U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy took some internet ribbing for going on “Meet the Press” Sunday and declaring that Republicans are “not a cult.”
After the GOP’s ugly midterm showing, with former President Donald Trump’s handpicked candidates on many ballots and his bitter lies dominating the discourse, you can’t blame people for snickering.
But you also can’t really fault Cassidy for making the argument. Unlike many of his peers, he’s not only seen Trump for what he is but been willing to say so for a while now.
Over the last week, many of Cassidy’s GOP colleagues seem to have suddenly discovered that the former president — whose scandals are way too numerous to list here — is toxic to a majority of Americans. Cassidy is one of way too few Republicans who has long recognized reality.
"Trump is the first president in the Republican side at least to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in four years. Elections are about winning," Cassidy told Axios a full year ago, leaving the implication — that Trump is a loser — hanging in the air.
He was similarly blunt in acknowledging all along that Joe Biden was the legit victor in the presidential contest that Trump still insists was stolen from him. Cassidy was the only member of Louisiana’s GOP delegation to vote to fully certify the results after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and one of a handful of GOP senators who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial (but notably not in his first).
“Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty” of inciting the mob that tried to stop the electoral college count, Cassidy said after the second impeachment. Amazing, even now, that most of his fellow Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to concur.
So maybe a little gloating was in order this week, when Cassidy spoke to local reporters. Asked his take on the results, he said that conservative issues of inflation, the border and crime were winners, but “as it turns out, I’m not sure a conservative agenda was on the ballot.”
A lesson from the election, he said, is that “if we continue to talk about the past, we’re gonna lose, because people are looking to the future.”
It just so happened that he was speaking hours before Trump took the stage at Mar-a-Lago and declared himself a candidate in 2024.
The announcement was met with everything from silence to outright dismay among former acolytes. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s loyal secretary of state, said it wouldn’t affect his plans to run. And Mike Pence, the same guy that Trump pushed the Jan. 6 mob to target for sticking to his constitutional duty as vice president, finally spoke up, predicting GOP voters will have “better choices” in 2024 — presumably including him.
Here’s the thing. We’ve heard that Trump’s over before:
Early in the 2016 primaries, when then-Gov. and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal called him an “egomaniacal madman,” a “power-hungry shark” who “eats whatever is in front of him,” not to mention “insecure and weak.” When the lewd “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced late in the campaign. When he withheld weapons from Ukraine as he leaned on the country to get him dirt on Biden and his son Hunter. When he refused to accept the voters’ will and sent a violent mob to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. And so many more times.
Remember when South Carolina U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said in 2016 that “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it?” How’d that work out?
It’s fair to point out here that Cassidy didn’t start criticizing until pretty late in the game, after he’d won reelection in 2020 with Trump’s support. But that was also well before he had the safety in Republican numbers. The state GOP’s move to censure him for his impeachment vote is proof he went out on a limb to tell the truth.
Still, if the party is really ready to move on from Trump this time — and for the sake of democracy, we can only hope it is — then Cassidy has earned the right to say he told us so.