It may seem counter-intuitive, but President Donald Trump spent the weekend engaged in scorched earth efforts to undermine the re-election efforts of several of his fellow Republicans.
Forty-eight hours that could have been spent targeting the Democrats ahead of this November’s crucial midterm elections, were instead devoted to the defenestration of prominent Republicans who have crossed him. On Saturday night, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana learned the hard way that once Trump deems you a traitor to the Make America Great Again cause, he still has the power to cook your electoral goose.
Cassidy, accused by Trump of being a “disloyal disaster”, committed the cardinal sin of supporting the president’s impeachment for “incitement to insurrection” back in February 2021. Five years later, Trump finally got his man, accusing Cassidy on social media of supporting “something that has now been proven to be total ‘bullsh*t’” and calling him “a sleazebag, a terrible guy who is BAD FOR LOUISIANA”.
He urged the state’s Maga voters to back an alternative, ideologically pure candidate, and they did so in droves, sending Julia Letlow and John Fleming to a runoff next month. Cassidy now becomes a footnote in history: the first sitting Senator from either party to be de-selected in a primary since 2012.
