The Wanton Destruction of the Texas GOP Senate Primary

As John Cornyn and Ken Paxton suck up to Trump and take shots at one another, the post-Trump future of MAGA in the Lone Star State is being decided.

In mid-May, around two weeks before the Texas Republicans’ Senate primary runoff election, state Attorney General Ken Paxton dropped yet another ad smearing his opponent, incumbent John Cornyn, for having “turned his back on President Trump.” Accompanied by a cinematic score, replete with intense, brassy blasts (BRAAAM!), the ad spliced together Cornyn admitting “the idea of a [border] wall is somewhat off-putting to a lot of people” and that “in politics, unless you can win an election, you’re pretty much irrelevant.”

These aren’t exactly barn-burning statements. The latter is only scandalizing, to some, because he was referring to Trump’s odds of winning in 2024. (He was, of course, wrong.) On practically every other level, Cornyn is about as orthodox a neoconservative as they come—trafficking the same revanchist, free-market dogma as decades of Republicans before him. (After the U.S. Supreme Court decision to repeal Roe v. Wade, for instance, he tweeted, “Now do Plessy vs Ferguson/Brown vs Board of Education.”) But in his 24 years as senator—six of which were spent as Republican whip, the second-highest ranking position in the Senate Republican Conference—the ground has shifted beneath his feet. This isn’t to say the party “left him,” as other longtime politicians have lately complained. If anything, Cornyn has gone great lengths to keep with the times, and in an increasingly cloying manner.

On May 12, he introduced a bill to rename U.S. Highway 287 to “Interstate 47,” in honor of Trump’s term as the 47th president. A day prior, he downplayed his previous opposition to lifting the federal gas and diesel tax after Trump floated the idea to combat costs due to his war in the Gulf. And online, the septuagenarian frequently rails against Democrats with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s all somewhat undignified, but these are undignifying times.

Compounding the second-hand embarrassment is the fact that, thus far, Trump has avoided endorsing Cornyn—though The Atlantic claimed Republican strategists........

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