Massie promptly condemned the insult and turned it into a fundraising tool. He recently said that if the Iran war powers resolution fails this week in the House, it will be because “Republicans are afraid of the president.”
Massie is forging new frontiers of fearlessness in trying to restrict Trump’s unilateral options in Iran, to win justice for sexual abuse survivors, and to bring accountability to the Epstein elites — including Trump and hundreds of others in business, politics, academia, and finance across the globe.
The Epstein issue is not “boutique or niche” in his district, Massie told Politico. In fact, he said, it has expanded his pool of supporters since that 2021 Christmas card. “The people who were upset that my entire family posed with machine guns are now voting for me,” he said.
For countless reasons, that would never be me. After writing so many times about so many gun tragedies over 40-plus years in journalism, guns alone would do it. Seventeen columns in seven years as of 2017, and at least five more since then. I wrote about the Massie card years ago, and I still remember it with disbelief.
At the same time, I do believe in political negotiation, results for both sides wherever possible, and partnerships between unlikely partners. I wrote a book about it a few years ago. I even gave props to Rep. James Comer (the Republican oversight overseer from Kentucky who persecuted the Bidens and will reprise his role this week by deposing the Clintons about Epstein) when he and D.C. leaders embraced a win-win deal to return the decaying 174-acre Robert F. Kennedy Stadium complex to D.C. so the city could redevelop the land.
Massie himself unintentionally offered the best case for making a partial peace with him despite his “please bring ammo” card and all the rest of his outlier politics. It was when he gave Von his theory of the “two forms” of Trump Derangement Syndrome. “There’s the kind where you hate him so much it’s irrational, and even if he’s for something you support, you’d still be against him,” Massie said. And then there’s the kind where “you love him so much that when he goes against something he said he would do, or he does something that’s against your principles, you change your own principles to support him. And I think that’s just as dangerous. And I try not to have either of the Trump Derangement Syndromes.”
I will never be tempted by Massie Derangement Syndrome of the second type, and it would be self-defeating to surrender to the first. Massie deserves credit for taking on this president and partnering with Khanna on projects they have proved they simply won’t let go.
BlueSky commenter Krankenbruder recently called Massie a “magnificent f-----g lunatic.” When it comes to quitting NATO or dissolving the EPA, dropping “magnificent” would make the description more appropriate. But it does fit Massie’s dogged attempts to constrain Trump and the Epstein class, including Trump’s Iran plan to exercise war powers the Constitution grants to Congress alone. And in the existential fight to save democracy, we need all the allies we can get.
Jill Lawrence is the author of The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock.
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Fascinating critique. If he accomplishes nothing else in his political career than to facilate the release of the Epstein files he will be fondly remembered by history.
Thank you for your perspective. I imagine you could write a similar piece about the occasional issues where Mitch McConnell has seemed sensible until he switched subjects.... To most any other subject.