The Snake Eats Another One
ETTD, Bill Cassidy Edition
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Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy spent five years trying to outrun a vote. This weekend, Trump and ETTD caught him.
Let me start with the part that I’ve been screaming into the void since approximately 2015, the part that the political-obituary writers at the legacy outlets will gently elide because it’s impolite to say I told you so over a man’s still-warm career: Everything Trump Touches Dies.
ETTD. It’s not a slogan I coined to sell books. It’s a law of political physics, as reliable as gravity and twice as merciless, and Bill Cassidy just became its latest case study, splayed out on a slab in Baton Rouge while the coroner reads the cause of death aloud.
He came in third. Third! In a three-way race!
That’s because Cassidy was stupid. Oh, he’s not a stupid man, but he thought he was an exception to ETTD, to the cult of power and personality led by a sociopathic would-be dictator who cannot be appeased, a Temu Terminator of his fellow Republicans because he’s obsessed with revenge and retribution.
On paper, Cassidy should have been fine.
A two-term incumbent senator, chairman of the Senate health committee, sitting on a $10-plus-million war chest he’d loaned himself, outspending his rivals by a margin that would make a defense contractor blush…over seventeen million in ads against Julia Letlow’s five and John Fleming’s pocket lint, and he finished behind both of them with a wet, sad 24.8 percent.
And lest anyone pretend this was about ideology, about Cassidy being some squish, some closet liberal in a lab coat: the man voted with Trump 89% of the time across his first term…and 90% in the first two years. His own campaign was bragging about it, waving the numbers like a hall pass.
Cassidy agreed with Trump eighty-nine percent of the time and got branded a traitor anyway over one vote, five years ago, that wasn't about policy at all. That's the tell. The modern GOP doesn't run on Reagan's math. It runs on a loyalty oath, and the oath has no partial credit.
The last time an elected Republican senator lost a primary, Barack Obama was president, and we were all worried about Mayan calendars. Cassidy didn’t just lose. He got curb-stomped by a congresswoman Trump endorsed from his phone in January and a treasurer nobody outside Louisiana could pick out of a lineup.
And here’s the thing that should be tattooed on the inside of every surviving Republican’s eyelids: none of them will learn from this. None. Not one. They will study Cassidy’s corpse the way a man studies a car wreck on the opposite side of the highway…with a brief, queasy fascination…and then they will accelerate into the night.
“I’ll never be the guy in the wrecked car that Trump ran off the road,” they whisper. “I’m one of the lucky ones…Trump will always love me.”
Let’s talk about the original sin, because that’s what this was, in the rituals of the modern GOP. Cassidy voted to convict Donald Trump in the second impeachment trial. He was one of seven. Seven Republican senators who looked at the smoking wreckage of January 6th, at a mob hunting Mike Pence through the Capitol with zip ties, and concluded that maybe the man who summoned them shouldn’t be president again.
A vote of conscience. A vote that, in a healthy party, would be unremarkable. In this one, it was a death sentence with a five-year stay of execution.
Because here’s what Cassidy did next, and this is the part that elevates the story from tragedy to Trumpian farce. Having committed the unforgivable, he spent the next several years frantically trying to be forgiven. He didn’t double down on the principle. He didn’t go full Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger and welcome political martyrdom in the name of principle.
He negotiated. He tried to split the difference with a movement that does not do nuance, does not do partial credit, does not grade on a curve.
The crowning achievement of this strategy of appeasement was the RFK Jr. vote. Bill Cassidy…a physician, a man who has presumably read a medical study or two, and who chaired the committee overseeing the nation’s health, voted to confirm a raccoon-penis-snipping, worm-brained anti-vaccine conspiracist to run Health and Human Services.
He held his nose, extracted some worthless verbal assurances, and put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of American public health, apparently believing this act of submission would buy him a permission slip back into the tribe. He even spent the following year sparring with RFK over vaccine safety and the gutting of the CDC advisory panels, which is the political equivalent of setting your own house on fire and then complaining about the smoke damage.
It bought him nothing. It was always going to buy him nothing. That is the part Cassidy and the entire cowering remnant of the institutional GOP cannot, will not, are constitutionally incapable of internalizing.
There is no appeasement price that satisfies Trump’s hunger.
The bill is never paid, because the debt isn’t financial; it’s a loyalty oath sworn in blood, and there are no installment plans. You cannot impeach the man and then confirm his cabinet and net out even. The ledger doesn’t work that way. The ledger only records the betrayal.
Donald Trump really, really didn’t like Bill Cassidy. But he always knew where to find Cassidy…for those of us who want to protect our privacy, here’s a reminder that your data and your privacy are for sale to people who want to take advantage of you.
The Independent ran a piece this year about a woman who’d barely used social media. Barely. A ghost. And her stalker still rolled up with her home address, her relatives, and her workplace anyway ,the whole dossier, gift-wrapped, off a single name search on a data broker site. No hack. No breach. No shadowy Russian intelligence asset in a Moscow hotel room. Just a search box, a few bucks, and a website with the moral compass of a parking meter.
These sites do not ask why somebody is looking you up. They never have. They never will. They just hand over the goods. Your address. Your family. Your daily patterns. The names of your kids, the make of your car, the church you go to on the Sundays…all of it, available to any person on planet earth with the price of a sandwich and a grudge. An angry ex. A stranger on the internet. Some absolute lunatic who didn’t like the thing you posted at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday, because he was drunk and you happened to be right.
Incogni is the only service I’ve come across that actually fights back. They hunt the data brokers down, one sleazy little site at a time, force the takedown, and then do it again, and again, and again when the data crawls its way back into the daylight — which it absolutely will, because data brokers are cockroaches in a suit and tie. Set it once. Let it run. Sleep better.
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This is the GOP’s terminal blind spot, and it’s worth naming precisely: they keep believing they can transact a deal with Trump, that somehow he won’t turn on them if they ever betray the slightest tendency to principle.
They think there’s a deal in there somewhere, a position, a vote, a sufficiently groveling Fox hit that squares the account. There is not, and will never be.
Trump’s grip on the primary electorate isn’t a policy preference that can be bargained against. It’s his superpower, the one durable asset in the whole gaudy, failing, criminal enterprise he calls a Presidency; the ability to walk into a closed primary in ruby-red Louisiana, where he won 60 percent in 2024, point a finger at a sitting senator, and end him. He didn’t even bother to campaign there in person. Gravity did the rest.
And so we arrive at the moral, the one Trump himself supplies at every rally when he reads “The Snake”…that interminable, terrible poem about the kindly woman who nurses a frozen serpent back to health and gets a fatal bite for her trouble. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.
He thinks he’s the woman in that story, betrayed by the migrants, the deep state, the disloyal. He has never once understood that he is the snake. He is always the snake. We told you. We keep telling you.
Cassidy took him in. Voted his agenda, confirmed his cabinet, swallowed the RFK poison pill, and stood there with his arms open, expecting gratitude. Last night he got the bite. He’ll spend his lame-duck months, per his concession speech, finally being the thorn he should’ve been all along, which is the timing of a man who orders the sprinklers after the building’s already been reduced to ash.
The next Republican is already in line. They watched the whole thing. They learned nothing. For all the gushing over J.D. and Marco now, when 2028 revs up, expect Trump to suddenly remember the sins of Marco from 2016 or J.D. Vance before 2024.
Expect Trump to always exercise his one, crappy superpower of making the Republican base exact revenge on the men and women who have given their honor, their principles, and their careers in escrow to his manias and paranoia.
Ronald Reagan once famously said, “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20 percent traitor."
Not in Trump’s world.
And that’s why ETTD works on people who try to appease him.
Every single time.
This free post was sponsored by Incogni.
Cassidy will unfortunately be remembered by most of us, not by the vote he cast in trump’s second impeachment, but by the vote he cast to sell out our healthcare and entire healthcare system to RFK Jr. a doctor who knew better, but for cowardice, sold America out!!
Cassidy must have known that Trump never forgives the slightest deviation from absolute loyalty. Why didn't he just screw his courage to the sticking place and just say, "to hell with it" and say what he really thinks and what the American public thinks? He may not have won, but at least he would have emerged with his honour intact.