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Baton Rouge, LA. – After ousting five Indiana state senators who opposed his attempt to redistrict Congress, President Donald Trump’s next target is Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial five and a half years ago, is fighting for his political life in a competitive race against two major challengers backed by the president in Saturday’s GOP Senate primary in the solidly red Southern state.
Trump and his allies, including Republican Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana, are endorsing GOP Rep. Julia Letlow in the Senate primary. Also in the race is former Rep. John Fleming, who is the state treasurer. If no candidate achieves 50% of the primary vote, the top two finishers will face off for the nomination in the election on June 27.
The primary is the latest test of Trump’s support in the GOP nomination race and the president’s tremendous hold on the Republican Party.
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Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana attacks a supporter during a campaign stop at a gun retailer and firing range in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Friday, May 15, 2026, the eve of the state Senate primary. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)
After running for re-election six years ago, Cassidy was one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump in early 2021 after he was impeached by the House for his role in the violent January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters aimed at upholding Congress’s certification of former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
But since the beginning of Trump’s second term, Cassidy has been supporting the president’s agenda and his candidates, including voting to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement are out for revenge.
This is because Cassidy, a doctor, has been skeptical of Kennedy’s efforts to reform the country’s health policies, including Kennedy’s efforts to cut vaccine recommendations.
And Kennedy’s allies blamed Cassidy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, for helping to sink the Surgeon General nomination of Casey Means, a close Kennedy ally and top MHA lawyer, because Cassidy did not bring it up in the committee vote.
Meanwhile, Trump has described the senator as a “very disloyal person”.
And on the eve of the primary, the President praised Letlow on social media as “the highly respected America’s first Congresswoman.”
Making Cassidy’s path to renomination even more difficult, Louisiana will now run separate party primaries in Senate races, replacing the system where all candidates appear in a single jungle primary. This guarantees more conservative and pro-Trump voters for the GOP nomination.
Cassidy is highlighting his record from two terms in the Senate for Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the country. And he has demonstrated his support for Louisiana’s large oil and gas industry, which accounts for about 15% of the state’s workforce.
“When people ask if you can work with President Trump, I point out that he has signed four bills that I wrote or negotiated,” the senator said in a preliminary interview with Fox News Digital. “By the way, we will continue to work together.”
And Cassidy said he is “a conservative senator who gets things done.”
In an effort to avoid becoming the first elected Republican senator to be ousted in a primary in nearly a decade and a half, Cassidy and his allied super PAC have spent more than $20 million on ads, according to national ad tracking firm AdImpact. This total amount is more than that spent by Letlow and Fleming combined.
Some of those ads take issue with Letlow’s past support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs during his tenure at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.
Cassidy argued that Republican voters “are concerned about her changing position on DEI. She was completely in favor of DEI.”
Letlow spoke about his past support for diversity programs
President Donald Trump stands with Representative Julia Letlow during the Congressional Ball in the White House Grand Foyer on December 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Defending his record, Letlow explained in a Fox News Digital interview on Friday that “Whenever DEI was presented to us in 2020, we had no idea what it was, and I immediately saw it. I was in higher education at the time. I saw the left completely hijack it, turn it into a Marxist leftist theory of our children. And so, when I came to Congress for the last five years, I’ve been fighting against it I am.
And he charged that his criticisms of Cassidy and Fleming at DEI “are all baseless attacks, desperate attacks.”
Letlow won her congressional seat in 2021, after her husband, Luke Letlow, died six days after being sworn into the U.S. House following his 2020 election victory for the seat he now holds.
He had Trump’s endorsement even before entering the race.
“Not only did they encourage me to run this race, but to have their full support, wow, is the honor of a lifetime,” Letlow said.
Letlow has taken aim at Cassidy for his bipartisan efforts in the Senate, including his vote for the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure legislation, which was a signature domestic achievement for then-President Joe Biden.
Asked about his criticism, Cassidy said, “People want someone who can work for Louisiana. The Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act has brought $13.5 billion to Louisiana for roads and bridges and high-speed Internet, and created a lot of good-paying jobs as well. My opponent opposed that bill.”
Fleming, who served as White House deputy chief of staff during Trump’s first term, has argued that he is the most conservative candidate in the GOP Senate primary.
“They clearly see me as MAGA,” Fleming told Fox News Digital, referring to Louisiana Republicans. “I worked in various capacities throughout his first administration,” he said. I was one of the first Congressmen who supported him in 2016.”
Fleming claimed that Letlow “is not the prototype of Trump support. He’s more like a Democrat.”
And Fleming has, apparently, become a threat to Letlow, because a super PAC supporting the congresswoman has started running ads attacking him.
But Trump’s support in the race for the nomination is overshadowing the situation in which he had won by 22 points in the 2024 election.
“This is the most powerful endorsement in the world,” Letlow said, adding that the Louisiana Republican is “a huge fan of the president.”
And the Louisiana primary comes a week and a half after Indiana’s primary, where Trump-backed challengers ousted five state senators who defied the president on the issue of redistricting.
The political world was closely watching Indiana’s primary election as it was the first of a series of major tests this month of Trump’s support strength in the GOP nomination, and the president easily cleared his first hurdle.
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Voters in Louisiana will also vote on five proposed state constitutional amendments, as well as primary contests for the state Supreme Court, Public Service Commission and state school board.
But the primaries for Landry’s U.S. House seats were postponed after the U.S. Supreme Court voided the state’s existing congressional district maps.
Republican state senators in Louisiana on Thursday advanced a plan to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional seats before the midterms. Louisiana’s state House will likely vote on the map next week. The US House primaries are being postponed until November.
