Two Republicans Lost This Week. Before You Cheer or Mourn, Read This.

Do those who stand on ONE issue deserve praise?

Yesterday Thomas Massie lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger. Bill Cassidy lost his too. The reactions are already pouring in, and most of them are wrong — or at least incomplete. So let me offer something more honest, because I served with one of these men and grew close to the other after one of the hardest votes of his career.

On Thomas Massie

I served with Thomas in the House. We were political opposites, and we fought — a lot. He held positions I found odd, sometimes infuriating, occasionally bordering on libertarian theology rather than policy. But I respected him for one rare and increasingly extinct trait in that building: he actually believed what he said, and he stuck to it even when it cost him. That kind of consistency is worth something, even when you disagree with where it lands.

So when Trump turned the full force of his machine on Massie, I felt for him. I rooted against the challenger. A Republican Party that purges its only remaining independent voices is a party with no soul left to save.

But let’s be careful, because the narrative is already hardening into something it shouldn’t be.

Thomas Massie was not an anti-Trump Republican. He was a Republican who, on rare occasions, said no — most notably on unauthorized military action, and more recently on the Epstein files. Both of those stands were real, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Voting to force disclosure on Epstein, when his own party leadership was working overtime to bury it, took spine. He earned credit for that.

But credit isn’t sainthood. Many of those Epstein files still haven’t been released. The fight isn’t won; it was barely begun. And Massie’s principled streak doesn’t extend backward to the moments that mattered most. He did not stand against Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. He did not support a serious investigation into January 6. When the constitutional order was being attacked in real time, he was not in the foxhole with those of us who paid for that stand.

So yes — support him over a Trump rubber stamp. Mourn the way the party eats anyone who deviates by even a single degree. But please, let’s not retroactively turn him into an ally of the pro-democracy coalition. He wasn’t one. He was a man who, on a few important issues, refused to lie. That is not nothing. It is also not enough.

On Bill Cassidy

Bill is harder for me, and I’ll be honest about why.

After he voted to convict Trump in the second impeachment, Bill and I got close. He took a real political hit for doing the right thing, and in those weeks and months I genuinely believed he was someone who understood the stakes. I believed it because he showed it.

And then he made a deal with the devil.

Faced with a 2026 primary, Bill chose survival. He cast the deciding vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run Health and Human Services — a man whose record on vaccines and public health is a danger to the country. He went on to wave through cabinet secretary after cabinet secretary, each one chosen to dismantle the institutions Bill himself once defended. He told himself, I’m sure, that this was the price of keeping a seat where he could do good. It wasn’t. It was the price of trying to keep a seat at all.

And here’s the bitter punchline, the one Bill should have seen coming because the rest of us all did: Trump threw him under the bus anyway. They always do. Loyalty bought through capitulation is never enough — they keep raising the price until you have nothing left to give, and then they take the seat too.

Bill earned this loss. He could have spent these last four years the way Liz Cheney did, or the way I tried to — using the platform to lead, to warn, to build something. He could have decided not to run again and used his remaining time as a free man. Instead he traded his moral authority for a primary he was never going to win, and now he’s lost both.

That said: he still has seven months. Seven months as a sitting senator, with no election to protect, no donor base to coddle, no caucus leverage to lose. Seven months to vote his conscience on every nomination, every bill, every oversight fight that lands on his desk. Seven months to do what he stopped doing the day he decided to run again.

I’m rooting for him to use them. I hope he proves me wrong about the last three years by being right for the next seven months. Lame-duck periods have produced some of the bravest votes in Senate history. There is still time.

The Bigger Lesson

Here is what last night should teach the rest of us — those of us trying to build something different, those of us who believe the country has to be more than this.

We need a big tent. We are not going to defeat authoritarianism with a coalition of people who agree on everything. We need libertarians and labor Democrats, evangelicals and atheists, populists and institutionalists, all in the same room arguing about taxes and trade and immigration — and all unified on the one thing that matters most, which is that the American constitutional order is not negotiable.

But a big tent is not the same as indiscriminate alliance. We have to be careful. We have to remember that “he voted with us once” is not the same as “he is with us.” That “she broke with Trump on one nomination” is not the same as “she will break with him on the next coup attempt.” The coalition we need is built on what people will do when it costs them everything, not on what they did when it cost them nothing.

Thomas Massie was useful on Epstein. He was absent on January 6. Both of those things are true at the same time. Bill Cassidy was brave in February 2021. He was a collaborator from 2023 forward. Both of those things are true at the same time.

The work ahead is to build a coalition that holds when it’s hard. That means welcoming the imperfect allies — and being clear-eyed about exactly how imperfect they are.

A big tent, yes. But pitch it on solid ground.

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