USA TODAY National
FORT MITCHELL, Kentucky – After Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie and his new wife got married this fall, the two got right back to work on his Kentucky farm.
“We put on work clothes, she left her veil on and we butchered chickens,” he said. Carolyn Grace Moffa, a former staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul, helped bleed out, scald, and pluck the birds, he said.
Their private ceremony in Garrison, Kentucky stayed a secret for about two weeks until, on Nov. 2, they had a wedding at a Pennsylvania farm with about 150 guests, including Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
There, the two enjoyed raw milk with their wedding cake and margaritas with peaches fresh from their orchard – after they signed a waiver indicating they’d take full responsibility if any guests got sick from the food.
The wedding happened roughly 16 months after Massie’s wife and high school sweetheart, Rhonda Massie, died unexpectedly after years of health struggles. She was 51 years old.
“I still cry every day,” Massie told The Enquirer, a USA TODAY Network partner, in an exclusive interview Nov. 15 at a Biggby Coffee shop in Northern Kentucky. “People, they're like, ‘Wait he didn't grieve long enough for his wife.’ I'm still grieving.”
His comments come the day after President Donald Trump taunted the congressman about his new marriage.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, “Did Thomas Massie … get married already??? Boy, that was quick! No wonder the Polls have him at less than an 8% chance of winning the Election. Anyway, have a great life Thomas and (?). His wife will soon find out that she’s stuck with a LOSER!”
In response, Massie said, "It's getting harder and harder as his attacks ramp up to be gracious, but I've still maintained it even with last night's attack."
But Massie and Moffa didn’t take the comment too seriously.
“Carolyn and I were cracking up and she said, ‘See I told you he was going to get mad if you didn't invite him to the wedding,’” Massie recounted.
The firebrand lawmaker, after all, frequently endures insults from Trump and other Republicans.
The Massie-Trump public feud
Massie and Trump have had an on-and-off feud over the years, which seemed to flip permanently on after Trump took office again in January. Trump has publicly called for Massie's ouster and is backing Republican Ed Gallrein in the GOP primary against Massie.
Their most recent public spat is about the highly controversial Epstein files.
Massie led the charge to publicly release the files. He side-stepped Republican leadership with a discharge petition that received its final signature Nov. 12.
Now, the clock is ticking and his bill is expected to reach the House floor for a vote that is expected to pass on Tuesday - with Trump changing his position late Sunday and urging Republicans to support the measure.
The Massie mystique
Trump’s comments aren’t the worst or weirdest of what Massie reads online.
“There's some people who think I have a body double now,” he said. “They have their own conspiracy theory that I've been replaced or I've had a chin implant.”
But while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate is an inventor and tinkerer, he hasn’t figured out how to clone himself.
Instead, he said, recent changes in his appearance are mostly grief-driven.
Without his longtime wife Rhonda – who frequently took care of their farm, home, now-grown children, and her aging parents – Massie didn’t know what to do with himself.
“So, between grief and not having somebody to share food with, I lost half my weight that way. And then I started running to sort of clear my head and to be healthier,” he said.
In total, he’s lost about 30 pounds in just over a year.
He also grew out a salt-and-pepper beard during Congress's Christmas break last year.
His late-wife and “mamaw” didn’t like him with a beard so he stayed clean-shaven for decades. When it came time for him to do a TV appearance that winter, he just didn’t shave.
“My mom said I looked like a hobo … and then some people on the internet said it looked like I was a homeless guy who was on a bender,” he said.
But he noted that women seemed to like it, so he kept it.
'What to do if your spouse passes'
After Massie’s wife died, he anonymously joined a Facebook group for widows and widowers.
There he connected with others, “compared notes,” and eventually learned that men who’d been in happy marriages often sought out that kind of relationship again.
But that wasn’t something he and Rhonda talked about. They always assumed he’d die first.
“We just assumed I'd roll a tractor on myself, crash the bulldozer in the ravine (and) not be found for two days, flip my car in the mountains of West Virginia driving to D.C.,” he said.
He even talked her through which parts of the farm she should sell and told her the value of his gun collection so she could get a fair price if she sold it off.
Eventually, though, he talked to his two daughters about dating and whether it’s something Rhonda would have wanted.
“One of my daughters was particularly insightful because … she had just gotten married that year – literally just months before (Rhonda died) – and had a conversation with my wife about what to do if your spouse passes,” he said.
Massie doesn’t want to talk about exactly when he started dating because of the scrutiny he’s already received from people. But he said his relationships with his four children became the most important in his life after his wife died and he wouldn’t have started dating if they didn’t approve of it.
Reconnecting and butterflies
Massie had met his new wife about 10 years ago through his good friend and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
Moffa was a staffer who eventually became in charge of agricultural policy with Paul, so her and Massie’s paths crossed on occasion.
Once, she even visited the farm he shared with Rhonda during a tour of Kentucky farms. Massie and Rhonda showed her the Clucks Capacitor – a mobile, solar-powered chicken pen that collects rainwater.
It had been years since he’d seen Moffa, but he eventually reached out to her and invited her on a date.
“I'm not afraid to say this: I had butterflies when I saw her the first time at the Library of Congress because I had this general idea of her but never in a dating context,” he said. “So when she showed up I was very (emotionally) attracted to her.”
Massie’s “extended shelf life”
“Carolyn achieved something most people never could. She got Mr. No to say yes,” their pastor said during their wedding in November.
Massie, who’s known for voting no on issues even if it makes him unpopular with other Republicans, didn’t see the joke coming.
“I wasn't ready for that. I doubled over laughing, we were all cracking up at that,” he said.
There’s a lot for him to find joy in when it comes to his new marriage.
For instance, before his interview with The Enquirer, Moffa told him he had something in his teeth and helped him floss it out before Massie posed for photos.
Massie gushed that his new wife is politically savvy, interested in farming and healthy eating, and can travel back and forth to Washington D.C. with him. The latter is something he always hoped Rhonda would be able to do at some point but they never got the chance.
On top of everything, Massie’s new marriage is bad news to those who’d like to see him unseated in the 2026 Republican primary.
“I think Carolyn is going to extend my shelf life way past when my enemies would like,“ he said.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Kentucky's Rep. Thomas Massie on grief, finding love, and President Donald Trump
Reporting by Jolene Almendarez, USA TODAY NETWORK / Cincinnati Enquirer
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