A FAFO for the Ages
The arrogant little pissants who run the White House coms operation couldn’t contain their glee last night when AP tolled the bell by calling the 4th of Kentucky for Gallrein, perhaps thereby signifying the very demise of constitutional liberty and capitalist prosperity in America.
On Tuesday, shortly after the results came in, the White House appeared to gloat over Massie’s defeat. “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power,’’ White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted on social media. “F— around, find out.”
And, no, we are not indulging in morning-after hyperbole with respect to the significance of the shocking defeat Tuesday night of Tom Massie by Trump, AIPAC and the billionaire thugs who funded a $22 million primary campaign against one of the single greatest libertarian congressman of modern times.
Indeed, if we set aside a certain long ago Congressman from the 4th district of Michigan, who served in the US House from 1977 to 1981, Tom Massie has no peer in the consistent advocacy of free markets, balanced budgets, sound money, small government and non-intervention abroad—-save for Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Howard Buffett (yes, Warren’s father, who was a pro-gold standard Congressman from Nebraska in the 1940s) and Mr. Republican, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio.
And that’s bloody crucial in the great scheme of history because the Trumpite Cult that now dominates the Republican party lock, stock and barrel stands for the exact and complete polar opposite of Massie/Paul/Buffett/Taft libertarianism.
To the contrary, Trump’s dog’s breakfast of here-t0day-gone-tommorrow policies amount to rightwing statism. The Donald doesn’t give a shit about free markets or small, minimalist government and could care even less about fiscal rectitude, sound money or the hemorrhaging burden of Fed-fueled public and private debt that now afflicts the very functioning of American society.
He is, in fact, a Washington Swamp Creature at essence because like the careerists domiciled on the banks of the Potomac he is always at the ready to deploy the powers, purse and coercive arms of the state to fix any problem that strikes his fancy ( e.g. trade deficits, imported fentanyl precursor chemicals, alleged Covid-19 contagions) or that might serve GOP partisan purposes, such as the deportation of taxpaying undocumented workers with no criminal records who might otherwise vote for the Dems.
As for his campaign blather about ending the Forever Wars, the single stupidest military intervention in American history now underway in Iran speaks for itself. It shows, if there were ever any doubt, that the Donald is an incipient Cesarean, who is actually enthralled by militarism, the war game screens in the Situations Room and being the omnipotent orchestra conductor of the American Empire.
Indeed, Trump is a John McCain type war-monger and imperialist. And one who is too damn clueless or stupid, as the case may be, to even hide his lust for the role of commander-in-chief of the planet.
The truth is, America’s days are numbered because our heretofore prosperous and mainly free economy and society are being crushed by the burdens of Empire abroad, lobbyist-dominated Big Government at home and a rogue central bank. The latter, in fact, is the core evil of the piece because it has massively monetized the public debt, thereby turning elected politicians into fiscal libertines; and has also transformed capitalist financial markets into vast leveraged gambling casinos that generate destructive financial bubbles, egregious wealth imbalances and prosperity-eroding malinvestment.
To be sure, American governance is not so fragile that it would otherwise fail, absent a majority caucus on Capitol Hill of Tom Massie’s. But in this day and age of the Brobdingnagian Warfare State and Welfare State, what American democracy cannot abide is two pro-government parties. Even if that includes one of the Left and one of the Right.
America’s Constitutional Republic form of democracy needs a full, free and fair competition between a Government Party, which role the Dems have claimed since the New Deal, and an anti-Government Party, which is what the GOP’s old time religion was all about; and which is most completely, cogently and sharply defined by the resolute libertarian stance of Congressman Tom Massie.
Needless to say, the job of Massie and the libertarians who came before him was to paint in sharp ideological relief the principles, vision and governmental modus operandi that is opposite to the plenary endeavors of our present Leviathan on the Potomac. But with the libertarian impulse now all but expurgated from the Trumpified GOP, there will be no contesting of statism at all as between the twin pro-Government parties which will now operate the machinery of government in Washington.
The implications are manifold, sweeping and untoward in the extreme. But a single number perhaps captures as well as any the essence of the calamity that lies ahead. That figure is $175 trillion and it represents the now built-in path of the public debt by 2055.
The fact is, the Dem’s Government party is never going to do anything about either the Welfare State or the Warfare State, even as it perennially threatens to heavily tax the rich in order to make fiscal ends meet. Yet time and again it fails to do so as it finds out the wealthy are already heavily taxed relative to everyone else and that, in any event, the Dems don’t have the votes to make the tax take from the rich any more fulsome than it already is.
At the same time, the Trumpified GOP is now downright pathetic when it comes to the fiscal front. You only need to listen the Capitol Hill Republicans repeating the hideous lies about Iran’s non-existent nukes and its mythical 47-year war on America to realize that today’s bloated trillion dollar DOD budget is here to say—even as the GOP pledges no cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Veterans, farmers and small businessmen, along with a robotic default to tax cuts under any and all financial circumstances.
What is worse, Tuesday night was actually not a fluke. The Trumpites and the Bibi Netanyahu/neocon Fifth Column now have the conn in the Republican Party. And a look under the hood of the vote results from Kentucky’s 4th District tells you all you need to know about how it happened.
Here are the key numbers and those from previous elections which provide relevant context. What stands out like giant sore thumb is that Kentucky’s 4th is a deeply red district where registered GOP voters of 311,005 in the month before Tuesday’s primary accounted for 52% of all registered voters and far out-numbered the 205,370 registered Dems, 37,265 registered independents and46,674 other registered voters.
Nor did these registered voter totals and their split change by any material amount from the 2024 primary election, which Massie won overwhelmingly against two weak opponents.
But what did change dramatically was the GOP voter turnout. Tuesday’s primary produced a near-doubling of the turnout (line 4), from 52,593 in the 2024 Republican primary to 105,822 this time.
In this context, Massie (line 2) increased his raw votes only modestly from 39,929 to 47,539 or by +7,610 votes. But challenger Ed Gallrein (line 3) racked up 57,822 votes in Tuesday’s tally compared to the mere 12,664 votes in 2024, which were split between Massie’s two challengers.
That’s right. There were 52,768 more votes in the 2026 GOP primary than in 2024, but Gallrein captured fully 45,158 (line 10) or nearly 86% of these new voters. Accordingly, total GOP primary participation as a share of registered Republicans surged from 16.9% in 2024 to 33.9% last night, and as a share of the broader eligible population it doubled from 8.3% to 16.6%.
Likewise, Massie’s vote went from 12.8% of registered GOP voters in 2024 to 15.3% on Tuesday. But that modest uptake was obliterated by the challenger vote as a share of GOP registered voters, which exploded from 4.1% among Massie’s two challengers in 2024 to Gallrein’s 18.6% share.
So the $175 trillion question, as it were, is how and why a challenger who didn’t effectively campaign or debate the incumbent and who had spent his entire career in the US military outside of the district, and who raised almost no campaign funds from actual voters inside the Kentucky 4th, literally ran the tables among the 52,768 new voters who came to the polls in this red hot, massively funded campaign.
Footnotes:
¹ 2024 opponents: Michael McGinnis (6,604 votes) and Eric Deters (6,060 votes).
² 2026 opponent: Ed Gallrein (57,822 votes, unofficial results).
³ Massie faced only a token write-in independent opponent in the 2024 general election and won 99.6% of the vote. The congressional race total (~279,517) was virtually identical to presidential turnout in the district.
As it happens, the context from the 2024 general election makes this even more striking. In that presidential-year cycle about 155,550 registered Republicans voted (Row 17). according to the state’s official records. That means, in turn, that during the earlier GOP primary that year just 52,593 or one-third of the typical Republican general-election turnout bothered to show up for Massie’s primary contest against two weak opponents.
In the general election, of course, Massie cruised to victory with 278,386 votes (Row 18) against virtually no opposition.
In 2026, the much-expanded primary turnout of 105,361 still reached only about two-thirds of the 2024 GOP general-election participation level.
In all, therefore, there were roughly 100,000 “missing” Republican voters as between the sleepy 2024 primary and the 2024 general election. And it was from this huge basket of 2024 primary election non-voters that the Gallrein campaign accumulated its massive uptake of votes.
The explanation of how Gallrein captured 86% of the incremental 2026 GOP primary election voters is straightforward. First, it is now well recognized that this became the most expensive U.S. House primary in American history, with total spending by the two candidates together (campaign + Super PACs) topping $32–35 million.
From this total, the Gallrein campaign plus pro-Israel and Trump-supported Super PACs accounted for about $22 million. That works out to roughly $487 per vote across the incremental 2026 Massie opponent votes of 45,158.
That’s a sizeable number, of course, but it surely cannot explain the outcome. What does explain the outcome, therefore, is Trump’s personal, no-holds-barred intervention. He endorsed Gallrein early, repeatedly called Massie disloyal, and turned the race into a high-visibility loyalty test. In a district that gave Trump 66.9% in 2024, it was this presidential weight—combined with saturation advertising, mailers, robocalls and targeted digital outreach—which activated infrequent, low-propensity Republicans who normally ignore primaries.
Massie’s dedicated small-donor base held and even grew slightly, but it could not compete with the wave of newly mobilized voters pulled in part by the wall of Gallrein money but mainly by the noisy and militant Trump campaign against Rep. Massie.
Nevertheless, these results also point to a hidden fragility in Trump’s 2024 landslide in Kentucky’s 4th district and therefore his political base around the nation.
Even in this dark-red district, Trump’s electoral coalition rested on more than just a hard core MAGA base. After subtracting Dem and independent crossover votes and using Massie’s 2026 primary performance as a proxy for the Congressman’s loyal base, the estimated hard-core MAGA share of the Donald’s big 2024 win in the Kentucky 4th is only about 38.1% (Row 26).
Under a revised scenario, therefore, based on Trump’s core 2024 MAGA vote plus 35% of the 2024 Dem/Other vote and 35% of Massie’s 2026 primary voters, Trump’s hypothetical share drops to just 48.7% (Row 28).
In other words, if Trump were to lose or alienate roughly 65% of the Massie-aligned conservatives and Dem/Other crossover voters who supported him in 2024, his once-commanding margin would collapse below 50%. Even here in one of the safest Republican districts in the country.
And that gets us to the real FA/FO implicit in Tuesday night’s shocker. Trump’s foolish War on Iran is eroding his Dem/independent voter base from 2024 rapidly; and his successful assault on Tom Massie will now surely send a good portion of the libertarian wing of his 2024 coalition to the sidelines next November.
The result wouldn’t be pretty. To wit, it would generate a Dem sweep of the House and Senate elections that, in turn, would guarantee Trump’s impeachment, conviction and removal from office early in 2027.
Alas, that would be a FA/FO lesson for the ages.
https://davidstockman.substack.com/p/a-fafo-for-the-ages-f0c