In these final days on the campaign trail, Massie’s events have seemed a bit like a collection of misfit toys.
The politicians who joined Massie have all had their clashes with Republican leadership – either in Washington or in local Kentucky politics. There’s Boebert, in a black cowboy hat, talking about how she strategised with Massie to handle the intense pressure the White House brought on her to drop her support for releasing the Epstein files.
Indiana congresswomen Victoria Spartz delivered a frenetic Massie endorsement with a thick Ukrainian accent.
“It’s very easy to be a rubber stamp, get that cheque, be nice to everyone else and just go along and be re-elected,” Spartz said. “It’s much harder to say no, guys, that’s not what we are elected on. People rely on us, people are struggling, people are really getting hurt.”
Senator Paul, one of the original grassroots “Tea Party” conservatives who organised against President Barack Obama and the Democratic congressional majority in 2010, has, like Massie, also bucked his party’s leadership.
“We did not come to Congress to join the club,” he said. “We did not come for fame or fortune. We came for one purpose, and that is to defend the Constitution.”
If Massie’s campaign team made for a strange assortment, those in the audience were an even more unusual collection.
Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the fringe right Oath Keepers who was convicted of sedition for his involvement in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol and pardoned by Trump, repeatedly showed up in a Massie campaign T-shirt. Kyle Rittenhouse, who gained notoriety for shooting three protesters during the Black Lives Matters demonstrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin, made an appearance in Florence.
Former congressman Matt Gaetz, who resigned from Congress in 2024 amid a congressional ethics investigation over claims of sexual misconduct, which he denied, interviewed Massie for his show on the right-wing One America News.
He asked the congressman if he was going to run for president in 2028. Massie demurred.
There were blue-blazer-wearing libertarians too young to shave and a tattooed man wearing an “American Reich” shirt.