In the aftermath of the Republicans' midterm collapse, Vice President J.D. Vance offered a rare moment of postmortem honesty. "The reason we lost is the war," he wrote, then listed the top remedies from the data: end the war, focus on cost of living and inflation, put America First, and change the relationship with Israel. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky replied with characteristic directness: "Thanks for acknowledging these things. Better late than never." He attached an image of a red hat reading "Massie Was Right About Everything" and offered to send one.
Massie had a point. The Kentucky congressman spent years opposing the precise combination of policies that later proved politically costly. He remained a fiscal hawk through both Trump terms, resisting the spending that fuelled inflation and debt. He opposed the Iran war and the broader pattern of foreign entanglements that raised gas prices and household costs at home. He treated "America First" as a constraint on foreign policy rather than a slogan that could be stretched to cover new wars. He also pressed for transparency on the Epstein files, another issue that sat inside the original MAGA coalition and later became a source of intra-party friction. These were not isolated stances. Massie treated financial restraint and foreign-policy restraint as linked, a connection many voters later felt at the pump and in their budgets.
The party's response was not course correction. After Massie warned following the 2025 off-year results that Republicans should quit funding wars abroad, put America before Israel, reduce spending to control inflation, and stop attacking independent voices, the reaction was primary pressure. Trump and allied groups mounted the most expensive House primary in U.S. history against him. Massie lost. The midterms that followed hit the GOP's core constituencies harder than typical blue-wave patterns, and Vance's postmortem essentially restated priorities Massie had already listed. Democrats, in some races, ran closer to an earlier America First message than the incumbent Republican administration did.
The hat is tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying observation is harder to dismiss. Massie endorsed Trump in 2024 on the expectation of securing liberties at home and avoiding needless wars abroad. When early promises of deep spending cuts and a cleaner break from interventionism faded, and when an Iran war arrived that many saw as serving other interests first, Massie did not adjust his position to match the administration. He kept the earlier standard. The midterm results suggest a substantial number of voters preferred that standard to the one that was actually pursued. Vance's list of fixes: end the war, control costs, prioritise America First, adjust the Israel relationship, tracks closely with what Massie had been saying, including in his November 2025 warning that the party ignored.
None of this requires treating Massie as infallible on every detail. It does require noting that the policies he resisted most consistently were the ones later cited as central to the electoral loss. Fiscal discipline and non-intervention were not side issues; they were the practical content of the America First claim that brought many voters into the coalition. When those constraints were loosened in favour of war spending, open-ended foreign commitments, and continued high deficits, the political costs arrived. Massie's primary defeat did not erase the underlying arguments. The midterm results, and Vance's acknowledgment of the same problems, effectively restated them.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/thomas-massies-revenge/