Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy on Sunday declared former President Donald Trump “cannot win” a 2024 White House election.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Cassidy weighed in on reported remarks from likely GOP candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — that he and President Biden were the only pols with a viable shot in the next presidential contest.
“During the last election cycle, we saw that all the swing states, almost all, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona… that the candidates for Senate that Trump endorsed all lost,” Cassidy told host Jake Tapper.
“If you had taken the votes that went to other Republicans and put them together, those Republicans would have won. So I think the [former] president’s kind of high profile endorsement of those candidates actually hurt those candidates,” he asserted.
“If past is prologue, that means President Trump is going to have a hard time in those swing states, which means that he cannot win in a general election.”
Cassidy supported Trump’s 2016 and 2020 bids, and also sought — and got — Trump’s endorsement in 2020 in his own re-election. But he turned on Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, and was one of the seven GOP senators who voted to impeach him on insurrection charges.
But the 65-year-old Senator was then censured by the Louisiana Republican Party for breaking party ranks.
Trump, in turn, dubbed him “Wacky” Bill Cassidy and accused him of being a “RINO,” or Republican In Name Only.