President Donald Trump fired a loud-and-clear warning shot at a Republican lawmaker who is bringing a number of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex abuse victims to the U.S. Capitol to force the release of legal files on the late pedophile financier.
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky has teamed up with Democratic Re. Ro Khanna of California in a bipartisan push to secure a House vote on releasing the files from the Epstein investigation. They’re holding a press conference on Sept. 3 to provide an update on the effort and have invited some of Epstein’s victims to speak.
Massie, an avowed fiscal hawk, has also been a thorn in Trump’s side when it comes to his policy agenda, voting against his deeply unpopular “Big Beautiful” budget bill—which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will add $3.4 trillion to the deficit—and opposing his air strikes on Iran.
The president has now sent Massie a thinly veiled warning in the form of a polling report that found the lawmaker’s break with Trump has made him susceptible to a primary challenger. On Thursday night, Trump posted screenshots of the findings on Truth Social with key sections highlighted, but without writing anything himself.
A poll conducted in his district found that Massie’s image ratings had gone from +14 in June to -11 in August, and that his job approval rating fell from +11 to -16. The drop was attributed to an ad campaign run by a political action committee called MAGA Kentucky.
The president’s favorable ratings, meanwhile, remain high among Republicans, and 57 percent of primary voters would be “more likely to vote for a candidate who is endorsed and supported by President Trump,” the survey found.
That makes Massie “extremely vulnerable in a Republican primary election for Congress,” pollsters McLaughlin & Associates concluded.
The firm—which is one of Trump’s most trusted pollsters—reached a similar conclusion in June, when Massie’s approval ratings were still in positive double digits. Trump shared those results as well, Newsweek reported.
The president has frequently lashed out at Massie and called for him to primaried.
In a July 21 post on Truth Social, Trump called Massie the “worst Republican Congressman” and an “embarrassment to Kentucky.”
“He’s lazy, slow moving, and totally disingenuous - A real loser! Never has anything positive to add. Looking for someone good to run against this guy, someone I can Endorse and vigorously campaign for,” he wrote.
This time, Trump presented the poll findings without comment.
Massie has taken the threats in stride, saying he doesn’t care what the president thinks about him.
After Republicans narrowly passed the budget bill in early July, Massie turned his focus to getting full access to the FBI and Department of Justice’s investigative files on Epstein, who was close friends with Trump for more than a decade.
Earlier this month, he suggested in a social media post that MAGA Kentucky was targeting him because one of its billionaire donors “appears in Epstein’s black book.”
