Representative Thomas Massie, the off-grid cattle farmer from Kentucky who never met a camera he didn’t want to lecture, has spent the last month strutting around Congress like he’s the last honest man in Washington.
Armed with a discharge petition co-signed by a few dozen grandstanding Democrats and some bored back-bench Republicans, Massie forced a vote on dumping every last unredacted Epstein file into the public domain. He framed it as a noble crusade for “transparency,” complete with that trademark smirk that screams “I went to MIT and you didn’t.”
What he actually wanted, according to virtually everyone who has ever worked with him, was the spotlight. Sources inside the House GOP caucus describe Massie’s Epstein stunt as the latest chapter in a decade-long personal branding campaign: block party priorities, pick fights with leadership, then run to Fox News or X to crow about how only he cares about the Constitution.
The New York Times recently painted a portrait of a man who keeps a running tally of how many times he’s been called an asshole on national television and treats it like a badge of honor.
And then Donald Trump did what Donald Trump always does: he waited until Massie had climbed out as far on the limb as possible, handed the Kentucky congressman a megaphone so the whole country could hear him scream about “cover-ups,” and quietly sawed the limb off behind him.
On Sunday night, after weeks of Massie and his allies insisting Trump was terrified of the files, the former (and future) president posted a single Truth Social message: go ahead and release everything, we have nothing to hide. Just like that, the self-appointed guardian of truth found himself holding a vote that will now pass unanimously, with Trump getting credit for the “courageous” release and Massie reduced to the guy who spent a month yelling at a door that was already about to open.
People familiar with the negotiations say Trump never actually feared his own name in those documents; he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago two decades ago, cooperated with investigators when asked, and watched his own Justice Department put the predator in a cell. What Trump feared was the circus: the inevitable media frenzy, the QAnon fever dreams, the pointless defamation suits. By fighting the blanket dump at first, he gave the responsible-adult wing cover to slow-walk it. Once Massie turned it into a public pissing match, Trump simply stepped aside and let the avalanche happen on his terms.
The result? Trump looks like the magnanimous leader who “put country over ego,” while Massie wakes up tomorrow as the smug prick who manufactured a crisis just to prove how pure he is, only to watch the man he tried to embarrass steal the applause.
Somewhere in Kentucky, a herd of grass-fed cattle is lowing in sympathy. Their owner just discovered that being the loudest libertarian in the room only works until someone louder decides the show would be better with you as the punchline.
