Outside the Beltway

Trump Revenge Tour Continues

Even as a lame duck, he still holds domination over the party.

James Joyner · Sunday, May 17, 2026 · 1 comment

Bloomberg (“Trump Gets Revenge Against Republican Who Voted to Convict Him“):

President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succeeded in their efforts to defeat Senator Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s Republican primary, a signal of the enduring strength of the president’s hold on his party despite an unpopular war and soaring gas prices.

Cassidy was one of seven GOP senators in 2021 who voted to convict Trump on the charge of inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6 that year. He placed last in a three-way race Saturday against Representative Julia Letlow, who was endorsed by both Trump and a Kennedy-linked political action committee, and State Treasurer John Fleming.

“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!” Trump said of Cassidy on social media late Saturday.

With 92.3% of ballots tallied, Letlow has 44.8% of the vote and Fleming has 28.3%. Cassidy trailed with 24.7% of the vote.

Letlow and Fleming will advance to a runoff next month. Whoever wins that contest is virtually assured victory in November in the deep red state. In his reelection race in 2020, just months before his vote to convict Trump, Cassidy won 59% of the vote.

[…]

In a defiant concession speech, Cassidy said: “Let me just set the record straight. Our country is not about one individual, it is about the welfare of all Americans and it is about our Constitution.”

“If someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves, they’re not about serving us,” he added.

NBC News (“Sen. Bill Cassidy’s defeat shows the price of dissent in Trump’s Republican Party“):

Sen. Bill Cassidy’s primary loss Saturday brings an end to a two-decade career in public office that was ultimately defined by tensions with President Donald Trump.

And when Republicans have tensions with Trump, the president usually wins.

[…]

The result marks another trophy for Trump’s collection in his ongoing bid to oust Republicans perceived as disloyal to him.

Throughout Cassidy’s career, there were occasional signs that the physician-turned-politician wasn’t quite in lockstep with his party on a handful of issues, including around health care. But Cassidy’s cardinal sin, in the eyes of Trump and his supporters, was voting in 2021 to convict the then-former president on impeachment charges of inciting an insurrection on Jan. 6.

Cassidy had just won re-election weeks earlier by a dominant margin. His vote after the impeachment trial was seen as something of a surprise by a senator not known for bucking his party once the dust settled.

It went against a pattern for Cassidy over his Senate tenure: a tendency to express moderate instincts and occasional disagreements with his party more through words than votes. This time, though, he broke with most of his party on the Senate floor.

“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person,” Cassidy said in a brief statement after the vote. “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.”

And Trump never forgot it, having waged a largely successful campaign to oust Republicans who voted to impeach or convict him. Just two of the other six GOP senators who voted to convict Trump are still in office: Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. And just two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him are still in office, with only one running for re-election this year: Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif.

Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump came just a few months after the senator handily won re-election to his second six-year term. He was first elected to the Senate in the 2014 red wave, ousting Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. Before that, he served in the House for six years and the Louisiana state Senate for about two years.

It points to the tight grip that Trump maintains over a core GOP electorate that shares his unforgiving demands for lawmakers in the party be loyal to him.

It didn’t matter that Cassidy’s voting record has been closely aligned with Trump’s agenda in the Senate. The senator rarely ever voted against his legislative priorities, administrative personnel or judicial nominees in either term.

Ronald Reagan liked to say, “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20% traitor.” Trump clearly does not hold to that worldview.

It’s clear that Republican primary voters remain in lockstep with their fearless leader. Longtime incumbents are either being defeated for crossing Trump or simply not bothering to run for re-election. I’ve never seen anything like it in the nearly five decades I’ve been following American politics.

I must confess that I have not followed Cassidy’s career closely enough to have a strong sense of how much good he did/pork he brought home to Louisiana. But it’s noteworthy that he sailed to victory in 2014 over incumbent Mary Landrieu 56-44, becoming the first Republican to hold the seat since 1883. In 2020, he won all-party primary on November 3 with 59.3% of the vote, making a general election unnecessary.

Indeed, this is the first time since 2008 that Louisiana has held single-party primaries—and that election was itself a departure from the state’s tradition. Apparently, the switch caused a lot of confusion. But I don’t think it’s the reason Cassidy came in third.