Republican who 'miscalculated Trump’s vengeance' is paying a heavy price

In Louisiana's 2026 GOP U.S. Senate primary, Sen. Bill Cassidy is fighting for his political survival. President Donald Trump resents the conservative senator deeply, doing everything he can to prevent Cassidy from making it to the general election. And New Orleans-based essayist/novelist is arguing that Cassidy made a huge political mistake when he "miscalculated Trump's vengeance."

Gary Sernovitz, in a New York Times op-ed, emphasizes that Cassidy entered the primary with a range of liabilities. On one hand, Sernovitz argues, the senator tried to "ingratiate himself with the Trump Administration" by voting to advance the nomination of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. despite strong reservations about his anti-vaccine views. But according to Sernovitz, trying to appease Trump didn't work — as Trump still held a grudge against him.

In 2021, Cassidy joined many Democrats in voting against Trump in the president's second impeachment trial. Cassidy, Sernovitz says, "grossly miscalculated the certainty of Donald Trump's vengeance."

"The tragedy of Bill Cassidy is that he is as close as we have to the nation's most powerful doctor and the point he was willing to compromise on — the point at which many looked to him to first, do no harm — gave him no political benefit at all," Sernovitz laments. "It may even help cost him his national role."

Sernovitz argues that Democratic strategist James Carville was spot on when he commented that "Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the devil, and he didn't get anything for it."

Nonetheless, Sernovitz contends that Cassidy can act with dignity if he loses the primary.

"Even if he loses," Sernovitz writes, "Mr. Cassidy will have the rest of his life to use his compromised voice in public and, for a few months, as a leader in the Senate. The nation is ever more confused by battling medical advice, of all types. It needs a ferocious champion of vaccines. We could use a doctor unencumbered from political gambles and the whims of Donald Trump."

Cassidy's predicament reflects a broader pattern within the Republican Party, where loyalty to Trump has become the litmus test for political viability, regardless of other credentials or accomplishments.

The Louisiana senator, a physician with decades of medical expertise, finds himself in the untenable position of having sacrificed his credibility on crucial public health issues without gaining any political insurance. His vote to advance Kennedy—a prominent vaccine skeptic whose views contradict basic medical science—was intended as a peace offering to the Trump administration. Instead, it exposed him as willing to compromise core professional principles for political expediency.

Meanwhile, Trump's memory of Cassidy's 2021 impeachment vote remains unforgiving, demonstrating that appeasement of the former president is a losing strategy.