“The reason we lost is the war,” Vice President J.D. Vance admitted Wednesday on X, explaining the Republicans’ disastrous midterm election loss the day before. He listed the top four things the GOP could do, according to a pollster with whom he spoke, to win back voters who had defected to the Democrats. These were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) replied to Vance’s post, “Thanks for acknowledging these things. Better late than never.” Massie included an image of a red, MAGA-style hat. Instead of “Make America Great Again,” it said “Massie Was Right About Everything.”
“I’ll send you the hat,” he added.
Massie had a point.
“Donald Trump will put Americans first by securing our liberties at home and preventing needless wars abroad,” declared Massie in his endorsement of President Donald Trump in October 2024.
At the time, Massie’s praise for Trump expressed the most basic hope of many in the original MAGA movement, and certainly of its ideological core.
After his inauguration, Trump’s early promises of radical DOGE spending cuts and a break from interventionist foreign policy withered more quickly and completely than even his political adversaries had expected, and by March 2026, the administration had launched a war with Iran that seemed to serve Israel’s interests, first. That war cost Americans at home, at the gas pump and beyond. So did massive federal spending. So did the other wars.
Massie resisted all of this. He has remained a fiscal hawk throughout the entire Trump era, which has enraged Trump in both terms. And he has been a stalwart “America First” Republican, one who is not afraid to challenge Israeli influence and question policy (which also irked the president). Massie understood that financial and foreign policy restraint were related, something many Americans are now experiencing firsthand.
The Kentucky congressman never abandoned the old MAGA message from his original Trump endorsement. He refused. For that reason, Trump teamed with pro-Israel billionaires to defeat Massie in his primary this May—the most expensive House primary in U.S. history.
This week Republicans suffered one of the most humiliating defeats in modern American political history. And it was a loss that differed in important respects from prior reversals. “Past midterm blue waves largely involved angry Democrats and independents beating up on jittery swing-seat Republicans who weren’t totally comfortable with what their president was doing, with a few genuine upsets sprinkled in,” observed Jim Antle of the Washington Examiner. “This one hit the GOP’s center of gravity.”
Indeed.
Massie tried to warn his party. After the off-year 2025 elections in which Democrats did exceptionally well, he told Republicans what they might need to do to survive the 2026 midterms. “To avoid a repeat of last night’s shellacking in the 2026 midterms,” Massie urged, “Republicans should: quit covering for pedophiles; put America before Israel; put farmers before corporations; quit funding wars abroad; reduce spending to control inflation; quit attacking independent voices.”
Take out Massie’s efforts for more transparency on the Epstein Files, also a part of original MAGA, and this sounds like Vance’s midterm postmortem list. In fact, in this election a number of Democrats ran with the “America First” message sounding more like Trump from two years ago than the president today—and sounding more like Massie on any day than the current Lindsey Graham–ified MAGA.
Resharing his November 2025 warning post, Massie wrote on Wednesday, “Instead of correcting course, the GOP chose to shoot the messenger and double down on stupid.”
Trump’s Republican party did shoot Massie the messenger, and it definitely doubled (tripled? quadrupled?) down on stupid.
But now, who looks stupid?
In the broadest sense, the America First message still remains viable and has been largely untried.
That isn’t due to Thomas Massie’s lack of trying. But judging by the midterm results, the voters believe it’s due to Trump’s.
Jack Hunter, The American Conservative
