Taking One for the Team

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 10, 2026

 

I missed the news last week that a U.S. senator has a book coming out in October titled How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents, in which Pete Hegseth (among others) is derided as a “MAGAT.”

 

The author? Republican Thom Tillis.

 

Memoirs by modern American politicians are notoriously leaden, reflecting the quality of our leadership class. But I might pick this one up out of pure curiosity about the premise: In what way, I’m dying to know, has Tillis meaningfully “antagonized” Donald Trump?

 

He voted to acquit the president at both of his impeachment trials. He supplied a critical vote last week to advance Todd Blanche through the Senate Judiciary Committee. And when the nomination of Defense Secretary MAGAT was hanging by a thread, it was Thom Tillis who rescued him by casting the 50^th vote needed for confirmation.

 

The senator did score a minor victory by vowing to block Kevin Warsh’s nomination to lead the Federal Reserve until the Justice Department resolved its investigation into former chairman Jerome Powell. That probe was eventually dropped before Warsh was confirmed.

 

But that was a case of winning the battle while losing the war. An unchastened White House is still using lawfare against Fed governors to try to create vacancies on the institution’s board for Trump to fill. And the president is reportedly in regular contact with the new chairman, defying modern expectations of an arm’s-length relationship to preserve public confidence in the Fed’s independence.

 

“It wasn’t clear if Trump and Warsh have discussed monetary policy,” the Wall Street Journal said of their communications, as if there’s even a dim hint of an ethical impulse rattling around inside the president’s skull that would cause him to avoid the subject for propriety’s sake. The Warsh episode is the Tillis era in Republican politics in a nutshell: The old establishment might muster the will now and then to throw up a speed bump in front of postliberalism, but it no longer even pretends to be trying to turn the car around.

 

When Tillis was asked during a television interview last week to define “MAGATs,” he described them as advisers who “are not giving the president honest advice and putting us in positions that we could avoid.” Imagine writing an entire book congratulating yourself on your willingness to antagonize Trump—and still going out of your way to alibi him for his terrible policies and native sociopathy by blaming his deputies instead for their poor counsel.

 

The only person in the White House who isn’t a MAGAT, it seems, is the one who’s producing the larvae. Among the prostrate modern right, “good czar, bad boyars” logic is what passes for nervy defiance.

 

Enough about Tillis, though. Today we’re going to focus on an even lamer member of the Senate GOP’s lame-duck caucus.

 

Last week Sen. Bill Cassidy achieved the distinction of casting his second deciding vote in favor of a grotesquely unfit Cabinet nominee. The first was his support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a vote that leveraged Cassidy’s authority as a medical doctor to provide cover for other wary Republicans to vote yes. That vote was morally indefensible but legible as a matter of expedience: The senator had a primary coming up in Louisiana and plainly hoped that backing RFK would cause the president to forgive him for voting to convict at Trump’s second impeachment trial.

 

It did not.

 

So by the time Blanche’s nomination reached the Senate floor last week, Cassidy had nothing left to lose by voting no. The stars had aligned for him, as Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski had already announced their opposition to the nominee. With Sen. Mitch McConnell still convalescing in Kentucky, that left the vote on Blanche deadlocked at 49-49. Cassidy at last had a chance to (partially) redeem himself for the Kennedy vote by borking a wildly corrupt candidate and sticking it to the president in the process.

 

There was every reason to think he would, too, as he’d already begun to take advantage of his new freedom as a lame duck by voting against Trump on war-powers resolutions involving Iran. In fact, when the president shouted at him for it during a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans in June, Cassidy shouted right back. He was liberated!

 

On Friday, he turned around and voted to confirm Blanche. Why?

 

Teamwork.

 

My theory of why Tillis and his lame-duck colleague, Sen. John Cornyn, behaved the way they did with Blanche’s nomination is that they were performing a sort of pantomime of accountability. Both are members of the Judiciary Committee, both are institutionalists, and both are lame ducks, but both are also party men who have been conditioned by habit and postliberal expectations to give the president whatever he wants.

 

They needed a way to reconcile those various interests and they found one. To demonstrate their allegiance to the “old” GOP, they made a stink about the rancid “anti-weaponization” slush fund that Blanche and Trump created. Then, to demonstrate their allegiance to the “new” GOP, they caved on it. They perpetrated a hoax designed to convince Americans that the Republican-controlled Senate is still performing a semblance of checks and balances when it no longer is.

 

What’s interesting about Cassidy is that he didn’t participate in that hoax. Granted, he’s not a member of the Judiciary Committee and so he wasn’t in the spotlight on Blanche’s nomination the way Tillis and Cornyn were. But as a fellow lame duck, he could have joined them by making a fuss and setting conditions for voting yes the way they did.

 

The fact that he didn’t led me to assume that he didn’t want the spotlight on him in this matter, for whatever reason. Either he was going to vote yes quietly and without fanfare, as other lame ducks like Sen. Joni Ernst did, or he was committed to voting no.

 

In the end he was neither. He waited until all the other Republicans had shown their cards, boosting the suspense and placing himself directly in the spotlight for a decisive vote, then … voted yes anyway. “I’ll be criticized for this vote. What’s new?” the senator observed in a floor speech on Friday in which he laid out his reasoning, but that was a strange complaint under the circumstances. If he’s sensitive to criticism, why did he play this in a way that was sure to maximize public attention to his decision?

 

The best I can do to explain it is to speculate that he was taking one for the team.

 

“The team” in this case is old-guard Trump-skeptical conservatives in the Senate. That includes Collins, who faces the voters in left-leaning Maine in less than three months. It includes Murkowski, who’s become a de facto independent and faces her own reckoning with the Republican base in 2028 in red-leaning Alaska. And it includes Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whose leadership position has grown precarious after he failed to end the filibuster and pass the SAVE America Act—a rare case where Reaganites in Congress really have obstructed postliberalism meaningfully.

 

My guess is that Cassidy thought confirming Blanche would help Thune. By handing the majority leader a win that would please Trump and MAGA, he weakened their case for replacing Thune with a populist in the next Congress. This confirmation process was a uniquely low-stakes vehicle to do so, too: Because the nominee would remain as acting attorney general even if the Senate rejected him, Cassidy may have reasoned that there was no practical downside to voting yes. If America is doomed to have Todd Blanche leading the DOJ, better that it happen in a way that strengthens the old guard’s grip on the Senate Republican conference, no?

 

As for why Cassidy waited until the very end to announce his vote, I assume that was less a matter of wanting to be in the spotlight than wanting to give his friends Collins and Murkowski (both of whom voted with him to convict Trump after January 6) as much time as possible to calculate how they should vote. In the end, and probably not coincidentally, the three produced an outcome that seems optimized to improve Collins’ and Murkowski’s fortunes—Blanche was confirmed, appeasing Republican voters in Maine and Alaska, but without the votes of the two centrist senators, appeasing the sizable Democratic center-left constituencies on whom both depend.

 

Blanche had to get through to help Thune, but it had to be done without support from Collins and Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy made sure that it was. Simple as that.

 

Well, maybe not quite that simple.

 

Helplessness.

 

There’s always peril in taking politicians at face value, but we should pay some attention to how Cassidy himself explained his vote.

 

“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this,” the senator said in Friday’s floor speech. “But the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche; it is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the DOJ effectively under President Trump, and who indeed may not be as good as Mr. Blanche.”

 

Who may not be as good as a guy who set up a “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund and gave Trump a de facto pardon for any tax evasion he and his kids may have engaged in?

 

What?

 

Cassidy also noted that he had consulted on the nomination with former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who left the administration after the 2020 election when he wouldn’t support the president’s lies about election-rigging. From the New York Times:

 

Mr. Barr counseled Mr. Cassidy to support Mr. Blanche in the belief that he could quietly talk the president out of bad ideas, even though Mr. Barr quit rather than comply with Mr. Trump’s demands to investigate an election Mr. Barr found had been fairly conducted.

 

Mr. Blanche’s experience as Mr. Trump’s private lawyer was not a reason to oppose him, Mr. Barr told Mr. Cassidy—but an asset. It gave Mr. Blanche the capacity to “have tough conversations” and confront Mr. Trump with “difficult truths” that could change his mind, Mr. Barr said to him.

 

Lay aside the fact that, in his four months as acting attorney general, Blanche clearly hasn’t been having those “tough conversations” with the president. (If he had, the slush fund wouldn’t exist.) By Barr’s reasoning, which Cassidy somehow found compelling, slavish cronyism is actually a virtue in a would-be attorney general because, without it, the president won’t trust his or her advice.

 

We need an attorney general who can talk the president out of his worst impulses, therefore we must confirm someone who’s extremely unlikely to try to talk the president out of his worst impulses. If you believe that, presumably you believe the ideal person to lead the DOJ in a Trump administration would be Roy Cohn.

 

Inescapably, the logic of “I need to support this terrible nominee because the next nominee might be worse” obliges you to support anyone the president might put in front of you, no matter how unfit. It’s absurd—yet we all know where Barr and Cassidy are coming from. The nature of Trumpist kakistocracy is that there’s always someone more sycophantic, more corrupt, more malevolent, and more incompetent whom the president might find to fill a vacancy if his preferred candidate isn’t confirmed.

 

As hard as it is to imagine someone being less fit than Todd Blanche, MAGA is crawling with ruthless morons. The postliberal right could assuredly turn over a rock and find one. Why, names were already being kicked around last week before the final confirmation vote was held.

 

What makes Cassidy’s position truly remarkable, though, is how intensely it smells of helplessness. Rarely does a U.S. senator signal “no confidence” in an administration led by his own party, as Cassidy clearly did in his damned-with-faint-praise argument for Blanche that the next nominee could be worse. But when it does happen, it typically doesn’t come packaged with a sense of fatalistic resignation that Congress has no power to compel the president to nominate more suitable public servants. And so the case for Blanche boils down to this: There needs to be someone by the president’s side who might restrain his malfeasance because, Lord knows, Senate Republicans aren’t going to.

 

They’re not going to impeach Trump or Blanche or some worse-than-Blanche replacement as attorney general, no matter what high crimes they might commit. So the best the world’s greatest deliberative body can do is give the president the mafia consigliere he wants and hope that that person can dissuade him from the sort of Rubicon-crossing authoritarianism that the Senate is too cowardly and partisan to prevent.

 

“If a senator Trump effectively ran out of office won’t even stand up to him, why would Blanche?” Ian Prasad Philbrick wondered at Slate, referring to Cassidy. Why indeed.

 

What’s the point?

 

I actually felt a twinge of sympathy for Cassidy yesterday, watching him field a question on Face the Nation about Blanche’s role in granting the Trump family legal impunity for tax cheating. “That’s totally wrong. Totally wrong,” the senator said of the arrangement. “That is wrong, and no American should be targeted by the law, but no American should be above the law. And that, frankly, almost weighed [on me] to vote no.”

 

The new attorney general’s part in a scheme to cripple the government’s authority to enforce the law against the Trump family almost—almost—weighed on Cassidy to vote no. The cancer of congressional impotence has clearly spread all the way to his bones. I don’t know why he wanted another six-year term; the president did him a favor by putting him out of his misery in this year’s Senate primary.

 

We’re left with a question that Never Trumpers have been asking for 10 years: What’s the point of having traditional conservatives in office if they’re only going to vote like Trumpists anyway?

 

Like Cassidy, I’d rather have John Thune than Mike Lee as Republican leader and I’d rather have Lisa Murkowski than some MAGA chud recruited from the Alaskan wilderness. But if we’re going to end up with Attorney General Todd Blanche either way, does it matter? Why was Bill Cassidy willing to take one for the Reaganite “team” in the Senate when that same team has presided over the chamber being reduced to Duma-fied irrelevance under Trump?

 

I suppose I’ve already answered my own question. As with Cabinet vacancies, so too with Senate seats: The modern right has an infinite number of rocks it can turn over. A majority with fewer Murkowskis and Collinses and more Mike Lees is a chamber that will end the filibuster and will pass legislation like the SAVE America Act. The ironclad rule of Trumpism is that things can always get worse—and you may rest assured that the president is working hard to make sure that they do. Cassidy is doing what little he can to slow that down.

 

But the day will come when voting to kill the filibuster will itself become a take-one-for-the-team matter among traditional conservatives as they go on futilely trying to appease an ever-radicalizing right. It’s long past time for “the team” to understand that it has no short- or medium-term future on the American right apart from providing support to, and a semi-respectable face for, postliberal goblins. Which is what Cassidy did on Friday when he talked himself into backing his second indefensible Cabinet nominee.

 

The senator’s reward, I suspect, will be watching Attorney General Blanche eagerly abet a presidential plot to overturn this fall’s election results. And then, for good measure, having Trump try to oust John Thune as majority leader anyway, despite Blanche’s confirmation. You would think Cassidy, of all people, would understand from his experience with Kennedy that advancing a nominee won’t earn you absolution from presidential grudges. But there are a lot of things conservatives have been slow to learn.