PLANO, Texas — As it happened, it would never be enough.
For more than a year U.S. Sen. John Cornyn worked to show Donald Trump and Texas Republicans that he and the president were on the same team.
Cornyn uploaded a picture of himself reading Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” He introduced legislation to rename a stretch of freeway after Trump. Perhaps most embarrassing, the Senate institutionalist who long backed the filibuster caved to an ultimately fruitless effort to push through voting limitations that are a top objective for the administration.
Nothing of it worked. Cornyn joins the long list of Republicans who have lost their primaries after falling out of favor with a president with little tolerance for dissent and an apparently insatiable thirst for payback. The four-term senator was beaten by double digits by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Trump supported last week as “a true MAGA Warrior.”
“Cornyn, on the other hand, was VERY disloyal to me,” Trump posted on social media.
Trump’s participation in the Texas runoff followed weeks of successful backing of primary opponents in Indiana, Louisiana and Kentucky, in retaliation against incumbents who split with his agenda.
Even some Cornyn fans cringed at his effort to dodge the same fate.
You look at the positions he made to appease the president and the groveling and whatever,” said former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a Republican and Trump critic who didn’t seek re-election during the president’s first midterm in 2018. “It was kind of painful to watch.
Cornyn jumps in early with ad bragging about pro-Trump voting record Cornyn didn’t lose for lack of political acrobatics and expensive campaign spending.
Last summer, his campaign ran an ad — amid an incredible nearly-$100-million air battle between the senator and associated groups — with Cornyn staring into the camera and proclaiming, “I voted with President Trump 99% of the time.”
On Cornyn’s campaign web site, Trump and Cornyn stand side-by-side with thumbs pointed upward in a photo meant to suggest solidarity. Further down the page, the category “The Trump-Cornyn Record” highlights the senator’s involvement in helping to secure votes for Trump’s hallmark 2017 tax reduction measure.
Cornyn has also been pushing measures in Trump’s landmark tax-and-spending plan to pay for building on the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, the senator had blasted the initiative as “naive”. But in January he was extolling the measure’s $11 billion for Texas contractors’ work at “the direction of the president of the United States, to whom I am very grateful” along a stretch of finished wall in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
Cornyn’s 2023 denial of Trump’s comeback lurks in backdrop That was not unusual for Cornyn, who offered effusive praise for his party’s leader and president, but it was out of whack with comments Cornyn made in May 2023, when Trump was launching his presidential comeback campaign.
“Trump’s history,” he told reporters. “I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election you have to appeal to voters outside your base.”
Trump would go on to easily win the nomination and win every swing state in the general election.
For the first 16 months of his second term, Cornyn would stay close to the president, hoping for the outside shot of his endorsement or to discourage him from weighing in altogether.
But Trump has not forgotten prior slights.
“John Cornyn is a good man and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive when times were tough,” he said on social media in backing Paxton.
Lesser motions, and one huge one Cornyn has been joking around in his efforts to foster Trump fandom, tweeting a picture on social media last year of himself poring over the pages of Trump’s 1987 memoir and business instruction book, “The Art of the Deal,” with a pensive look on his face.
In a more overt gesture he offered to name a stretch of U.S. highway from the Texas Gulf Coast to Montana “Interstate 47,” in honor of a 47th president with a well-documented fondness of naming things after himself. Cornyn stated in a news release announcing the idea, filed just over two weeks before Tuesday’s runoff, it would be known as the “Trump Interstate.”
The real tectonic change came in March, after Trump had teased a possible endorsement of either Cornyn or Paxton in the runoff.
The Senate, controlled by Republicans, has refused to lift the filibuster and enact the SAVE America Act, a slate of voting restrictions that Trump has called a cornerstone of his program, but Paxton quickly stated he would consider ending his candidacy if the Senate did.
The next week, Cornyn penned an op-ed in the New York Post—Trump’s favorite newspaper, the rag of his hometown—in which he backed away from his previous support of the filibuster. He promised to “support whatever changes to Senate rules that may be necessary” to get the law “through the Senate and to the president’s desk for his signature.”
Flake seemed uncomfortable.
“I know John and his long-standing positions on the filibuster and institutions of the Senate,” he said. “No office is worth that.
Bedayn reported from San Antonio. Mary Clare Jalonick, an Associated Press writer in Washington, contributed to this report.
