Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood at the podium at Gun Owners of America’s annual gathering in Des Moines last Sunday and thanked the organizers “for having this event in Iowa,” before adding: “There’s no place I’d rather be — maybe New Hampshire or South Carolina. Just kidding.” New Hampshire and South Carolina are the first two states in the Republican presidential primary calendar. Massie laughed. The room gave tentative applause. He added, “Some people got my joke.” Iowa traditionally knows what it means when someone shows up and makes those jokes.
The Iowa visit did not happen in isolation. On August 1, Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a photograph on X showing herself, Massie, Tucker Carlson, and Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned from the Trump administration over his opposition to the Iran war, seated around a table at Carlson’s cabin-studio in Maine. Greene’s post accused Trump of betraying MAGA “by pursuing foreign wars” and concluded: “The movement has begun.” Massie reposted it. Carlson separately told the Columbia Journalism Review he was committed “to help build a third party” while stipulating he doesn’t intend to run as its candidate. Kent appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” after the Maine meeting and described their discussions as “the initial phases” of a movement to give voice to voters across the political spectrum who are “sick and tired” of both parties and “want us out of these foolish wars.” A week later, Massie was in Iowa making jokes about New Hampshire.
Raw Story’s investigative reporting published August 5, for which Massie could not be reached for comment, describes the Iowa visit as the latest indication that Massie is “laying the groundwork for a potential presidential run.” The reporting places the visit in the context of a Republican Party experiencing a public fracture between the Trump-aligned majority, which supports the Iran war as a necessary confrontation with a nuclear-threatening adversary, and the Massie-Carlson-Greene dissident faction, which views the Iran war as the betrayal of the “America First, no foreign wars” promise they believed they were endorsing in 2024.
Massie’s political biography is the one that makes the Iowa visit legible. He has served in Congress since 2012, representing a rural Kentucky district in the Eastern part of the state. He has voted against essentially every expansion of federal authority, military commitment, or bipartisan spending measure that crossed his desk in those 14 years. He voted against COVID relief bills. He voted against Ukraine aid packages. He sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act in direct challenge to the Trump administration’s handling of those records. He voted for every Iran War Powers resolution that came to the floor. He broke publicly with Trump over the war. He lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger. He went to Iowa.
Joe Kent provided the electoral analysis that Massie’s Iowa visit is designed to test. Speaking on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Kent described a specific demographic problem Republicans face in November: the low-propensity voters who “crawled through broken glass” to vote for Trump in 2024 because they believed he meant “America First, no foreign wars.” Those voters, Kent argued, feel betrayed by the Iran war and are unlikely to mobilize for a midterm simply because Trump endorsed someone or a candidate has an R next to their name. “To get them to come out now, because Trump endorsed somebody or they have an R next to their name, I just think that’s going to be a very, very hard sell,” Kent said. He predicted November would be “rough” for Republicans. He also looked to 2028 and predicted that the internal Republican fight “will be MAGA versus America First, with someone like Marco Rubio representing the new MAGA establishment.”
The math of a potential Massie candidacy involves several variables that are not yet knowable. The first is whether the sentiment driving the Carlson-Greene-Massie coalition, that the Iran war was a betrayal and that Trump’s second term has reproduced the foreign policy establishment’s priorities under a different aesthetic, is strong enough to produce primary voters outside the congressional districts where Massie-style libertarian Republicanism already runs competitively. Iowa is one of the states where that question has answers. The second variable is whether the coalition can cohere around a platform and a candidate without fracturing over the many issues where Carlson, Greene, and Massie disagree. They share a foreign policy position and a media aesthetic. They diverge on social policy, immigration enforcement, and the relationship between Christianity and American governance in ways that are non-trivial.
Carlson has said he doesn’t intend to run. Greene has floated a third party without naming herself as its candidate. Kent has positioned himself as a movement theorist rather than a candidate. Massie went to Iowa and made jokes about New Hampshire. The coalition has a message: no more foreign wars, Epstein accountability, America First, but we mean it this time, and is searching for the candidate who can carry it into a primary calendar that begins in early 2027.
Trump is 80 years old and constitutionally barred from a third term. Vance is the designated successor. The coalition that elected them is now fighting over whether the Iran war was the deal-breaker and who gets to define what America First means without Trump on the ballot.
He lost his primary. He visited Iowa. He joked about the calendar. The movement, per Greene, has begun.
When the congressman who voted against every war loses his primary, visits Iowa, and jokes about New Hampshire while his allies describe a movement just beginning, what exactly is the candidate they’re looking for?
Sources
Raw Story: GOP maverick triggers alarm as surprise Iowa visit signals party ripping apart
