Republican Senator Flat-Out Declares Trump ‘Cannot Win a General Election’ in Thorough Takedown on CNN

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) bashed Donald Trump’s election record over the last several years and proclaimed that the former president “cannot” win the White House again in 2024.

Cassidy spoke with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday about the debt ceiling negotiations between Congress and the White House. But Tapper eventually turned the conversation toward the 2024 election — asking for Cassidy’s thoughts about newly-reported comments from Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who is expected to announce his presidential candidacy in a matter of days.

The New York Times reported that DeSantis recently spoke with donors of how the 2024 contest will basically come down to himself, Trump, and President Joe Biden, and “of those three, two have a chance to get elected president — Biden and me.” Cassidy agreed with the Florida governor’s assessment that Trump cannot win the general election — though he accused DeSantis of minimizing Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), who just announced his own candidacy.

“I don’t think Trump can win a general election,” said Cassidy. “But that is a nice way for [DeSantis] to diss people like Tim Scott, who is a pretty formidable candidate. So you just have to take this as a competitor trying to diss others.”

From there, Cassidy recalled the swing states Trump lost in the 2020 election, plus the fact that a widely-predicted red wave failed to materialize in 2022 — when so many Trump-endorsed Republican candidates failed to win their races in battleground states.

If you had taken the votes that went to other Republicans and put them together, those Republicans would have won. So I think the president’s kind of high-profile endorsement of those candidates actually hurt those candidates, at least in the general election. So if the past is prologue, that means President Trump is going to have a hard time in the swing states, which means he cannot win a general election.

Cassidy was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to impeach Trump for incitement of insurrection after the January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol. Since then, Cassidy has repeatedly urged the Republican Party to distance itself from Trump, frequently citing the losses the GOP has seen under Trump’s leadership.

Watch above via CNN.