Outgoing Texas Senator John Cornyn has twisted the knife after a longtime Republican power broker split with the party in the key battleground state.
Earlier this week, Karl Rove, the veteran GOP strategist who helped steer George W. Bush to two presidential wins, said he would vote for Democrat Jon Rosenthal over Republican Bo French in the race for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates oil and gas production.
This rankled Trump, who blasted Rove as “so bad” for the party.
Rove’s decision was spurred on by a bigoted post from French, who has a history of what the New York Times called “unvarnished bigotry.”
“The GOP has a growing number of Bo Frenches—and not only in Texas,” Rove subsequently complained in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
Enter Texas Senator John Cornyn, who appeared to endorse this message. Cornyn, who was defeated in a primary in May by President Donald Trump’s preferred candidate, the scandal-plagued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, retweeted the article on X.
The 74-year-old then trumpeted a line from the article, where Rove wrote: “The GOP’s stables need a cleaning. This is a good place to start.“
It was a small but telling move that sent MAGA figures haring down on the party loyalist. Many attempted to cast Cornyn as bitter for losing to Trump’s man.
“The sitting ‘Republican’ Senator of Texas, who lost by 27+ points in his primary, is now telling people to vote Democrat. Spineless,” fumed YouTube talking head Benny Johnson.
He accompanied his post with a screengrab of the results of Cornyn’s unsuccessful Republican primary runoff against Paxton in May, and a grab of Rove’s WSJ piece.
He continued: “Your own voters rejected you. Now you’re endorsing the party whose beliefs are antithetical to what Texans stand for. Pure betrayal. This is why we lose.”
“And there it is,” added the influential MAGA personality Jack Posobiec, appearing to suggest that Cornyn had rejected his party because he was bitter about the primary loss.
Catturd, an online MAGA activist with more than 4 million X followers, weighed in, writing, “Thank God Texas voted this snake out of office by a landslide.”
Paxton will now face Democratic Texas Senate nominee James Talarico in November. Trump gave Paxton the nod over Cornyn because of his absolute loyalty and willingness to do his bidding without question.
Conversely, hardliners believed that Cornyn was a less safe bet, despite siding with the president on almost all key votes in his second term.
The president showed his Cornyn anxiety when he endorsed Paxton in a Truth Social post. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” he wrote.
They have a patchy past. Trump called the senator a “RINO,” Republican in name only, when he helped negotiate bipartisan gun-control legislation in 2022.
The notoriously thin-skinned president had not forgotten past dissent, either. In May 2023, when he was mounting his presidential comeback campaign, Cornyn was less than glowing.
“Trump’s time has passed him by,” the 24-year Senate veteran told reporters. “I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base.”
Cornyn has largely fallen in line during Trump’s second term, but he became an issue for the president after he sided with Paxton. For example, in July, Trump attacked Cornyn when he and the Trump-bashing Republican Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, attempted to block Todd Blanche’s path to become attorney general.
He spitefully said that their “political careers have been ended” by his refusal to endorse them.
Cornyn also opposed Trump’s proposed DOJ “anti-weaponization fund.”
