Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie struck a defiant tone as he conceded defeat to MAGA challenger Ed Gallrein in their primary election Tuesday, telling his supporters: “We didn’t bend the knee.”Massie is one of the few conservatives in Congress to have regularly stood up to Donald Trump, opposing his “One Big, Beautiful Bill” and the war in Iran and campaigning for the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, earning the president’s lasting enmity.Trump responded to his perceived disloyalty by backing Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL who was heavily supported by pro-Israel donors, and succeeded, as he did with Liz Cheney in 2022, in silencing a rare opposing voice from his own side.Taking to the stage at the Marriott Cincinnati Airport in Hebron to acknowledge the result – with the MAGA man chalking up 54.9 percent of ballots to 45.1 percent – a good-humored Massie joked to his crowd about Gallrein’s connections. “I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede,” he said. “And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie was in jubilant mood Tuesday night despite his defeat to primary challenger Ed Gallrein, who was backed by President Donald Trump (Getty)The congressman pointed out that their race had been the most expensive congressional primary in American history, “went on longer than Vietnam,” and had begun when the MAGA wing of his party had no candidate in place, just a burning desire to remove him from office.“We’ve been honorable the whole time and we’re going to stay that way,” he said, taking pride in the fact that neither he nor any member of his staff had been made the subject of an ethics complaint during his time in D.C.“For 14 years those SOBs in Washington tried to buy my vote,” Massie said. “They couldn’t buy it.”“They used a lot of dirty tricks but we stayed the course,” he said of the race for his seat. “We didn’t bend the knee, we didn’t throw a foul ball, we didn’t do any of those things. We didn’t kneecap anybody. We had lots of opportunities to try a lot of stuff like that and we never did it. We ran a clean race.”Massie applauded his staff and supporters in his concession speech for running a ‘clean race’ and refusing to resort to ‘dirty tricks’ (AP)Massie also rounded on Trump’s allies in the media, mocking Fox News for imposing a “blackout” on him until “four hours into the election” when he appeared on American’s Newsroom with Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino.“Hey, their slop is selling, so they will keep selling it,” Massie told his audience as boos rang out.Far from downbeat in defeat, he continued: “Why am I hopeful right now? We have the younger demographic. You are patriots and you will inherit the country. You will make it better and I am hopeful because of it. “We started out as an election and it turned into a movement. There is a yearning in this country for somebody who votes for the principles of their party.”Reflecting on the pivotal role he played in passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November, forcing Trump’s Department of Justice to declassify and publish millions of pages of documents and photographs concerning the late pedophile, Massie said there was still work to be done to hold Epstein’s allies to account.Massie with former colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene and California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna campaigning last year for the release of the Epstein files, which is likely to be remembered as his defining achievement on Capitol Hill (Getty)“We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture – and that was just six months,” he said. “I’ve got seven months left in Congress.”As his remarks concluded, the crowd broke out into chants of “2028! 2028!” urging him to run for the Republican presidential nomination in two years, at which he grinned.“I need a medical margarita right now but we’ll talk about it later,” he said.After he left the stage, his campaign account on X picked up the slack, responding witheringly to Indiana Rep. Erin Houchin when she posted about being the first person to inform Trump of Massie’s loss: “How do his boots taste?”When the president himself issued a statement calling Massie “the Worst Congressman in the History of our Country,” the same account replied by posting an official endorsement the Kentuckian received from Trump in 2022.Taking Massie’s defeat less well was former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who likewise broke with Trump last year over Epstein and other issues, who said the future of the Republican Party had been “destroyed” by the tightening of the president’s stranglehold over it.Greene called Massie a “friend” and “a giant among weak pathetic men.” “Tonight the future of the Republican Party was destroyed,” she added. “The Real America First Movement will rise led by the younger generations, who hate the old guard with an unquenchable passion. Let us pray that we have a country left by the time these creatures are gone.”