The Billionaire Plot to Destroy a Billionaire Mascot

Still doubt the reality of MAGA’s civil war? Behold the $35 million oligarch campaign to destroy Thomas Massie.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/19/billionaire-plot-congress-kentucky-primary-thomas-massie-ed-gallrein/


Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) stands for a portrait in his office on Capitol Hill, February 12, 2026. Credit: Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images

When Thomas Massie won his first hotly contested seven-way GOP primary back in 2012, he was the one getting panned as the poster child for out-of-state super PAC money: His campaign got a last-minute $541,000 boost from a super PAC founded by a Texas trust-fund kid looking to fill the halls of Congress with fellow devotees of Ludwig von Mises. “The big winners in Tuesday’s election were Rand Paul, his buddy Thomas Massie and money,” groused Kentucky New Era columnist Al Cross. “The big losers included those of us who don’t like big money warping our elections.”

Fast-forward to yesterday, when the political ad–tracking firm AdImpact reported that the now seven-term congressman’s primary against former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein had officially clocked in as the most expensive primary of all time, with Gallrein and the constellation of pro-Israel super PACs backing him spending $19 million to unseat the onetime darling of the conservative GOP base. As of 4:30 p.m. Monday, on the eve of today’s primary, some $34 million had been spent flyering doorsteps and airing attack ads in Kentucky’s Fourth District. But that number grows literally every time I google it, and the sums dumped upon the district by pro-Israel dark-money groups now surpass the amount they spent ousting former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) in 2024—in a district where a 30-second television spot costs roughly a tenth of what you’ll spend trying to reach voters in Bowman’s old district just north of Manhattan. So “where’d that money come from?” as Tucker Carlson asked Massie on a recent three-hour episode of his podcast. “Well, it didn’t come from regular people. It’s come from billionaires,” Massie replied, as Mises surely rolled in his grave.



The congressman then launched into a fairly comprehensive tutorial on the perils that await politicians who antagonize Organized Money: how the post–Citizens United rules of campaign finance had created a two-tier system of disclosure that requires a mere candidate like him to report contributions nearly instantaneously, while billionaire-backed super PACs could wait six months; how traditional Israel lobby–affiliated donors were increasingly routing funds through a platform called Democracy Engine to deflect attention from the central role the Israel lobby had played in the movement to “flush me out of Congress”; and how a super PAC financed principally by casino heir Miriam Adelson and hedge fund billionaires Paul Singer and John Paulson had deployed artificial intelligence and a fine-print disclaimer to produce a commercial depicting hidden-camera “footage” of Massie strolling the National Mall, dining out, and then retreating back to a hotel room with Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, while a narrator proclaimed: “Congressman Thomas Massie had been caught in a THROUPLE” and was “cheating on the America First movement” with “the Squad” in a “complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives.”

Meanwhile, Massie lamented, with good-natured incredulity, that his opponent Gallrein—whom Trump had famously recruited on the strength of his “warm body”—had turned down eight separate invitations to debate him, declined virtually every request for an interview his campaign had received, and failed to answer any of the questionnaires conservative interest groups had urged him to complete. Perhaps understandably, Gallrein appears content to rely on the seemingly bottomless sewer of dubious half-baked stories about an ex-girlfriend promoted by Trump and his gleefully unhinged attack dog Laura Loomer to carry him across the finish line. “It seems like this primary is more than a primary,” Carlson remarked. “It’s a window into what MAGA has become. And it’s a referendum, I would argue, on democracy itself. If in the end some Israeli casino lady can come in and just determine the outcome with [Trump consultant] Chris LaCivita, that’s not democracy. It’s … it’s not even a poor facsimile of democracy. It’s just straight-up teeth-bared oligarchy.”

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