Is There Room in the GOP for John Cornyn?

EDINBURG, Texas — Here’s a snapshot of life as a traditional Republican in the age of Trump.

Whether a lawmaker can continue a highly respected 40-year career as a judge, state attorney general and U.S. senator hinges on a thumbs up or thumbs down from Trumpus Augustus, the modern emperor in the GOP Colosseum.

But even the high sign may not be enough to save Texas Sen. John Cornyn from being fed to the lions.

Which sounds overwrought.

Or it does until you talk to Cornyn about how he’d view handing his seat to a Republican rival, Ken Paxton, with more baggage than DFW at Christmas.

“I feel a responsibility to the state and to the people I represent not to turn it over to a crook — and then risk the seat, risk all the downballot races in the process,” the senator told me, laying out the stakes of next week’s primary.

We were riding in the back of an SUV in the Rio Grande Valley, with one of his two daughters in the way back, and Cornyn was submitting to variations of one question: why on earth he’d want to run for re-election at 74.

He seems to want one last term to block Paxton as much as he wants it for himself. Cornyn doesn’t much pretend otherwise.

“If there'd been an honorable person who was serious and willing to do the job, I would have to think twice, cause all good things have to come to an end,” the senator told me. He said he was plenty healthy and that his wife of 46 years, Sandy, was bought in. And for one overarching reason.

“When she heard the alternative was Paxton, she said: ‘You have to run.’”

A four-term senator who previously served as the chamber’s second-ranking Republican, Cornyn holds the quaint view that compromise, incremental progress and looking out for one’s home state on vital but unsexy issues such as water desalination is the stuff of a congressional career.

He narrowly lost his bid last year for Senate Republican Leader to Sen. John Thune (S.D.). Then his attempt to claim a committee gavel was denied.

Surely, the speculation went, he’d call it a career, return to his home in Austin and enjoy breakfast tacos by morning and Texas sunsets at night with Sandy, right?

No, he said at the time, and it turns out he meant it. Cornyn, you see, has a blessed compulsion for saying what he really thinks.

Chatting between a tacos de bistec lunch with border patrol officials and a meeting with local mayors here, the man who you’d think Trump would see as “central casting” for a senator minced few words. And even at his most euphemistic, it wasn’t hard to discern Cornyn’s real views about his race, his president and his party in this moment.

Even before we got into the vehicle, he had a resigned air about him.

Picking up on a local TV interview Cornyn had just conducted inside the border patrol union, in which he said Paxton is hoping character doesn’t matter to voters, I asked the senator if his bet was that between the attorney general’s transgressions and his own record, he’d prevail.

“Well, I mean, we'll see,” he responded with, well, not exactly Trumpian confidence. “I have to tell you that I won the last primary I had with 77 percent of the vote, but it's just a very different dynamic.”

And why is that, I asked, playing the fool a bit.

“A lot of it has, you know, sort of the dominant role of President Trump,” Cornyn said, stating the obvious. “And that's why everybody, you know, does advertising with their picture with him.”

To ask Texas Republicans whom Trump has endorsed, he added, is to get three different answers: Cornyn, Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas), the hungry Houstonian who entered the race late and will likely only ensure it goes to an expensive and bloody runoff — between the other two candidates.

Cornyn volunteered that Trump’s endorsement “would be significant if he decided to do it, but we can't really count on that.”

Should the incumbent outpoll, break even or come close to Paxton in the first round of voting next week, senior Republicans tell me they think Trump can be persuaded to finally back Cornyn. The argument is straightforward: Especially if James Talarico emerges as the Democratic nominee — instead of the more polarizing Rep. Jasmine Crockett — a Paxton nomination could ensure a $100 million race and divert resources Republicans need for other competitive and less gargantuan states.

Cornyn, while eager for Trump’s support, seemed somewhat skeptical it would come through. Noting that politicians invariably alienate a significant share of their supporters when they take sides in party primaries, the senator pointed out that Trump had recently called all three candidates “friends,” adding: “So I don't know whether that's it or not — I sort of suspect that’s it.”

Which begs the question: Why isn’t the president already supporting a scandal-free, incumbent GOP senator who, unlike Cornyn’s neighbor to the east in Louisiana, didn’t vote to impeach Trump? There’s no fireable offense, at least as Trump sees it.

The answer is in who’s challenging Cornyn, which is as good a time as any to mention what Paxton is packing — namely, an opposition researcher’s dream file.

There’s his alleged adultery and wife’s very public divorce on “biblical grounds,” his dummy Uber account to fulfill his alleged infidelity and the securities fraud charges for which he avoided trial by paying restitution and performing community service. But I can’t not mention the most bizarre episode in the file: the time Paxton was caught on video at a county courthouse pocketing somebody else’s $1,000 Montblanc pen (he later returned it).

So why is Trump unwilling to oppose somebody with such a, uh, vivid pattern of behavior?

In part because Paxton was loyal to Trump after the 2020 election, leading the charge among GOP state attorneys general to challenge the results and lend credence to the president’s denialism.

But Trump’s unwillingness to quickly side with Cornyn is also because, for all the president’s factional dominance, he’s mindful about sticking close to his voters. And Paxton is clearly more MAGA-coded than Cornyn.

The senator is quick to note how often he’s voted with Trump — even more than his fellow Texan Ted Cruz, who’s also withheld his endorsement — but he’s rooted in an earlier Republican Party.

A state judge, Cornyn was elected attorney general in 1998 on a ticket led by then-Gov. George W. Bush. He then won his Senate seat in 2002, in Bush’s first midterm as president.

That’s the party from whence he came, and he still sounds like a Bush Republican. That’s particularly the case here in the heavily-Hispanic valley, where signs are in two languages and the three national flags flying at the McAllen airport make clear NAFTA is no four-letter word.

I was with Cornyn the day the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariff power, and a local reporter brought it up after the lunch with border patrol officials.

“Well, the president likes tariffs because it gives him negotiating leverage,” the senator said, playing pundit to avoid taking sides. But Cornyn said the Supreme Court had offered the “final word.” Then he caught himself, to his staff’s relief, and added “[on] that particular statute.”

In a following meeting with local mayors, Cornyn said he wants the Trump administration to call USMCA, the successor to NAFTA, “a win” and make minimal changes to the trade pact.

His attacks on Democrats are tame compared to the ad hominem swipes of Trump and his imitators, real gloves-on stuff. Cornyn’s would-be Democratic opponents? Why they’d be better suited to run in California “because their policies are out of step with most Texans,” he said.

On immigration, Cornyn sounds more like the former president who once said “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande” than the Republicans today denouncing immigrants by ethnicity and embracing blood-and-soil nationalism.

“I believe that legal immigration has been a blessing for our country,” he told the border patrol members, most of them Hispanic. “It has made us who we are today, because all of us come from somewhere else.”

Cornyn denounces illegal immigration in the next breath.

Yet when asked by some of the mayors about ICE, he said the raids on non-violent illegal migrants in workplaces are “hopefully a temporary transition” following what he called President Joe Biden’s “open borders” policy.

More striking is what Cornyn told me about why he wants to serve another term: to help “fix our broken immigration system” in the next two years.

“I think President Trump's the only one that could do that,” he told me.

I told him I had just interviewed his former Senate colleague, now-Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, at the National Governors Association meeting and that DeWine had said a comprehensive immigration fix could be Trump’s “Nixon goes to China.”

Cornyn readily agreed and recalled working with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, on the issue during the president’s first term.

“Remember, he offered a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million DACA recipients,” Cornyn said about Trump’s willingness to offer legal status for those brought to the country illegally as minors. “He's a builder, he understands all that.”

Enthusiastically discussing how to craft a grand immigration compromise — a third rail of 21st-century American politics — isn’t necessarily the most obvious way to win a GOP primary in 2026. But it’s who Cornyn is.

He’s also somebody who pays attention to the unglamorous parts of the job, issues that draw little attention but are vital to some of his constituents — issues such as water desalination, which is important along the Rio Grande.

“The valley is loyal to him, he’s been our champion,” Amanda Saldana, who chairs a regional economic partnership, said of the senator after the mayors meeting, adding: “Cornyn shows up.”

I wasn’t originally supposed to sit in on his session with the officials, some of them Democrats and all of them possessing a local fiefdom which, in the South Texas tradition, can deliver troves of votes.

But I got the point and if I had somehow missed it, a Cornyn aide came by during the meeting to whisper to me: “Can you imagine Ken Paxton doing a meeting like this?”

With the mayors and at the border patrol event, a parade of law enforcement officials, agricultural industry figures and elected leaders praised Cornyn for his efforts on matters of local concern. He even was gifted a box of oversized grapefruits, a product of Texas’s “fruit and vegetable basket,” as he called the valley.

But produce doesn’t produce content. The information landscape has shifted dramatically since Cornyn arrived in Washington in 2003, and the newspapers that had robust bureaus in the capital are now largely shuttered. Many voters get information from social media feeds. Plus, Texas is a transient state.

Talking to pollsters not involved in the race is to hear the same refrain: Cornyn isn’t disliked, he just has a light footprint with the electorate. Which, on one level, is extraordinary for somebody who has been in statewide office for more than a quarter-century.

Yet consider Cornyn’s opposite number.

Cruz ran for president, has a podcast, appears often on Fox primetime and engages in the culture wars that dominate the age. That’s what breaks through today.

Cornyn’s supporters are not the casual voter but those who are active in public affairs and have been for many years. Talking to attendees at the border patrol hall, I found almost uniformly people who had grown up in politics or worked adjacent to it now.

Those such as Gume Ybarra, who is involved with government-dependent infrastructure contracting, said Cornyn was in the proud line of past Texas senators such as John Tower and Phil Gramm.

It was the sort of praise that could have been heard a political lifetime earlier, in the Tea Party era, for senators with distinguished records like Richard Lugar and Robert Bennett, who were felled in primaries.

So, I asked Cornyn, does a record still matter in a GOP primary?

He answered honestly.

“I wonder, I wonder,” he said.

However, Cornyn added, “we’ve got enough performance artists in D.C.” and the Senate needs “people who will do the work.”

And not just run for president, as with his junior colleague from Texas, I added. “No comment,” Cornyn said with a grin.

Yet if he tolerates Cruz, he cannot countenance Paxton.

Is the attorney general fit for public office, I asked.

“No,” Cornyn said.

Would he lose to Talarico?

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

It doesn’t take a psychology degree to recognize that, in Paxton, Cornyn sees an avatar for all that has changed for the worse about his party, even as Trump has so many similar transgressions.

Yet there’s an edge in the senator’s voice when he mentions the attorney general.

“After March the 3rd, we'll have 10 weeks where we are going to give him the - ” Cornyn said, catching himself. “I think it's going to be a miserable experience for him. And I think whatever positive he enjoys today will evaporate. And so he'll be even less electable.”

Which is to say we’re unlikely to see Cornyn and Paxton, clenching hands in solidarity, at a Texas GOP unity breakfast the morning after the runoff.

So a come-to-Jesus Talarico win next week that opens Republican eyes about the challenge ahead, a scorched earth contest exposing Paxton’s vulnerabilities and along the way a Trump endorsement — together it could be enough to eke out a win.

For what, though? To spend the rest of your 70s flying back and forth between Washington twice a week, I asked him.

Cornyn laughed again. And then he cited a fellow Texas elder, forever on the road again.

“Well, to quote Willie Nelson, it ain't no good life, but it's my life,” he said.