Conscience Kills

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, May 18, 2026

 

I come to bury Bill Cassidy, not to praise him.

 

The two-term incumbent finished third in this weekend’s Republican Senate primary in Louisiana, missing the runoff. In 2014 and 2020 he was elected to his seat by double-digit margins, in the first case bumping off longtime Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu. On Saturday, against two lesser-known right-wingers, he couldn’t muster 25 percent.

 

Not since 2017 had a sitting senator standing for election failed to advance past a primary.

 

Cassidy famously voted to convict Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, and our retribution-obsessed president never forgot it. As late as Saturday afternoon, with Louisiana Republicans already at the polls, Trump felt obliged to ding Cassidy as a “sleazebag” and a “terrible guy” in a screed on Truth Social.

 

The commentariat was of one mind afterward in pronouncing the cause of political death. The senator’s fate “shows the price of dissent in Trump’s Republican Party,” NBC News concluded. “The lesson: Do not cross Trump,” independent analyst Chris Cillizza agreed.

 

That is not the lesson of Bill Cassidy’s defeat.

 

Lots of Republicans have “crossed” Trump since 2016 and lived to tell the tale. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz opposed him in that year’s Republican presidential primary, at times criticizing him in bitterly personal terms. Cruz couldn’t even bring himself to endorse the party’s new nominee in his speech at that year’s GOP convention. “Vote your conscience,” he urged conservatives contemplating their choice in November.

 

Ten years later, Trump is talking up Cruz for a Supreme Court vacancy and touting Rubio, his secretary of state, as a potential successor to lead the party.

 

Rubio’s chief rival as heir apparent also crossed the president in the past. J.D. Vance was an outspoken Never Trumper back in the day, you may recall, having once gone as far as to wonder whether Trump might prove to be “America’s Hitler.” All of that was public knowledge in 2024. The president made Vance his running mate anyway.

 

Few Republicans have crossed him as sharply as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did when DeSantis jumped into the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Defeat in that race would have cost Trump not just his hegemony over the American right but potentially his freedom, given the federal criminal cases pending against him. One might assume that the president bears DeSantis a ferocious grudge for his impertinence.

 

Nope. The two had lunch together in Miami last month and reportedly discussed a position in the administration. “Trump likes him,” a source told Axios.

 

I could go on and on. How about Lindsey Graham and the president throwing wild rhetorical roundhouses at each other in 2016, then a clearly shaken Graham declaring “count me out, enough is enough” on the evening of January 6, 2021—yet still maintaining his status as a top-tier Trump crony to this day? He turned up on Meet the Press this weekend to opine on Cassidy’s defeat, in fact, gloating over his own superior survival skills.

 

Or how about Mitt Romney lambasting Trump in a speech in the thick of the 2016 primary, calling him a “phony” and a “fraud,” and the new president-elect responding nine months later by interviewing Romney to be his secretary of state?

 

“Do not cross Trump” is not the lesson of Bill Cassidy’s political demise. But there are lessons.

 

Minor lessons.

 

Lesson one: Do not side with political enemies who are treating Trump “unfairly,” especially as a matter of conscience.

 

There are doubtless anodyne factors that help explain why the president has forgiven people like Rubio and DeSantis yet couldn’t forgive Cassidy. Watching vanquished opponents come crawling to him tickles his ego, I’m sure. And, importantly, all of the Republicans I mentioned earlier (save Romney) plainly worked hard to cultivate relationships with him after they’d crossed him.

 

Trump has a childlike habit of viewing anyone who treats him cordially as a “friend,” including Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and if you’re not a postliberal’s friend you’re his enemy. Bill Cassidy didn’t try very hard to build the sort of sycophantic “yes, master” personal rapport with Trump following his impeachment vote that might have reestablished him as a friend.

 

But even if he had, I doubt it would have worked.

 

That’s because Trump does seem to hold special grudges against Republicans who take sides against him in, ahem, Democratic “witch hunts.” He never forgave Jeff Sessions for recusing himself in the Justice Department’s Russiagate probe, which made Robert Mueller’s investigation possible. He never forgave Liz Cheney for linking arms with the left to punish him for his plot to overturn the “rigged” election of 2020. And he never forgave Mike Pence for declining to stop the counting of electoral votes on January 6, deeming it preferable to run instead in 2024 with a guy who thought he might be “America’s Hitler.”

 

When Trump feels cornered, he expects all Republicans to rally to his aid unthinkingly against those who cornered him. To prioritize what your own conscience tells you is right over his political survival is to fail the supreme loyalty test, an unforgivable betrayal. That’s what Cassidy did in voting to convict him at his impeachment trial after the insurrection.

 

Lesson two: If you insist on ignoring lesson one, go all-in.

 

Failing that supreme loyalty test for conscientious reasons is a deeply admirable thing to do. It amounts to political martyrdom: Rather than behave immorally to preserve your career, you opt to behave virtuously and accept professional death as the consequence. That’s what Pence and Cheney did, and it’s why every non-chud in America respects them.

 

Bill Cassidy behaved virtuously when he voted to convict—but couldn’t make peace with the political death sentence it earned him. He sought clemency from the president for his betrayal. And rather than earn that clemency by becoming a slobbering ass-kisser like Graham, damaging only himself in the process, he chose to make amends by all but singlehandedly clearing the way for the most influential anti-vaccine kook on earth to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

 

A gastroenterologist who’s treated hepatitis patients, Cassidy knows firsthand how much needless human misery can be avoided by vaccination. His vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was transparently a ploy to try to win back Trump’s favor by lending scientific credibility to the least fit Cabinet nomination in the history of the country, knowing that another Senate primary in Louisiana was on the horizon.

 

No one has done more damage to the United States in order to make Donald Trump happy than Bill Cassidy did by voting to confirm Kennedy. It’s an infamous dereliction of duty and will be remembered as such.

 

I repeat what I said when I wrote about it last year, borrowing what Churchill told Neville Chamberlain after Munich: “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” Bill Cassidy chose dishonor, handing over American public health to witch doctors, in hopes that doing so might spare him a primary war. He got war anyway. He lost, and he deserved to.

 

Let others learn from his foolishness: If you choose political martyrdom at Trump’s hands, own it. Make the most of it by continuing to follow your conscience, knowing that your prognosis is terminal regardless. It’s the height of stupidity to cast a difficult vote that secures your legacy as a statesman, as Cassidy did after January 6, and then undertake to destroy that legacy by behaving disgracefully for expedient reasons, as he did with Kennedy. Liz Cheney understood that. Somehow the brilliant doctor did not.

 

Die on your feet, not on your knees.

 

Lesson three: Don’t be brave only after it’s “safe” to do so.

 

“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout,” Cassidy told supporters during his concession speech on Saturday night. “You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen.”

 

It was clear to all to whom he was alluding. “Insults only bother me if they come from somebody of character and integrity,” he went on to say, mentioning no one in particular. “I find that people of character and integrity don’t spend their time attacking people on the internet.” Then this, from the physician who voted to put RFK Jr. in charge of Americans’ access to vaccines: “Leaders should think through the consequences of their actions.”

 

To listen to him after the votes were in, you might assume that he had scrupulously distanced himself on the campaign trail from the pouting, whining black hole of character and integrity in the White House. Not so. He ran ads trumpeting his vote for Trump’s tax cuts, emphasizing that he “worked with” the president to pass them and showing photos of the two side by side.

 

He even called it “ridiculous” for his primary opponents to question his loyalty to Trump. “It’s being said by people who don’t have anything else to campaign on,” Cassidy told NOTUS of the allegation last year. “The president has eight Cabinet secretaries that he would not have if I had not voted for them and got them through. When the secretary of defense was [confirmed] … I was the 50th vote.”

 

Given all of that, who was his concession-speech candor supposed to impress, surfacing as it did only after he no longer had anything to lose by telling the truth about Trump?

 

I suppose I prefer pugnacity to the alternative, as professing his undying devotion to the president even in defeat would have been Lindsey Graham-tier pathetic. But suddenly being brave after it becomes “safe” to do so is destined to alienate everyone. To Trump supporters, watching Cassidy vent at the president as soon as the race ended must have felt like proof that the phonies of the GOP establishment really do secretly despise their hero and, by extension, them.

 

Whereas, to Trump critics, Cassidy at last mustering the nerve to speak out once the axe had fallen confirmed suspicions about the loathsome selfish cowardice of Beltway Republicans. Only after their careerist aspirations run aground, conveniently, do they tend to rediscover the civic spirit that’s supposed to animate them as public servants.

 

Whichever side you’re on with respect to Cassidy, you’re more cynical about politics today than you were a few days ago. That’s not true of Republicans like Cheney and Romney, who didn’t proceed to talk out of both sides of their mouth about the president once they realized what a civic menace he was.

 

The major lesson.

 

But wait, you say. Cassidy wasn’t brave only when it was “safe” to be brave. He voted to convict Trump. That was brave!

 

True—although I strongly suspect the senator didn’t understand just how brave he was being when he cast that vote. If there’s a tragic element to his primary defeat, it’s that he may have assumed that the rank-and-file of his party are much more virtuous than they really are.

 

Remember the posture of his impeachment vote. Cassidy was less than two months into a new six-year term. Trump’s approval, although still sturdy with Republicans, had plummeted among Americans after the insurrection. The Biden Justice Department was gearing up to pursue the now-former president on criminal charges related to the “stop the steal” plot.

 

The senator from Louisiana had good reason to believe the Trump era was over.

 

Sure, Republican voters would be angry at him for voting to convict—for a while. But they had six years to get over it before he’d face them again in a primary. By 2026, Trump might be in prison. Even if he wasn’t, it’s a cinch that the GOP would have moved on by then and found a new leader, eroding the base’s resentment of Cassidy for his impeachment vote.

 

That the right might nominate Trump again in 2024, after a failed coup plot, simply did not occur to him, I would guess.

 

All of which is to say that I don’t think Bill Cassidy was naive about Trump’s wrath when he voted the way he did after January 6. The president is little more than a gelatinous blob of grudges and grievances, and the senator doubtless knew it. What Cassidy was naive about was his faith that Republican voters could not possibly be so morally wretched that they would still be worshiping that blob five years later, still seeking revenge on the senator in 2026 for having cast what was obviously a brave, correct, and honorable vote.

 

He didn’t grasp at the time how rotten his own constituency was or foresee how much more rotten it would become. He did the right thing, unambiguously—and it made him anathema to the American right. In Donald Trump’s party, conscience kills. That’s the real lesson of the Cassidy disaster.

 

And the senator tried to learn it, albeit too late. The easiest way to understand his vote to confirm Kennedy is as a formal repudiation of his own conscience: Between betraying his profession as a doctor and cynically aligning himself with a president whom he believed committed high crimes during his first term, few Republican lawmakers have strained as hard to prioritize partisan loyalty over conscientiousness as Cassidy has over the past year.

 

Having failed the supreme loyalty test five years ago, though, he couldn’t un-fail it. In a postliberal party like the GOP, you don’t lose a primary for disappointing the base on policy; ideological orthodoxy is whatever Trump declares it to be from one moment to the next, after all. You lose it for trying to punish an authoritarian demagogue for a coup plot that would have ended the American experiment had it succeeded. Cassidy chose the Constitution over Trump. He would never be forgiven for it.

 

There is no hope for America as long as the right remains what it’s become. Bill Cassidy didn’t know that in 2021. He knows now.