President Donald Trump excommunicated Congressman Thomas Massie from MAGA after he dared criticize the president’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.
Massie, a Kentucky Republican, told CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday that Trump’s decision to bomb the Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan facilities made it “a good week for the neocons and the military industrial complex who want war all the time.”
“We are exhausted,” he said. “We are tired from all of these wars, and we’re non-interventionists. I mean, this was one of the promises. I mean, are you going to call President Trump’s campaign an isolationist campaign? What he promised us was, we would put America first.”
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Massie further claimed there was “no imminent threat” to the United States and that Congress should not have ceded its authority.
In response to the interview, Trump went on a lengthy Truth Social rant against Massie on Sunday, calling him “weak, ineffective, and votes ‘NO’ on virtually everything put before him (Rand Paul, Jr.), no matter how good something may be.”
“Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky is not MAGA, even though he likes to say he is. Actually, MAGA doesn’t want him, doesn’t know him, and doesn’t respect him,” Trump wrote. “He is a negative force who almost always Votes ‘NO,’ no matter how good something may be. He’s a simple minded ‘grandstander’ who thinks it’s good politics for Iran to have the highest level Nuclear weapon, while at the same time yelling ‘DEATH TO AMERICA’ at every chance they get.”
“MAGA should drop this pathetic LOSER, Tom Massie, like the plague!” he added.
In a separate interview with Fox News Digital published after Trump’s post, Massie said he felt “misled” by the president’s actions, and was not alone in the MAGA camp.
“I didn’t think he would let neocons determine his foreign policy and drag us into another war.”
Massie continued, “Other people feel the same way, who supported Trump—I think the political danger to him is he induces a degree of apathy in the Republican base, and they fail to show up to keep us in the majority in the midterms.”
Massie also labelled JD Vance’s statement that the U.S. is only at war with Iran’s nuclear program as “ludicrous.”
“He’s engaged in war,” Massie said.
“We are now a co-belligerent in a hot war between two countries. You can’t say this isn’t an act of war, that it’s a strike outside of a war. This is inside, geographically and temporally, of a war.”
Massie then took to his X account to reply, tagging Trump and stating the president “declared so much War on me today it should require an Act of Congress. #sassywithmassie.”
On Sunday, Trump’s political operation, backed by a war chest of $500 million, launched Kentucky MAGA, a super PAC dedicated to defeating Massie in a May 2026 primary, Axios first reported. Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and aide Chris LaCivita will run the PAC, which LaCivita said will do “whatever it takes” to oust Massie.
In his earlier remarks to CBS, Massie questioned the president’s authority to conduct a war without Congress’ approval.
“Congress was on vacation last week when all this was happening,” Massie said. “We haven’t been briefed. They should have called us all back and, frankly, we should have debated this war powers resolution that [Representative] Ro Khanna and I offered instead of staying on vacation and doing fundraisers and saying, ‘Oh, well, the president’s got this under control. We’re going to cede our constitutional authority.’”
Massie and Khanna, a Democrat, proposed a War Powers Resolution last week that was meant to reassert Congress’ sole authority under the Constitution to declare war. “The ongoing war between Israel and Iran is not our war,” Massie said in a statement. “Even if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended on Sunday the administration’s actions in Iran, saying it complied with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The act says the president must notify Congress within 48 hours of military action and cannot deploy troops for longer than 90 days without a formal declaration of war.
Massie also defended MAGA supporters like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who’ve opposed the intervention, saying they were simply “exhausted” from Americans fighting abroad.
Massie’s remarks came a day after he slammed the strikes as “not constitutional” in an X post and slammed House Speaker Mike Johnson for not demanding the president ask for congressional authorization.
“Why didn’t you call us back from vacation to vote on military action if there was a serious threat to our country?” Massie replied to Johnson’s post praising Trump’s actions. “I introduced a War Powers Resolution on Tuesday, while Congress was on vacation. We would have had plenty of time to debate and vote on this.”
He also said Trump’s decision constituted an “act of war.”
“When two countries are bombing each other daily in a hot war, and a third country joins the bombing, that’s an act of war,“ he wrote. ”I’m amazed at the mental gymnastics being undertaken by neocons in DC (and their social media bots) to say we aren’t at war… so they can make war."
The Daily Beast has reached out to Massie and the White House for further comment.
