By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Over the weekend, the State of Louisiana emphasized its
fundamentally antisocial, suspiciously Francophile nature by holding its
primary election on a Saturday, instead of the Tuesdays other more civilized
states use. But Louisiana could have held its primary this year during Mardi
Gras or Easter Sunday and it wouldn’t have saved Senator Bill Cassidy, who was bounced out of his seat in a blowout primary loss to two
Trump-affiliated candidates.
Cassidy — a marked man among MAGA stalwarts since 2020 —
was already expected to lose, but his failure to even make the runoff is a
final humiliation in this deepest red of states. Finishing with a miserable
24.8 percent of the vote to Trump-endorsed Julia Letlow’s 45 percent and former
administration official John Fleming’s 28.3 percent, his rejection was
overdetermined: Governor Jeff Landry manipulated to close this year’s formerly
open primary race to registered Republicans only, leaving Cassidy uniquely
vulnerable in a state filled with ancestral Democrats who vote GOP nationally.
To Cassidy’s credit, he took his defeat in stoic fashion.
“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you
want it to. But you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim that an
election was stolen from you.” Everybody knew what he was referring to, the
real reason he was retired by his constituents on Saturday night: Cassidy was
one of three remaining Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump
for incitement of insurrection in 2020. (The other two are Alaska’s Lisa
Murkowski — who is going to have a deeply troubled reelection campaign in 2028
unless she retires — and Susan Collins, whom even Trump isn’t stupid enough to
try to push out of office in Maine.)
Perhaps the most notable thing about Cassidy’s loss is
how both sides of our current ongoing political war were happy to kick him in
the rear on his way out the door. MAGA voters hate him because of his
“disloyalty” to Trump, but mostly because they are eager to focus their present
frustrations outward rather than admit they’ve irrevocably wedded themselves to
the cause of them. Progressives hold him in contempt as the deciding vote to
confirm RFK Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
(Cassidy was a medical doctor before coming to D.C. and expressed extreme
skepticism about RFK’s anti-vaccination stance — but ultimately voted to
confirm.) I’ve talked to a surprising number of these people, who argue “he was
already dead politically the moment Trump got reelected in 2024; he should have
voted his conscience.” Apparently, Cassidy himself wasn’t as certain of that
assessment as they were.
But now he is.
Thomas Massie Awaits Judgment
And Trump’s private war continues. So today we will learn
the outcome of the Kentucky primary, where longtime Representative Thomas
Massie currently sits as incumbent in the ultra-MAGA fourth district, awaiting judgment night. Massie is a notorious crank of the Ron and
Rand Paul school, a man who famously once described his appeal to his
constituents as being “the craziest son of a bitch in the race.” (He is an
MIT-educated former engineer who lives off the electrical grid in a house he built for himself — personally, by hand.)
Now that he has enraged Trump — by voting against his
economic agenda, by loudly opposing the war in Iran and aid to Israel, but most
of all by collaborating with Democrats to force the release of the so-called
Epstein files — he is under siege, running against Trump’s pet candidate Ed
Gallrein in a district torn between its familiarity with Massie and its love of
Trump.
A sickening amount of money has already been spent —
big-money donations directed by Trump to Gallrein, small-donor dollars to
Massie. At $32 million invested between both sides, it has now officially
become the single most expensive primary race in American history — which only
becomes more astoundingly ridiculous when you realize that it has all gone into
a completely safe and nonessential seat. Trump has
directed an unbelievable flood of money toward satisfying his impulse to squash
his internal opponents, and not because he believes himself to be building a
disciplined movement, but rather out of sheer pique: Millions upon millions
that would otherwise have gone to campaigning in November have been flushed
before May is over, on prosecuting his personal grudge against Massie.
For that reason alone — the bloody-minded pettiness of it
all, the fanatical waste of crucial and finite resources — the mainstream media
rather transparently are rooting for Massie to edge this race out. (Massie is
no angel himself; it’s amusing to read outlets like the New York Times try
to present him as a noble iconoclast as opposed to a bug-eyed libertarian
lunatic — which is how he would be treated in any other context by the Times.)
Trump has thrown everything he has at Massie, and if it doesn’t work? Every
political reporter in America is eager to write the story about how Trump’s
grip on the Republican Party is beginning to slip.
But I don’t think they are going to get to write that
story, at least not tonight.
Graham Platner Is a Fancy-Boy Fraud on Top of
Everything Else
With all the ongoing carnage in the various Republican
primaries (John Cornyn’s turn comes next week), it’s easy to lose sight of the
madness also engulfing the Democrats, albeit slightly more peacefully.
When Maine Governor Janet Mills announced at the end of April that she was
dropping out of the Senate race against Susan Collins in favor of her upstart
Democratic challenger Graham Platner, I had nothing to add that I hadn’t
written already. (I declared the primary race over a week before Mills’s
announcement, after all — this was merely the official proof.)
There is no need to rehearse the most obvious issues with
Platner’s candidacy — if you’ve heard his name at all, it is no doubt because
he (up until a few months ago) proudly sported an enormous Nazi tattoo across
his chest. (Platner farcically claims he had no idea that the totenkopf he
wore on his flesh was also worn by the SS, which was a bridge too far for even
his former campaign manager, who flatly accused him of lying.) Matters weren’t helped when
he later approvingly retweeted an honest-to-goodness neo-Nazi, suggesting if nothing else
that an X algorithm that personally adapts to a reader’s demonstrated interests
knew enough to feed him pleasingly antisemitic content.
No matter for progressives; Graham Platner may be a
neo-Nazi-curious rat cosplaying as a decent human being, but he is going to be
the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine after June, as the left attempts
to unseat the remarkably resilient Susan Collins. And why? Because national
Democrats were willing to overlook all that “kill the Jews” stuff (“he
doesn’t mean it!”) for Platner’s authenticity. Here was a vigorous real
American, not some boring, dried-out career politician: a bulked-up combat
veteran, a rough-hewn blue-collar oysterman, a hard-luck “normal dude” speaking
truth to power in a tough economy.
Alas, he’s none of that: It’s pure imposture from an
upper-middle-class brat being handled by political consultants, pretty much. It
turns out that Platner is instead a much more familiar type: a spoiled
trust-fund kid living a downwardly mobile lifestyle at the expense of his
parents. Yes, the New York Times did a little digging into the life story that Platner is
retailing on the campaign trail — hardscrabble oysterman trying to grind out a
living in Trump’s America — and found out that, in reality, Platner has been
almost completely propped up and supported by his wealthy and hyper-educated
parents:
As he campaigns
across Maine and raises his profile in the national news media, Mr. Platner
frequently cites his financial circumstances as a central credential for
office.
“I’m a
working-class guy that lives a working-class life,” he told a local Maine
television station. “There’s an authenticity there that most other politicians
just can’t provide because it’s inauthentic for them.”
Recently, as he
wooed voters at an American Legion hall in the small town of Sabattus, Mr.
Platner repeated what has become a routine campaign line: “I’ve never been
close to money and power.”
As it turns out, Platner was born into family money and
has soaked himself in it so deeply that he is now edging ever closer to power.
The oyster farm that Platner theoretically runs? It has exactly one main
client: Graham Platner’s mother, who buys his haul out of family obligation.
The working-class presentation he gives? Platner is a private-school whelp
whose parents helped buy his house for him and have been supporting him
throughout his life. Platner recently lied outright in a campaign video: “Susan Collins, you voted to send me to
Iraq” — a tough attack to defend, were it not for the fact that Platner
volunteered in 2004, long after we had declared war, and that years ago, before
he was a candidate, Platner gave a far darker (and truthful) account of why he went: “I
wanted to have an adventure and kill some people . . . and managed both.”
(Platner was so traumatized by his tour he returned as a private mercenary to
Afghanistan in 2018.)
There is a chance that none of these falsehoods and
exaggerations will matter. I’ve seen enough campaigns — heck, I’ve seen Donald
Trump — so I no longer entertain any delusions that moral shame can decide
a campaign in 2026. Progressives enthusiastically bought their ticket with
Platner, and now they’re going to take the ride, wherever it leads.
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