On Saturday, we’ll find out how another Trump Crisis will end. Recent polls have put Bill Cassidy, a senator from Louisiana, in third place entering the first round of the Republican primary here. His first competitive race in a dozen years and the culmination of a whirlwind of events that saw him rise to President Trump, kissing Mr. Trump, thrown aside by Mr. Trump, who has achieved nothing politically in any way, and undermines not only his positions as a politician but also – in what makes this tragedy worse than most – his greatest achievements.
Mr. Cassidy may go on a run in June, but few are giving him a chance to win it. As James Carville summed up the events for me: “Bill Cassidy sold his soul to the devil, and he got nothing for it.”
Mr. Cassidy has never had a high profile nationally or in Louisiana, despite being a senator for 11 years. He was a respected liver doctor at a charity hospital for about 25 years and set up a clinic in Baton Rouge to provide medical care to the uninsured. He began his political life to participate in public health issues, first as a supporter of the Democratic Alliance governor 22 years ago, before changing parties, citing the perceived demise of the “Democratic Conservative Democrats.” He won his first state seat in 2006 as a Republican.
Mr. Cassidy built a reputation for being a hard-working, smart, sometimes tough, politician who is as natural in Louisiana as an igloo. We love big people, thick accents, throwbacks and bad fun. Mr. Cassidy does not like to answer reporters’ questions about politics. He chooses to discuss policies and programs, especially those related to health care; He holds a senior position as the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee. He still likes to be called Dr. Cassidy, not Senator Cassidy. Several New Orleanians reminded me of Mr. Cassidy, from former representative Cedric Richmond: “Dude’s weird.”
Two votes defined his career in the national arena. The former was one of seven Republican members to vote for Donald Trump’s impeachment trial in 2021. Mr. Cassidy probably thought that in five years he would be running again in a “jungle” competition that was not affiliated with a divided party. In 2020, he had beaten his leading Democratic rival by 40 points. And, anyway, Mr. Trump in 2021 seemed to be no longer in public life.
However, the Louisiana Republican Party changed the rules so that only Republican (or “unaffiliated”) voters could vote in its Senate primary. And, of course, Mr. Trump did not disappear from public life. So Mr. Cassidy joined a long line of former Trump opponents led by Marco Rubio and JD Vance in trying to ingratiate themselves with Mr. Trump – most famously, for his vote last year to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services.
As recently as last November, Mr. Cassidy told the media, “It has been announced that the president is neutral” in his race. Mr. Trump then did what Mr. Trump also endorsed one of Mr. Trump’s opponents. Cassidy: Julia Letlow, representing the Fifth Congressional District. (A third candidate, John Fleming, Louisiana’s treasurer, proved an incredibly competitive dark horse).
Mr. Cassidy had raised more money than his opponents — most of it from donors outside of Louisiana. But close political observers have told me that the polls have consistently shown that Mr. Cassidy didn’t rise enough to win, despite the millions spent and his endless writing of his Trump-endorsed campaign as “liberal Letlow,” which has the benefit of alliteration if not logic.
Part of this may come down to Mr. Cassidy. Shameless triangulation is a job requirement for a politician. But as Lionel Rainey III, a Republican state strategist in Louisiana, also told me, “If you’re going to win the Louisiana primary after criticizing the party president, you better have a larger-than-life personality.”
It is a big mystery about the life of Mr. Cassidy that his second moment in the national spotlight – the tie-breaking vote he cast to advance the nomination of Mr. Kennedy – it would ruin a lot of his life’s work. Mr. Cassidy spoke repeatedly about his efforts to protect Louisianans from hepatitis B and how he started a program to vaccinate 36,000 children against it. He recounts the despondency of loading an 18-year-old patient into a medevac helicopter for a liver transplant, knowing that a $50 vaccine could have saved him.
Mr. Cassidy was always clear that Mr. Kennedy and the injections worried him so much. Before a key Senate committee vote last year, Mr. Cassidy told Mr. Kennedy, “If there’s a false note, any undermining of a mother’s trust in vaccines, someone else will die from a vaccine-preventable disease.”
But Mr. Cassidy at the time was still trying to ingratiate himself with the Trump administration and prevent Mr. Mr. Cassidy insisted that he would vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy with a clear conscience because he had made promises to the nominee, including that they would have “an unprecedentedly close working relationship.”
Mr. Kennedy quickly broke those agreements. He combined that Mr. Cassidy called an advisory panel of vaccine critics “completely disrespectful” that voted to remove recommendations for the hepatitis B vaccine – a vaccine that played a major role in Mr. Cassidy – when he was born. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website still includes an information page titled, “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism,” but it is accompanied by a paper that says the reason the article is being removed is because a certain senator does not approve of it. The rest of the web page is full of what the American Medical Association calls “misleading claims” linking vaccines to autism. Mr. Kennedy’s supporters at MAHA PAC pledged $1 million to support Ms. Letlow.
In response, Mr. Cassidy reiterated that vaccines are safe and effective and do not cause autism. He stalled the appointment of Casey Means as surgeon general.
But the campaign of Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine campaign is certainly not over – and it certainly isn’t because of Mr. Cassidy.
In February, when the Dispatch it asked Mr. Cassidy if he regrets voting for Mr. Kennedy, responded: “Is it my feelings? Mr. Cassidy sounded like a seasoned gambler who knows you can’t win ’em all. And we don’t want our politicians to win ’em all: At times, they have to subordinate their opinions – even their skills – to political reality. That’s how Republican government works.
Bill Cassidy’s tragedy is not that he cast a vote he didn’t want. It’s not that he’s doing too badly to be sure of Donald Trump’s revenge. The tragedy of Bill Cassidy is that he is very close to the nation’s most powerful doctor and the point on which he was willing to compromise – which was the point that many looked to him first, not to harm him – did not benefit him at all politically. It may also cost him his national role.
Even if he loses, Mr. Cassidy will have a lifetime to use his compromising voice in public and, for a few months, as a leader in the Senate. The nation is even more confused by fighting against medical advice, of all kinds. It needs a ruthless champion of vaccines. We could use a doctor who doesn’t get caught up in gambling and Donald Trump’s ambitions.
