The US Congress decided last night not to begin the impeachment process that could have led to the dismissal of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. By 211 votes to 204, and with many absences, the lower house chose to send the impeachment proposal to a committee, which means shelving it, at least until the next legislature in which there will be a huge Democratic majority. President Donald Trump was furious, Vice President JD Vance argued that it is ridiculous. And Hegseth himself, cornered, cried that everything is "a farce and a setup driven by the ego and resentment of a loser." The vote has not been taken but in Washington the general feeling is that Hegseth's fall is only a matter of time.
Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman from Kentucky who is at odds with Trump and who launched the proposal to force the impeachment of the Secretary of Defense, is a difficult character to fit into the usual categories of Trumpism. An engineer by training, libertarian and defender of a small state, he was for years a close ally of much of the MAGA movement. His worldview combines liberal positions in economic matters, conservative positions in internal affairs, flirting with conspiracies in delicate matters and a very pronounced isolationism in foreign policy.
He came to Congress in 2012, during the Tea Party wave, four years before Trump jumped into politics and transformed the Republican Party from top to bottom. And it has endured three decades, inevitably marked by the open war with the White House in the last of them.
Married to his high school sweetheart, they 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 house that he designed himself. They both founded a company and have more than 25 patents to their name. He owns cattle, plays the banjo, was one of the first to drive a Tesla and has viral videos drinking unpasteurized milk, becoming an idol for libertarian youth. He precisely followed in the footsteps of the same state's senator Rand Paul, son of the legendary libertarian Ron Paul, to Washington.
Massie was with Trump during his first term almost seamlessly. Despite economic discrepancies, he shared with the MAGA universe not only the ideas of America First and economic nationalism, but the need for the wall on the border with Mexico, opposition to abortion, the principles of the culture war or distrust towards the idea of Washington as a place of elites, lobbyists and corrupt interests.
He was and is against public spending, development aid, wars in the Middle East, but also the federal government's emergency packages (and confinement measures) during Covid, which caused the first sparks with the president's team. Trump, furious even then, charged at him, calling him secondary with pretentiousness, and spoke of expelling him from the Republican Party, but Massie held on and managed to win the primaries again easily and be re-elected. Despite the differences, he voted against the impeachment proceedings against the president launched by the Democrats.
Twist in Trump's second term
Everything changed in Trump's second term. Throughout 2025, Massie, like her friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, another convinced MAGA congresswoman who ended up at odds with the leader, opposed the US bombing of Iran, which she always denounced as an unconstitutional decision for having been taken without authorization from Congress. He also voted against Trump's big budget and tax law, 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 attack him personally, especially for having married "too soon" after the death of his first wife.
The most brutal clash, however, involved the Jeffrey Epstein case. With relations already completely broken with the White House, Massie allied himself with Democrat Ro Khanna, who is now considering running in his party's presidential primaries for 2028, to promote a law that would force the Department of Justice to disclose the files. The White House did everything in its power to prevent it. He wrote, called, met, threatened, but he couldn't stop him. The initiative prospered.
The president made Massie one of his main enemies. He criticized, insulted and threatened him and ended up supporting Massie's rival in the Republican primaries, the former military man Ed Gallrein, making his allies finance a very expensive campaign to defeat him. On May 19, Massie lost the Republican primary. The campaign surpassed $32 million in advertising spending, with Trump and pro-Israel groups among its top endorsers.
Massie, who at times thought he could still prevail and be re-elected to Congress, has not retired quietly. With nothing to lose, and already thinking about a life after politics (at least for now), on Monday he once again presented an initiative to impeach the Secretary of Defense, whom he accuses of having violated the Constitution by taking the country to war against Iran without authorization from the Legislature. Or for the death of more than 240 people in dozens of attacks on boats in the Caribbean, many of them fishermen.
His drift in the last 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, she spread 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 an intern in her office, who called her an anti-Semitic, to resign.
