The U.S. Congress decided last night not to initiate the impeachment process that could have led to the removal of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. By a vote of 211 to 204, with many absences, the lower chamber opted to send the impeachment proposal to a committee, effectively shelving it until at least the next legislative session, which will have a significant Democratic majority. President Donald Trump was furious, and Vice President JD Vance claimed it was ridiculous. Hegseth himself, cornered, declared that it was all "a farce and a setup driven by the ego and resentment of a loser." The vote did not go through, but the prevailing sentiment in Washington is that Hegseth's downfall is only a matter of time.
Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman from Kentucky at odds with Trump who initiated the impeachment proposal against the Secretary of Defense, is a figure difficult to categorize within the usual Trumpism framework. An engineer by training, libertarian, and advocate for a small government, he was for years a close ally of much of the MAGA movement. His worldview combines liberal economic positions, conservative stances on domestic issues, flirtations with conspiracy theories on sensitive matters, and a pronounced isolationism in foreign policy.
He arrived in Congress in 2012, during the Tea Party wave, four years before Trump entered politics and transformed the Republican Party from top to bottom. He has endured three decades, inevitably marked by an open war with the White House in the last one.
Married to his high school sweetheart, both studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a student of Paul Krugman, for example. They raised their four children in a solar-powered home that he designed himself. They co-founded a company and he holds over 25 patents. He owns livestock, plays the banjo, was among the first to drive a Tesla, and has viral videos of him drinking unpasteurized milk, becoming a libertarian youth idol. He followed in the footsteps of the senator from the same state, Rand Paul, son of the legendary libertarian Ron Paul, to Washington.
Massie was with Trump during his first term almost without fissures. Despite economic disagreements, he shared with the MAGA universe not only the ideas of America First and economic nationalism but also the need for a wall on the Mexican border, opposition to abortion, principles of the culture war, and distrust of Washington as a place of elites, lobbyists, and corrupt interests.
He was and is against public spending, foreign aid, wars in the Middle East, but also against federal emergency packages (and lockdown measures) during Covid, which sparked the first sparks with the president's team. Trump, already furious then, lashed out at him, calling him secondary with delusions of grandeur, and spoke of expelling him from the Republican Party, but Massie held on and successfully won the primaries again and was reelected. Despite the differences, he voted against the impeachment processes against the president initiated by the Democrats.
Turn in Trump's second term
Everything changed in Trump's second term. Throughout 2025, Massie, like his friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, another convinced MAGA congresswoman who ended up at odds with the leader, opposed U.S. bombings against Iran, which he always denounced as an unconstitutional decision made without Congressional authorization. He also voted against Trump's major budget and tax bill, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which skyrockets the country's debt and deficit and goes against promises of austerity. Trump did not hesitate to personally attack him, especially for marrying "too soon" after the death of his first wife.
The most brutal clash, however, revolved around the Jeffrey Epstein case. With relations with the White House completely broken, Massie allied with Democrat Ro Khanna, who is now considering running for his party's presidential primaries in 2028, to push for a law that would require the Department of Justice to disclose the files. The White House did everything in its power to prevent it. They wrote, called, met, threatened, but could not stop it. The initiative succeeded.
The president turned Massie into one of his main enemies. He criticized him, insulted him, and threatened him, ultimately supporting Massie's rival in the Republican primaries, former military Ed Gallrein, causing his allies to fund an expensive campaign to defeat him. On May 19, Massie lost the Republican primaries. The campaign exceeded $32 million in advertising spending, with Trump and pro-Israel groups among its main backers.
Massie, who at times thought he could still prevail and be elected to Congress again, has not retreated quietly. With nothing to lose, and already thinking about life after politics (at least for now), he returned on Monday to introduce an initiative to impeach the Secretary of Defense, whom he accuses of violating the Constitution by leading the country to war against Iran without Legislative authorization. Or for the deaths of over 240 people in dozens of attacks on Caribbean boats, many of them fishermen.
His trajectory over the past year has left a partial image of the congressman, who is light-years away from being a moderate. In his political life, he has been involved in thousands of controversies and scandals. In the summer of 2021, he shared an image that compared the requirement to present a vaccination certificate to access certain establishments with the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, which led to a staff intern resigning after labeling it as anti-Semitic.
The following year, after the Russian invasion, Massie amplified on social media Moscow's accusations about alleged U.S. biological laboratories on Ukrainian territory and has since continued to spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda or fake news. He has systematically voted against resolutions supporting Ukraine and against various military assistance packages, both to Kiev and Israel. In 2021, he was the only Republican to vote against funding the Iron Dome missile defense system. And in 2023, he was one of two congressmen who opposed a resolution reaffirming Israel's right to exist. His proposal to end school shootings is for teachers to be armed.