Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana last weekend declined to endorse Donald Trump for president but said he would vote for the Republican nominee in November, NBC News reported.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 17, Cassidy was grilled by host Kristen Welker on recent comments Donald Trump made about illegal immigration and the January 6 defendants.
While campaigning in Ohio the day before, Trump suggested that some illegal aliens shouldn’t be described as “people” but as “animals.”
When asked about the comment, Cassidy told Kristen Welker that it “reflected poorly” for a former president to use such “dehumanizing” language when talking about illegal immigration and said it was rhetoric like this that gave many Americans “reservations” about voting for Trump in 2024.
Cassidy said that the only thing helping Trump in the presidential election was that his challenger was Joe Biden, another candidate many voters “also have reservations” about.
Cassidy added that the reason so many Americans were considering third-party candidates in November was because of the reservations they have about both Trump and Biden – a situation the Louisiana senator described as a “sorry state of affairs.”
When Welker asked Cassidy if he would endorse Trump in the presidential election, he told her that he would answer her question the same way he always had, saying he would be voting for the Republican presidential candidate in November.
Welker then brought up Trump’s comment from the day before about freeing the jailed January 6 rioters when he returned to the White House and asked Senator Cassidy if he supported the plan.
Cassidy, one of the few Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in the January 2021 impeachment trial over the Capitol riot, said pardoning the January 6 prisoners would send “the wrong signal.”
Welker also pressed Cassidy on whether he thought Trump would follow the Constitution if he was elected president. The Louisiana senator described the question as “hypothetical” and noted that the system of checks and balances would ensure that a president acts according to the Constitution.
