John Cornyn probably never had a chance to keep his seat. The senior Republican senator from Texas has repugnant, far-right politics. He even used the confirmation hearing for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to float legal theories for ending same-sex marriage. But he is mild-mannered — a flaw in today’s GOP — and he doesn’t have a history of flashy corruption scandals and adultery, unlike Ken Paxton, the state attorney general who handily defeated him in the Republican primary on Tuesday night.
Paxton is just a bigger scoundrel than Cornyn, so of course he drew a last-minute endorsement from Donald Trump, who took credit for Paxton’s victory, gloating on Truth Social with a meme declaring “Ken Paxton wins! Endorsed by Trump!” over a photo of the president glowering in a face he believes looks “tough.”
But the president will likely come to rue the day he stuck his nose into this particular race. Or at least he would regret it, if he were capable of self-reflection. Polls show that the Democratic nominee, state Rep. James Talarico, is more likely to beat Paxton than Cornyn in November’s general election. But even if that doesn’t happen, Trump was unwise to alienate Senate Republicans, who largely backed Cornyn, at a time when his political power is starting to wane.
Members of the Republican caucus are visibly outraged over Trump’s endorsement — and will be livid over Paxton’s victory. The National Republican Senatorial Committee backed Cornyn during what has turned out to be the most expensive Senate primary in the country’s history, with over $120 million spent, mostly by Cornyn supporters. This isn’t just because they understandably don’t want to work with Paxton, who has a long history of being unpopular with many of his Republican colleagues. It’s widely believed that Paxton is a much weaker candidate against Talarico, whose Boy Scout demeanor will make him a more appealing choice compared to the highly corrupt Paxton, especially for swing voters weary of the president’s non-stop scandals.
Trump is already paying for his choice to endorse Paxton over Cornyn. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has barely hidden his exasperation, complaining to reporters, “none of us control what the president does.” Multiple Republican senators have refused to answer questions or expressed displeasure at the prospect of losing Cornyn, a fundraising powerhouse for the party. As the New York Times reported, there is already growing restlessness among many Senate Republicans, who have blocked Trump’s efforts to secure $1 billion in taxpayer money for a White House ballroom and are fighting his attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund to pay legal bills for people who commit crimes for him.
Now they have one more reason to resist Trump: He has proved he will not return any loyalty shown to him by legislators. Cornyn has been a loyal MAGA foot soldier, voting with Trump 99% of the time. His only real resistance has been in refusing to agree to the Big Lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 presidential election, but even then, he still refused to vote for Trump’s impeachment over the Jan. 6 riot. Trump keeps the Republican caucus in line with fear he will endorse their primary opponents, and his endorsement of Paxton over Cornyn is that anxiety made manifest. But showing that even fierce loyalty to Trump won’t guarantee Republicans safety also removes much of the incentive to stick by him.
Cornyn now joins a group of sitting Republican senators dubbed the “YOLO caucus,” because they are leaving at the end of this year and so they no longer have to worry about angering Trump. Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary race in Louisiana earlier this month after Trump deemed him “disloyal” for his vote to impeach after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Like Cornyn, Cassidy has been a rubber stamp for Trump’s agenda this term, even providing the decisive vote in favor of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the famously narcissistic president didn’t care. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who protected Trump through two impeachment trials, is retiring as Kentucky’s senior senator at 84 after many high-profile conflicts with the president over some of his dumber political decisions. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis is — by Senate standards anyway — a spry 65, but he is retiring after being abused by Trump for years for occasional votes against his agenda.
Trump’s inadvertent creation of a YOLO (You Only Live Once) caucus is looking to be a poor decision on his part. Free from having to placate the infamous bully in chief, these Republicans are causing far more problems for him than they ever did when they were trying to stay in his good graces. They are trying to derail his slush fund, attacking and helping push out members of his Cabinet, and it looks like they may even kill the ballroom funding. With only 53 senators in the caucus, adding one more Republican to the list of people who are angry at Trump could make it very hard for the president to will a majority on anything he wants to do, especially if it’s already unpopular.
The deep irony is that Paxton likely would have won, even without Trump’s endorsement. He was ahead in the limited polls before Trump’s endorsement. As for those 7% who said they were undecided in early May, odds are high most would have broken for Paxton. As I explained in March for Salon, the very qualities that threaten Paxton in a general election — his corruption, gleeful sadism and a preference for trolling above meaningful governance — boost him with Republican primary voters. Even in the face of Trump’s roiling failures as president, the MAGA myth that shameless evil is the same thing as strength will not die so easily. Cornyn has been a far more effective politician at pushing the Republican policy agenda than Paxton will likely ever be, but that doesn’t matter to the GOP. As Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who just lost his primary to the Trump-backed Ed Gallrein, told the Washington Examiner in 2017, Republican primary voters simply prefer “the craziest son of a b***h in the race.”
Despite bragging about being a “dealmaker,” Trump has shown that the only political tool he understands is rule through fear. This has backfired on him most of the time; everyone from Jimmy Kimmel to the residents of Minneapolis to Iran’s military have shown that the president’s intended victims often fight back. Likely because they share much of Trump’s fetish for hierarchy, though, most Republicans have been willing and even eager to bow and scrape before Trump, enduring his insults and his “gifts” of oversized shoes so he can laugh as they dress like clowns.
But even though he can still wreck someone in a primary, Trump is getting weaker. Every week, his approval ratings sink further. The nearly 80-year-old president seems sick and tired. He has alarming bruises on his hands and a slower gait, and he appears even more prone to anger and profanity — and to nodding off in public. He has had three “annual” visits to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in 13 months; after his latest on Tuesday, he declared himself to be in perfect health in a Truth Social post. Trump also keeps having unscheduled visits to the “dentist,” even though dental care is typically provided on-site at the White House.
Losing the Iran war appears to have undermined him more in the eyes of Republicans. Even some of Trump’s biggest sycophants in the Senate, like Ted Cruz of Texas or Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, are venturing public criticism of Trump over his failure to defeat the Islamic Republic.
Since Trump’s disapproval ratings, which now stand at 58.3% according to a Real Clear Politics poll, have slipped above even the high-water mark of 57.9%, set after the Jan. 6 riot, it’s reasonable for Democrats to start hoping that Talarico might actually win in a state held firmly by Republicans for decades. After all, former Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke came within two points of ousting Cruz in 2018, and Republicans are in even worse condition now. But Texas has a long history of slipping out of Democrats’ grasp, so although Talarico is tied or even slightly ahead of Paxton in the polls, it’s wise to be skeptical.
What’s more certain is that Trump did himself no favors by destroying Cornyn’s career over a grudge that is over five years old. The move signaled to Republicans the futility of bending over backwards to help Trump, which is all Cornyn has done since then. Trump is destroying their personal hold on power, and that the one thing members of his party can’t abide. Even Republicans have their limits.
