Thomas Massie’s loss proves how deranged and dangerous Donald Trump is

A dangerous Donald Trump is the worst version of America’s 45th and 47th president. But it gets far, far worse for anyone not aligned with his cult.

Thomas Massie didn’t lose because he became a leftist. Nor because he betrayed conservative voters. He also didn’t lose because he suddenly discovered MSNBC, started quoting AOC, and decided the administrative state was actually pretty cool after all.

He lost because he crossed a deranged man named Donald Trump.

Massie, a seven-term Republican congressman from Kentucky, lost his May 19, 2026 GOP primary to “Ed Gallrein,” a retired Navy SEAL and farmer backed by Trump. Reuters described the race as a test of Trump’s power to persuade Republican (ahem, primarily Boomer) voters to punish his critics, and “Gallrein’s” win answered that question pretty clearly.

Axios went even further. Trump’s team reportedly launched a PAC devoted to defeating Massie, recruited a shill, and spent more than $32 million in ads.

So spare me the fairy tale about “the will of the people.”

This wasn’t some noble civic ritual where informed citizens weighed records, principles, votes, tradeoffs, constitutional questions, war powers, debt, transparency, and corruption. It was a loyalty test, and Massie failed it by refusing to bend the knee to a power-obsessed lunatic. One who knows many Boomers will fall for whatever the hell he says.

Meet a tyrant who’d have worshiped Trump in my dystopian survival trilogy

The Boomers showed how fragile their principles are

Massie voted with Trump most of the time. By his own argument, he was with the president roughly 90% of the time. His problem was the other 10%.

That 10% included things like spending, war, and the Epstein files. Axios reported that Massie argued the White House wanted “100% compliance,” even though he considered himself one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress.

That should terrify and outrage anyone who still thinks electoral politics protects liberty. Because if 90% agreement isn’t enough, then this was never about principle. It was about obedience to a madman finding legal ways to be a dictator while pretending he’s a president.

A Boomer voter can call himself conservative. He can fly the flag, quote the Founders, post memes about the Second Amendment, rant about socialism, and pretend he’s standing athwart history yelling stop.

But if one man tells him to throw out one of the most independent small-government voices in Congress, and he does it, then what exactly did he conserve?

Not a goddamn thing. He’s part of the problem that’s killing liberty while bucking on his so-called skepticism of centralized power. He only conserved his cult.

That’s not every Boomer or the overwhelming number in the GOP electorate that’s 50 or older. But it’s more than enough to skew this thing to put a shill closer to a Congressional seat over someone who’s done a damn good job of at least trying to keep centralized power at bay.

One propagandist can’t have this much power

Trump brands, blesses, and curses candidates. He turns elections into morality plays where the only moral question’s whether the politician’s loyal to him. That’s political propaganda dressed up as populism.

And yes, I know the response already.

“But the voters chose.”

Sure they did. They also chose inside an information machine built to tell them who the traitor was. It’s the classic Boomer trump card, and the part democracy worshippers never want to face. They act like voting magically purifies the process. As long as a ballot gets counted, they pretend the outcome carries some sacred legitimacy.

But ballots don’t make people wise, elections don’t cleanse manipulation, and majorities don’t become moral just because they’re majorities.

Powerful people stampede and hypnotize a democracy. They whip supporters into a frenzy by slogans, ads, television hits, social media posts, donor money, and they transform into one dominant personality standing above the crowd like a secular pope.

That’s what happened here. A man with a long record got reduced to one charge: disloyalty. Then the (primarily 65-and-over) majority pulled the lever because that man who controls their hapless minds told them to.

Democracy is still the god that failed

This is why democracy remains the god that failed. Public schools told the masses democracy would save them from kings. Instead, it gave them rotating kings with marketing teams who act like dictators.

Schools drilled into their brains that voting would protect them from tyranny. But voting’s nothing but a ritual where turnout baptizes tyranny.

Those publicly-funded prisons (schools, not actual prisons) claimed that people would hold power accountable. But voting transforms people into the enforcement arm for power, punishing the few who refuse to fall in lockstep.

That’s the ugly truth nobody wants to admit. All because a sacred institution propagated it into their minds the second after that institution instructed them to worship a piece of cloth and pledge allegiance to it.

Democracy doesn’t automatically equal liberty. It only produces winners. And when the winners worship power, the system gives power a halo.

Massie’s loss proved the point. A constitutional republic’s supposed to restrain power, not worship it. Democracy, when treated as a religion, flatters power as long as enough people fuel it.

And if the so-called small-government Right’s too dim to understand that, then it’s nowhere near as anti-tyranny as it thinks. Mainly a Boomer issue, when you look at the voting demographics.

Massie may ironically be more dangerous to a dangerous Donald Trump

The irony is that Massie may now become more dangerous to the system on his way out. And it’s why Trump’s idiot power play won’t win the long game.

He still has seven months left in Congress. Axios noted that his feud with Trump included Massie’s push to release Epstein files, while The Guardian previously reported that Massie and Ro Khanna sought stronger enforcement of Epstein-related document releases.

That gives him a final window. He has no primary to protect, no donor class to appease, and no reason to pretend anyone can reason with Trump’s acolytes. If Massie wants an exit strategy, that should be it: burn every ounce of remaining political capital on transparency, war powers, debt, and elite immunity.

Not because he’s perfect or even that he’s some saint. But because the machine just showed him what it does to people who say no.

This is why libertarian fiction matters

This is also why I write the stories I write. This shit’s not abstract. The same people who mock dystopian fiction as paranoid will watch one off-his-rocker tyrant command a political tribe to destroy a dissenter, then call it democracy.

They will watch mindless voters punish independence and call it accountability, and propaganda turn obedience into virtue and call it the voice of the people. That’s mass participation in submission–not liberty.

Massie’s loss won’t make anyone nostalgic for some fake golden age of politics. It should wake people up. The danger isn’t that Donald Trump had this much influence over one primary. No. The millions of people who apparently believe this is normal are every bit a part of the problem. That makes Donald Trump dangerous, and politicians like him.

And when an aging population starts mistaking obedience for principle, democracy buries liberty with applause.

Catch this line of thinking in action inside my Beyond the Lost trilogy