After Donald Trump left the White House in early 2021, many prominent figures in Republican politics assumed that he’d effectively set his political career on fire. By any sane measure, this was an understandable assumption: The then-former president had just plotted to seize illegitimate power and bore responsibility for an insurrectionist attack on his own country’s seat of government.

The idea that Trump would maintain a leadership role in American politics wasn’t just wrong; at the time, it seemed utterly ridiculous.

With this in mind, when the then-former president was impeached for his role in trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election, several GOP officials felt comfortable voting their conscience instead of toeing the party line. Indeed, the impeachment vote was the most bipartisan in the nation’s history: 10 House Republicans voted to hold Trump accountable, as did seven Senate Republicans.

Almost all of those 17 GOP lawmakers are now gone from Capitol Hill, and one will soon join them: Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana suffered an embarrassing loss on Saturday, finishing third in his primary race and failing to advance to a June runoff. Six years after winning re-election by a 40-point margin, the incumbent finished with just under 25% of the intraparty vote.

There’s no great mystery as to what happened: The incumbent president set out to destroy Cassidy for his 2021 impeachment vote, and Trump succeeded in his goal. The senator had spent the last year and a half trying to thread a partisan needle — up to and including confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nation’s health secretary, in direct contradiction to the senator’s ostensible principles about medicine and public health — but those efforts ultimately amounted to nothing.

Looking ahead, however, the dynamic that’s worth appreciating isn’t just whether Trump got his revenge against Cassidy, but also whether Cassidy might yet get some revenge against Trump.

MS NOW’s report highlighted a notable quote from the senator’s concession speech:

“When you participate in democracy, sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. But you don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim the election was stolen,” Cassidy said as applause from supporters overtook him in a speech after his loss. 

In the same concession speech, the Louisiana Republican added, “Let me just set the record straight: Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others by using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”