Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy was one of the few Republicans who tried to hold Donald Trump accountable after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Voters in his home state rewarded him for that Saturday with an overwhelming defeat.
“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim the election was stolen,” Cassidy said as applause from supporters overtook him in a speech after his loss. “You don’t manufacture some excuse. You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege, and that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Back in February of 2021, Cassidy was one of just seven GOP senators to side against the then former president in the impeachment trial over an incitement of insurrection charge that drove Republicans apart. At that point, weeks removed from winning his seat once again, it seemed possible that by the time Cassidy was up for re-election, if he decided to run at all, Trump would no longer dominate Republican politics as he faced severe backlash over the tumultuous end to his presidency, and his false claims of voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election that spurred a mob of his supporters to storm Capitol Hill.
“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person,” Cassidy said in explaining his vote. “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.”
Most of Cassidy’s Republican colleagues went a different direction, and gave Trump a free pass. In doing so, they provided him with a path back to power that he seized upon almost immediately. Cassidy suffered the consequence of his choice Saturday night in a reliably Republican state.
“Louisiana was not pleased with that vote. They took that as a sign that he had turned his back on the Louisiana voters,” GOP Rep. Julia Letlow told reporters before saying that Trump, who endorsed her to replace Cassidy, is “the best president of my lifetime.”
More than five years removed from a second impeachment trial and acquittal, Trump’s influence over the Republican party is as fierce as ever, a march out of the political wilderness that saw him take back the White House and win every presidential battleground in the 2024 election. Republicans in Congress uneasy with him after Jan. 6 have by and large gathered behind him. Almost all of those who felt differently have either lost office or found themselves largely excommunicated from the party.
Facing voters in an election for the first time since his vote, Cassidy contended the kind of storm that made the unlikely already seem impossible.
Since his last win, Republicans overhauled the state’s wonky style of elections, meaning that Cassidy needed to win over the kind of GOP voters who are the backbone of Trump’s base of support if he wanted to continue on in Washington. His third place finish in the GOP primary this weekend showed how tall an order that was.
Trump publicly coaxed Letlow to enter the race, endorsing her before she even officially announced, giving Cassidy a stark challenge. The state’s GOP governor also backed Letlow, making a bleak campaign for Cassidy even lonelier.
Cassidy adjusted his tune as the president returned to power. In a telling moment early during Trump’s second term last year, Cassidy, a physician, ended up supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the administration’s leader for health and human services despite clear public concerns about the Trump pick’s anti-vaccine record.
The only Republicans still in Congress today who defied Trump on impeachment have all been saved by unique circumstances, benefiting from different state election practices or representing seats that they alone, as relative moderates, may be able to hold. The rest have either skipped running again or been rejected by voters.
That track record underlines a trend that’s been borne out by Trump’s second term in the White House. Republicans have seen firsthand what happens to those who challenge or defy the president. And even amid a presidency relying heavy on the kind of executive authority that is typically anathema to the GOP, accountability has been few and far between.
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Federal campaign finance records show that more than $17 million in outside spending went towards trying to influence Saturday’s primary in Louisiana, with a large amount of that opposing Letlow. That money couldn’t even help get Cassidy to a one-on-one primary runoff. Instead he watched his fellow Republicans side with Letlow and state treasurer John Fleming, both of whom made it to that next stage. Fleming, a former member of Congress who served in Trump’s first administration, loaned his campaign more than $10 million as he tried to prove to voters that he was the real Trump acolyte instead of Letlow.
Fleming’s campaign emphasized his allegiance to Trump in the aftermath of Jan. 6 when the president’s political future seemed so tenuous, claiming on its website that “John stood by President Trump until the end of his first term, and was the last staffer to leave the White House on January 20, 2021.” His campaign even touted that Fleming “was MAGA long before MAGA was cool.”
It’s rare for this kind of loss to happen to a senator, any senator, in recent years. One has to go all the way back to 2012 when Richard Lugar lost a Republican primary in Indiana, to find an incumbent who lost a primary battle after having been elected to the statewide seat before.
When Cassidy took the stage Saturday amid defeat, he gave the kind of speech that was humble, self-effacing, but still with enough implicit sharp elbows towards the president to try and acknowledge why the Louisiana senator had just been rejected by voters. He made appeals to character, integrity and the values of leadership, stressed the lofty ideals that are supposed to tie the nation together — the same kind of tone Trump’s opponents struck back in the 2016 Republican primary, as they dropped out, one by one, and brought the country, and the party, to where it is today.
Cassidy’s loss comes just a few weeks after Trump got revenge on some of the Indiana GOP state senators who had defied him late last year and voted down a plan to dismantle the state’s two Democratic congressional districts.
All of that underlines that Trump’s control over Republicans may be sacrosanct still, even if his ability to sway the kind of general election voters his party needs this fall to keep control of Congress may be more fragile and tenuous.
For now though, Trump has called on Republicans to oust those he’s deemed not fit to be a part of his party time and again.
They’re still more than willing, in most cases, to oblige him.
Trump celebrated Cassidy’s defeat, saying in a social media post overnight that the senator “voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane!”
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend,” Trump said.
Hunter Woodall covers politics for MS NOW. He’s reported on politics and presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and CBS News and reported on Congress for The Minnesota Star Tribune.