Representative Thomas Massie was wedged in the back of a pickup truck careening through the hills and hollers of his district back to his off-the-grid farm here in Kentucky, scrolling on his phone through the litany of memes his legion of online fans have created on his behalf.
Then he landed on his favorite, a photo of himself playing the banjo, with accompanying text that read: “Here’s a little song I wrote called ‘I’ll still win, but if I lose, it was worth it.’”
That has become Mr. Massie’s battle cry these days as the only Republican in the country centering his re-election bid unapologetically on his willingness to buck his own party, even if it means defying President Trump. He has been singled out by Mr. Trump as “disloyal” and “a complete and total disaster” after leading the charge within the G.O.P. to release the Epstein files. A thorn in the president’s side on everything from federal spending to the war in Iran, Mr. Massie is now embroiled in the toughest fight of his political career, a contest set to be the most expensive congressional primary in the nation.
A die-hard libertarian with a puckish sensibility and a yen for the minutia of congressional procedure, Mr. Massie has frequently upset the apple cart of Washington. When he single-handedly called every member of the House back during the height of the pandemic to cast an in-person vote on the coronavirus relief bill, Mr. Trump endorsed against him. He beat that opponent by 62 points and developed what he called the “Trump antibodies.”
This time is different. Outside groups, led by the Republican Jewish Coalition and three G.O.P. megadonors, have already dumped more than $5 million into the race to oust him. This month, Mr. Trump flew to Mr. Massie’s district and delivered a roughly eight-minute screed against the congressman before backslapping the former Navy SEAL the president’s team selected to challenge him.
“I think I was a curious annoyance to them four years ago or six years ago — whenever that was,” Mr. Massie said in a lengthy interview. “And now they’re upset because they like fake fights, but I’m throwing real punches that are landing on issues.”
“Not at the president,” he added. “I’ve always been careful to never criticize the president, because when this race is over, I want him to sign some more of my other bills.” (Mr. Massie has also run an advertisement that opens on a photo of himself with Mr. Trump.)
His challenger, Ed Gallrein, is offering the polar opposite pitch: a willingness to stand “shoulder to- shoulder” with Mr. Trump, who personally called and asked him to run.
“Just give me somebody with a warm body to beat Massie,” Mr. Trump recounted telling his staff at the Kentucky rally. “And I got somebody with a warm body, but a big, beautiful brain and a great patriot. He’s unbelievable.”
Mr. Gallrein’s campaign mailer features a large photo of himself standing in the Oval Office next to the president, each holding a red MAGA hat.
“This is Trump country,” it reads. “It’s time we had a congressman who acts like it.”
As he gave his stump speech at a recent luncheon fund-raiser for the Harrison County Republican Party at a Mexican restaurant, Mr. Gallrein centered his message to voters on the president, who he noted had won nearly 90 percent support there during the 2024 Republican primary.
“You deserve a congressman who stands united with you and the Republican Party and President Trump and your families,” Mr. Gallrein said. “He took a bullet for us.”
He paused briefly to call out Mr. Massie, who had recently dropped an advertisement disclosing that Mr. Gallrein had left the Republican Party in 2016 and registered as an independent after Mr. Trump became the G.O.P. nominee. (He re-registered as a Republican in 2021.)
As a commissioned military officer, Mr. Gallrein said, he had sworn an oath to “the Lord and the Constitution.”
“You wouldn’t know anything about that because you’ve never served,” Mr. Gallrein said, jabbing a finger in Mr. Massie’s direction.
But the congressman welcomes such contrasts. He told the crowd that while in the military, Mr. Gallrein had reported to the commander in chief, something that he does not consider part of his current job description.
“In Congress, we don’t report to the president,” Mr. Massie said. “We’ve got a republic. There’s three branches of government. I don’t even report to the speaker of the House. I report to every one of you in here.”
The approach has served Mr. Massie well for more than a decade in this crest of northern Kentucky dotted with grazing horses and rolling hills, where he has never received less than 60 percent of the vote in a general election. But Mr. Trump’s vendetta against him has swayed some onetime supporters.
Mr. Gallrein’s speech was the first time that Edith Rowand, 85, had directly heard from the man challenging her longtime congressman, but she had already decided she would support him in the primary on May 19.
“If my president wants me to vote for Ed, I’ll vote for Ed,” said Ms. Rowand, who added that she had “always voted for Massie” and “liked him a lot.”
“I think I’m not so much opposed to him voting against Trump,” she said, “but I’m opposed to him not making up with Trump.”
Nancy Zaletta, who was also on hand at the restaurant to hear both candidates speak, said she supported both Mr. Massie and Mr. Trump, and had told the seven-term congressman that “what Trump said about him didn’t bother me.”
Mr. Massie, she said, “votes for common sense, and if something’s not right, he’s going to vote no.”
“I’m for Trump, but I think sometimes Trump gets a little out of hand,” Ms. Zaletta added.
It is perhaps not surprising that Mr. Massie is the Republican who appears to irk and enrage Mr. Trump the most. In a Republican Party that has remade itself in the president’s image, flattening out dissent and churning out MAGA sameness, Mr. Massie occupies an unusual space.
He voted against Mr. Trump’s tax bill, in favor of reining the president in on Iran and Venezuela, and routinely opposes any form of foreign aid. He is preternaturally online, fluent in the meme-laden vernacular of the self-described “based” users of X who lionize him.
Yet offline, the M.I.T.-trained engineer is something of a homesteader. He built almost every component of his solar-powered house on his farm, down to the stones he quarried himself from the nearby creek. He is a champion of raw milk, and each year cans the peaches harvested from his orchard. He has 30 patents registered for his inventions.
“And a few pending,” he added, including on the tiny electronic badge he coded himself and wears on his lapel, displaying a running total of the nation’s debt, and on “my chicken tractor that moves itself, the Clucks Capacitor.”
He has always had an obsession with detail. When Representative Mark Meadows moved to oust Speaker John A. Boehner from office, Mr. Massie was standing by with a backup copy of the motion to vacate in his pocket in case the North Carolinian lost his nerve.
Then came the passage of the legislation that ordered the released of the Epstein files using an arcane procedural tactic, a maneuver he attributes to his time spent on the Rules Committee, where he studied the precedents that govern the House.
“I learned that we can break every rule that exists, unless it’s in the Constitution,” he said. “Unless the Constitution forbids it, you can do it in the Rules Committee.”
The push to release the files ultimately prevailed, despite pressure from the White House to get the three Republican women who joined his effort to remove their names from the petition requiring the House to bring up the matter. It was a rare example, Mr. Massie said, of a time when party leaders have been unable to flip the one lawmaker in the House they have needed by offering an empty promise.
“They create so much mental anguish with the person on the bubble that that person starts looking for an off-ramp,” Mr. Massie said, reflecting on how Republican leaders almost always manage to cajole defectors to fall in line. “Like, ‘Oh my gosh, how’d I get in this situation? I don’t want to be here.’”
“You’ll get a phone call from some guy that gave you money and never wants anything,” he continued. “He’s back in the district, he’s proud of you, and he calls up, he says: ‘Thomas, what are you thinking? I’m watching this on TV, and they say you’re the one guy stopping all this.’”
Neither Mr. Massie nor the three women — Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — ultimately caved, and the Justice Department has since begun releasing the files.
But Ms. Greene has left Congress, and Ms. Mace, who is running for governor, will follow her exit. Ms. Boebert saw funding to bring clean water to her district that passed Congress vetoed by Mr. Trump.
“It’s important to have independent voices within the party,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and a friend of Mr. Massie’s who plans to campaign with him. “If everybody becomes a rubber stamp, maybe we could just have A.I. run the country.”
Mr. Massie said he regarded his race as a test case for whether any shred of independence can survive in today’s G.O.P., and believed other Republicans would read the results that way as well.
“I think if I lose, nobody’s going to stick their head up. The entire Republican Congress will be a rubber stamp,” Mr. Massie said. “If I win, there’ll be more people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace who are willing to go against the grain when it’s unambiguously the right thing to do.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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