For as long as his hair has been silver (going back to his 20s), John Cornyn has been winning elections.
Among those victories seemed, perhaps, to be the 74-year-old U.S. senator’s surprising first-place finish in the March primary—over expected frontrunner Attorney General Ken Paxton—which set up next week’s decisive runoff. On primary night, Cornyn called the scandal-plagued AG “flawed, self-centered and shameless” and boldly called his shot: “Judgment Day is coming for Ken Paxton.”
The next day, The Atlantic published a purported scoop—reported by two prominent ex-Washington Post political correspondents—stating that President Donald Trump would soon throw his endorsement to Cornyn in an attempt to end what would otherwise be a protracted, expensive bloodbath. Trump confirmed he would be endorsing one of the two and calling on the other to bow out.
What a coup this would have been for Cornyn, the consummate Senate hand who had spent his life cultivating influence in the deepest ends of the D.C. swamp—the sort of figure that’s fallen out of fashion in the brash era of unbridled Trumpism. Here was a man who was never a full convert, who had the gall to—in brief spurts in the distant past—not always speak of Trump with pure reverence, now seemingly about to get the nod over Paxton, a favored MAGA son.
Then came… nothing. Hours passed, then days, weeks, and months as the painfully long period between Texas primary and runoff dragged on without Trump intervening.
Both camps kept lobbying Trumpworld for his endorsement—each playing to the president’s personal vanity, his guiding principle when it comes to picking sides.
For Paxton, there was no amount of groveling that would come off as shocking. For Cornyn, though, it was sometimes cringeworthy to see him go through the motions: posing with The Art of the Deal and giving up on his beloved filibuster.
Meanwhile, each also commenced with campaign bloodsport—spending tens of millions of dollars attacking the other (to be fair, more so the Cornyn side than Paxton). Then, just before noon on May 19, on the second day of early runoff voting in Texas, Trump put his proverbial hand on the shoulder of his chosen one, and lo, it was Warren Kenneth Paxton.
In a 683-word, typically self-absorbed missive posted on Truth Social, where posts are supposed to be known as “truths,” Trump wrote that Paxton is “an America First Patriot, and someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT.”
Cornyn, on the other hand, was merely “a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough.”
In a tight runoff, the Trump endorsement, though late, almost certainly ensures the scandal-tarnished attorney general the nomination. (As incumbents from Louisiana to Kentucky—who’d risked considerably more independence than Cornyn, to be clear—recently discovered in their own primary contests.)
And, of course, this will almost certainly ensure that Cornyn’s decades-long run as a statewide official in Texas is brought to a likely end with a flippant tapping of a button on Trump’s own social media app.
As John Cornyn rose, over the course of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, from a San Antonio lawyer to district court judge, from Texas Supreme Court justice to state attorney general, and ultimately to the Senate in 2002, he served in many ways as a sort of cipher for the political arc of the traditional Republican Party in Texas—its rise to power, its deepening and maintenance of that power, and, ultimately, the fading of that power in the face of insurgent forces. Cornyn pioneered the Republicanization of the Texas Attorney’s General Office that paved the way for his successors: Greg Abbott and Paxton. And, in the Senate, Cornyn helped usher in the 21st century brand of conservatism that fused the religious and social right with the power of Corporate America (while, in his own way,never really managing to become a consistent favorite of the hardcore base).
All along the way, Cornyn was the most loyal of servants for the GOP cause—and he steadfastly rose through the ranks of power in Washington as his tenure advanced.
Ken Paxton, meanwhile, has been a cipher for the Trumpification of the Republican Party in Texas and nationwide—the beneficiary of an era wherein one can enjoy the trappings of a Christian conservatism brand while possessing the personal ethics and morality of an unrepentant hustler. He is of the tendency that cast aside some traditional pro-business principles (including the tort reform revolution that Cornyn rode to power) in favor of a wildly vindictive, heat-seeking agenda to take out the scourge of “Woke,” “DEI”, etc. Despite his generally dull personal affect, Paxton has used each ounce of his official and political power to fan the flames of conspiracy theory and neo-McCarthyism.
The day before Trump’s (likely) fateful endorsement, Cornyn was hitting the campaign trail across Texas. The list of guests who were at his side was instructive. Up in North Texas, there were the Republican state Representatives Jeff Leach and Matt Shaheen, both once faithful Collin County conservative allies with Paxton who have since become outspoken adversaries—and public enemies among the pro-Paxton grassroots. In Austin, Cornyn rallied a small crowd with Michael McCaul, a longtime congressman and Cornyn mentee who was once seen as his potential successor in the U.S. Senate, who’s now had his fill of Congress in the age of Trump.
Then, down in San Antonio, the senator was flanked by former Governor Rick Perry who has now been out of political office for nearly 12 years, plus Cornyn’s own predecessor, Phil Gramm. (Both men, it should be noted, made the transition from conservative Dem to Republican during the Texas political realignment of the 1980s.)
In short, this was not really a crowd that met the current moment, even as Cornyn has sought to pucker up and display his Trump fealty. (One of his most recent official acts was a proposal to name a Texas highway after the president.)
The undignified way in which Cornyn’s political career appears to be meeting its maker now begs a bigger question.
In many ways, his Senate career was already over—becoming so when he narrowly lost his long-coveted shot at becoming majority leader of the U.S. Senate last year. His path to power in that case was blocked, in part, by a pressure campaign led by Paxton and his allies. Trump ultimately chose not to endorse in that contest.
So why exactly did he, well into his 70s, even want to spend another six years in the U.S. Senate, a political body that has lost its august sheen and become yet another venue for unvarnished politicking, a body that couldn’t even feign to pass a non-budgetary, non-defense piece of legislation. A body whose core tradition, the filibuster, he felt forced to abandon in a desperate campaign tactic? Why not retire and ride off into the sunset?
Cornyn has explained repeatedly that this was mostly, perhaps entirely, about preventing a man of Paxton’s immoral character from ever stepping foot in the Senate—not about passing some long-denied piece of legislation, or solving the immigration policy dilemma that he helped blow up over a decade ago, or anything else beyond the symbolic. Congress, after all, is no longer a place where things get done.
But now, it appears that even his seemingly straightforward goal of stopping Paxton’s ascent is on the verge of failure.
In the end, Cornyn always had a rather unnatural, if not unpleasant, relationship with Trump and the Trump era—and those points where he chose to speak out against the GOP uberleader probably led to his (also probable) demise. Even still, his resistance ultimately amounted to little more than stray comments.
So, if he loses his runoff, will Cornyn become another in the line of Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, or, most recently, Bill Cassidy, who at least managed to exit the stage with what seemed a genuine flourish of principle over position?
Don’t count on it.
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