It’s not every day that the president of the United States drops a million-dollar target on your head. But that’s exactly what just happened to Thomas Massie, the representative for Kentucky's 4th District. Massie is a Republican, but that hasn't stopped Donald Trump from unleashing his trademark verbal spew against him, branding the congressman a “pathetic LOSER” and a “lazy, grandstanding, nonproductive politician” on Truth Social. Heeding the call from their boss, two of Trump’s senior advisers have started a “MAGA Kentucky PAC” with the goal of ousting Massie from Congress, and they’ve invested $1 million in attack ads which accuse him of being allied with “Democrats and the Ayatollah.” They’re also trying to recruit a challenger for his next election, with Trump posting that “HE SHOULD BE PRIMARIED, and I will lead the charge against him.” And what, you might ask, is Massie’s offense against the Great Donald? He’s genuinely anti-war, in a way Trump only pretends to be, and it’s making establishment politicians in both parties look bad. 

Massie embraces the labels “libertarian” and “constitutional conservative,” and as such, many of his political ideas range from the bizarre to the reprehensible. He’s a raw (unpasteurized) milk enthusiast, saying that he’s “been drinking it every day for two years” despite the risk of bird flu infection. He’s obsessed with the national debt, to the extent that he often wears a ticking LED “debt clock” as a lapel pin. (It updates in real time, and you too can become a “debt badger” for $99.99. As one testimonial says, “I used to only complain about the debt during dinner. Now, when I wear the Debt Badge, I make it an issue they can’t ignore.”) Massie doesn’t believe in human-caused climate change, calling it “pseudoscience.” He opposesuniversal healthcare. Earlier this year, he lobbied Trump to pardon Ross Ulbricht, the hacker who ran the “Silk Road” black market for illegal guns and drugs for several years. (Ulbricht was Massie’s guest of honor at the State of the Union, and donned one of the Debt Badges.) Really, he’s not even a consistent libertarian, since he has also co-sponsored a federal abortion ban—which would take personal liberty away from anyone with a uterus—and supports Trump’s efforts to “secure our border and build the wall.” Looking at all this, you could be forgiven for writing Massie off as a total wingnut. 

And yet, I’m often reminded of my fellow Current Affairs writer Ciara Moloney’s definition of a libertarian: someone who is as wrong as you can be half the time, and dead right the other half. That description fits Thomas Massie perfectly. His ideas about domestic policy are a ludicrous mess, but his foreign policy, by contrast, is impeccable. If he were Secretary of State right now instead of Marco Rubio, I’d feel a lot less worried about the prospect of World War III breaking out on any given day. For that matter, if half of the Democrats voted against war as consistently as he does, it would be a big improvement.   

For example, take the Trump administration’s recent airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. These were both incredibly reckless and illegal under international law; Iran is a sovereign nation that has not attacked the United States, so Trump had no right to bomb it. But it was not, as you might expect, a Democrat who was working the hardest to prevent this act of aggression before it happened. It was Thomas Massie. On June 17, five days before the bombings, Massie introduced a congressional War Powers Resolution to prohibit “unauthorized hostilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” co-sponsored by Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA). Together, the two laid out a simple case: that “the ongoing war between Israel and Iran is not our war,” and in any case, “no president should be able to bypass Congress’s constitutional authority over matters of war” and simply attack another country unilaterally.

Unfortunately, at the time of Trump’s bombing spree on June 22, the resolution only had 43 cosponsors from among the 435 U.S. Representatives, and Massie was the only Republican on the list. He and Khanna were completely right, and their position accurately reflects the will of the American people, 60 percent of whom say the U.S. should not get involved in warfare between Iran and Israel. If more of the Democratic Party had endorsed Massie’s resolution, plus a few more GOP legislators, Trump might have been forced to reconsider his plans. But to their lasting shame, they refused. 

This is the kind of principled action Massie has been taking throughout his congressional career. Like Bernie Sanders, the representative has a certain “broken record” quality, always returning to the same points. “Overseas military interventions and protracted foreign occupations are expensive,” he warns, and the investment doesn’t make Americans any safer. Instead, “our meddling in the Middle East makes more enemies for us.” Presidents are particularly dangerous, he says, and we need to “rein in the executive and reassert Congress’s authority, sole authority, to declare war.” Ultimately, we should spend less on the ever-expanding military budget and instead “put our veterans, our immigration policies, and our infrastructure first.” 

It’s not just rhetoric, either. On Capitol Hill, Massie has the nickname “Mr. No” because he’s often the only “no” vote against whatever foreign policy “hawks” in both parties want to do. He voted “no” on arming and training rebel militias to topple the Syrian government in 2014—a wise move, since today’s “moderate rebels” have a nasty habit of turning into tomorrow’s terrorists. He voted “no” on sanctioning China for its human rights abuses in 2019, saying that “when our government meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries, it invites those governments to meddle in our affairs." That’s a rare acknowledgement of the double standard in which the United States wants to judge other nations for their misdeeds, but never be judged itself. Four years later, he also voted “no” on a resolution to “hold China accountable” for flying a spy balloon over the United States, which was completely hypocritical since the U.S. spies on China all the time. Massie voted “no” on $1 billion in military aid to Israel in 2021. He voted “no” on expanding NATO onto Russia’s doorstep by admitting Sweden and Finland in 2022. Most recently, he publicly opposed the Trump administration’s strikes on the Houthis (Ansar Allah) in Yemen, pointing out that there are “no U.S. troops that were in imminent danger” to justify them. Over and over, it’s the same story. A lot of Republicans talk about putting “America First”; Massie actually does it.

A few of these stances warrant a closer look. Massie’s opposition to sanctions is especially striking, because it’s consistent across the years. As he put it in a 2023 interview with Reason magazine: 

I don’t support sanctions, never voted to sanction a sovereign country in the 11 years that I’ve been in Congress. I think it leads to war. Sanctions actually create crimes only for U.S. citizens because we're not going to put somebody in jail in another country who trades with Iran. What we’re proposing to do when we pass a sanction is to make a federal law that would result in the imprisonment of a U.S. citizen who trades with Iran, and it hurts the people who are in the country. I think it actually edges us closer to war instead of getting us out of war.

This is a rare stance to find in Congress. Other legislators might pick and choose, supporting sanctions in some cases and voting against them in others, but almost nobody opposes sanctions as a concept. There’s a distinctly libertarian flavor to Massie’s argument, which is rooted in the idea that Americans should be able to buy and sell things wherever they want. But there’s also a humanitarian element that can’t be reduced to the usual libertarian line about free choices. In the case of Iran, Massie explained his “no” vote on sanctions by saying they would “hurt the citizens of the country more than the government of the country that’s being sanctioned.” He’s right about that, and it’s exactly the argument left-wing critics of U.S. foreign policy make: that sanctions are indiscriminate in who they harm, and hurt the poorest people most while leaving the rich and powerful insulated, so their use is totally illegitimate. And to his credit, Massie sticks by this principle even when it comes to communist (and pseudo-communist) countries, which his libertarian politics should make him particularly hostile to. In 2017, he voted against sanctions on North Korea, arguing they would “punish civilians” rather than Kim Jong-Un. In 2015, he even cosponsored the “Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act.” Compare that to Marco Rubio, who has gone out of his way to condemn individual U.S. celebrities for visiting the island nation, and the difference couldn’t be more clear. 

Massie’s stance on Israel is also unusually principled compared to his congressional peers. As early as 2019, he voted “no” on a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, saying that “[I] do not support federal efforts to condemn any type of private boycott.” That’s a fairly value-neutral defense of Americans’ First Amendment rights, but it still makes Massie stand out in a political climate where several states have passed laws to specifically penalize boycotting Israel. More recently, with the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza, his statements have become more blunt and direct: 

Nothing can justify the number of civilian casualties (tens of thousands of women and children) inflicted by Israel in Gaza in the last two years. We should end all U.S. military aid to Israel now.

This is just straightforwardly true—and, like with Massie’s Iran resolution, it’s an accurate reflection of what the American people want, since a June 2024 poll found that 61 percent of them believe “the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel.” But as Massie points out, there’s a concerted lobbying effort to ensure U.S. lawmakers don’t do what their constituents want. In a 2024 interview, he told Tucker Carlson that every Republican member of Congress has a dedicated “AIPAC babysitter”—a lobbyist who is “always talking to you” on behalf of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, pushing for pro-Israel votes. By itself, this isn’t exactly news; it’s just what lobbyists do, whether it’s for Israel, the tobacco industry, or any other death-dealing interest group. What is notable is that Massie has banned AIPAC representatives from his office, and wants the group to register as an agent of a foreign country, curtailing its influence in U.S. politics. And for stepping out of line on Israel, AIPAC has already spent at least $328,675 on attack ads against him. 

Finally, Massie has been a reliable voice against sweeping government surveillance of U.S. citizens, opposing what he sees as unconstitutional spy programs and defending the whistleblowers who expose them. He’s tried twice to repeal the PATRIOT Act, in 2015 and 2020, and wants to ban mandatory “back doors” in consumer electronics, which allow the government to access users’ data. In 2022, he once again teamed up with Ro Khanna to sponsor a bill restricting the uses of the 1917 Espionage Act, so journalists who publish classified information would be categorically protected. He’s even intervened in specific cases, introducing a House resolution to “drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange” in 2020 and expressing his support for Edward Snowden all the way back in 2013. Not only did this make him an anomaly among his Republican peers, but it put him to the left of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the latter of whom took until 2024 to finally strike a plea deal in Assange’s case.

Taken together, these positions explain why Donald Trump is so furious at Thomas Massie, and why he wants the Kentucky representative gone from Congress at all costs. It’s not just the one vote Massie commands in the House (although that’s inconvenient when the GOP holds a thin majority). It’s deeper. 

Massie’s whole existence exposes Trump as the fraud he is. In the last election, one of Trump’s key appeals to voters was his spurious claim to be anti-war; as he grandiosely put it at one point, “I am the candidate of peace. I am peace.” This was always a transparent lie, since Trump’s first term saw him assassinate an Iranian general and seriously consider invading Venezuela. But he was aided and abetted by the stupidity of the Harris campaign, which promised the “most lethal fighting force in the world” and made Liz Cheney a prominent surrogate. There was just enough substance there for particularly gullible pundits to tout Trump as anti-war, and even claim the deeply embarrassing label “MAGA lefty.” But libertarians, for all their crackpottery, knew better, and booed Trump when he showed up at their 2024 convention. Now, with the strikes on Iran and Yemen, the myth of “Donald the Dove” is dead, and the plumage of a war hawk is visible in its place. Not only that, but one of Trump’s most bitter opponents is a fellow Republican. Every day that Massie remains in Congress to call him out, Trump looks worse—not to liberals, who he wants to provoke, but to his own voting base, who have a constant reminder of what a real anti-war politician looks like. 

Meanwhile, Massie is just as inconvenient for establishment Democrats, who’ve allowed themselves to be outflanked on war and surveillance by a libertarian from Kentucky. By all rights, it should be Democrats leading the charge against Trump’s militarism. That is, after all, the job of an opposition party, and war remains deeply unpopular, so it’s an obvious line of attack. But it’s only a handful of left-wing Democrats, like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ro Khanna, who actually take a consistent anti-war stance. Mostly, we’re stuck with people like Chuck Schumer, who mocked Trump as a “chicken” for attempting negotiations with Iran and egged him on to attack. Or there’s Ritchie Torres and John Fetterman, who cozy up to AIPAC, make support for Israel their primary issue, and neglect their own constituents. We’re left with an absurd, upside-down world where the guy with the fridge full of raw milk and the debt clock on his lapel has more moral courage than the Democratic leadership. For voters who care about preventing death and destruction around the world, there’s little reason to vote for the Democrats over the Republicans at this point, and Massie just underscores that bleak reality. 

Massie is frustrating, though. The British Marxist writer Jack Graham says that right-wing ideologues are often people who failed to become leftists, in the same way that Jupiter is a giant ball of gas that never quite became a star, and that applies to Massie too. In a recent interview with podcaster Theo Von, he came tantalizingly close to grasping the basic fact that capitalism and corporate profit are the main driver of unnecessary wars: 

America doesn’t make money off of war. A few people in America do make money off of war, and they make a lot of money off of war. So they want the music to keep going, they don’t want the music to stop. And as soon as Biden was serious about getting out of Afghanistan, and did get us out of Afghanistan, and we were spending—by the way, we were still spending 50 billion dollars a year in Afghanistan, after 20 years. As soon as he got us out of there, guess what? We start spending 50 billion dollars a year in Ukraine. And now that that's winding down, guess what? This thing in Iran is heating up. And regardless of whether our troops engage directly, those are all American munitions[...] 

Ostensibly, those are weapons that are supposed to protect us, that are now being used. And so they know we’ll buy them back. I have this theory that there’s about 50 billion dollars a year of things that need to be blown up and replaced in order for that sector of the economy to stay healthy.

Once again, dead right. And yet, because Massie is still committed to free-market ideology, he can’t take the next step. He understands, as General Smedley Butler understood, that “war is a racket.” But he hasn’t yet arrived at Butler’s conclusion: that “we must take the profit out of war.” If we choose, we can dismantle the whole business model of companies like Boeing and Raytheon, criminalize their lobbying efforts, and prevent them from having any influence in our politics. When corporations get rich off war crimes, as they clearly have in Gaza, we can put their CEOs on trial. If we want peace, we must do these things. It should simply be illegal to make a profit on cruise missiles or land mines, because that profit creates a direct incentive to warmonger. But that’s the tragic limit of libertarianism: it understands that state power is a threat, but can’t extend the same thought to corporate power. Massie is now running headlong into that limit. Maybe, if he’s smart—and I think he is—he’ll break through the wall, take the next step in his evolution, and become an anti-war socialist. 

  Until then, anyone who annoys Donald Trump this much is worth having around, and “Mr. No” has proven a more reliable partner for the anti-war left than Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries will ever be. That’s what Ro Khanna and a handful of others have realized. As weird and misguided as his positions on other issues can be—and oh boy, are they weird—Thomas Massie’s uncompromising foreign policy is miles ahead of what the Democratic leadership is offering right now. Really, it should become the default for any member of Congress, and voters should punish their leaders when they stray from the anti-war path. It should be supporting airstrikes and sanctions and surveillance, not opposing them, that puts you on the chopping block.