LEXINGTON, Ky. — Northern Kentucky Republicans embraced President Donald Trump’s choice for Congress on Tuesday, advancing GOP primary challenger Ed Gallrein to the Nov. 3 general election and rejecting seven-term U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, whom Trump targeted for defeat.

The Associated Press called the race shortly before 8 p.m. Eastern time.

The Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District was the nation’s closest-watched race Tuesday.

More than $32 million was spent as an angry Trump worked to unseat Massie for his perceived lack of personal loyalty to the president, making it the most expensive House primary in recent history, Politico reported.

Massie, an iconoclastic budget hawk and libertarian, sometimes disagrees with Trump — for example, forcing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse files, voting against Trump’s massive 2024 tax-and-spending bill and demanding congressional authorization of the U.S. war on Iran, which he opposes.

Those occasional breaches, rare in the Republican-controlled Congress, were enough to earn Trump’s loathing.

Trump lashed out at Massie again on Tuesday, telling reporters in Washington: “Thomas Massie is a terrible congressman. He’s been a terrible congressman from Day One. Dealing with him is just a horrible — I don’t think he’s a Republican. I think he’s actually a Democrat.”

Gallrein made it clear early that, if elected to Congress, he would do what Trump wanted him to do.

“This district is Trump Country. The president doesn’t need obstacles in Congress — he needs backup,” Gallrein said in the press release announcing his campaign last year.

Kentucky’s GOP primary on Tuesday followed the president’s recent successes purging other Republicans he considered disloyal to him, in Indiana state legislative primaries and Louisiana’s U.S. Senate primary. Although Trump has low approval ratings overall at the moment, thanks to rising prices and other woes, his hold on the Republican Party faithful appears strong across most of the country.

Trump recruited Gallrein, a Shelby County farmer and former Navy SEAL who fell short of winning a seat in the Kentucky Senate in 2024. The president stood on a Hebron stage to endorse Gallrein in March and sent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to campaign with him Monday, all while showering insults on Massie.

It was a brutal campaign. Sometimes using AI images, political action committees tied to Trump and Israel ran attack ads trying to connect Massie to Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and liberal lawmakers like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

Just last week, a Republican who campaigned against Massie in 2012 posted a video interview alleging that Massie offered a former girlfriend hush money to drop a complaint against one of his allies in Congress. Massie immediately denied the claims.

Voters in the 4th District first sent Massie to Congress in 2012 after he served a term as the Lewis County judge-executive. He’s a farmer with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he founded a startup company, SensAble Technologies Inc.

In frequent interviews during the campaign, Massie said he didn’t enjoy being the target of Trump’s wrath. But he said most people in his district understood that his principles were sincere.

With the Epstein files, for example, Massie teamed with a Democratic colleague to force the U.S. Justice Department to disclose a vast trove of information that has embarrassed Trump and many other powerful people with close ties to the disgraced financier.

“I’ve pissed off enough billionaires who are clearly amoral people that I might have shortened my expected lifespan,” Massie told The Atlantic earlier this year.

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