Sen. John Cornyn looked outright dejected on Wednesday. It made sense — a day earlier, President Donald Trump had endorsed his nemesis, ultra-MAGA Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Next week, Texas will hold its runoff for the Republican Senate primary, which has turned intensely personal. Paxton has made a point of saying Cornyn, the incumbent, insufficiently supported the president, while Cornyn has pointed to Paxton’s messy divorce, alleged affairs and being impeached by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.
Before the initial contest in March, Cornyn had warned that Paxton would be an albatross around the neck of the Texas GOP, which he stood by on Wednesday when The Independent asked him about the mess he now finds himself in.
“Absolutely, if he’s the nominee, but I don’t intend on letting that happen,” Cornyn said. Despite his bravado, Cornyn is the latest victim of Trump’s revenge tour. He’s trying not to become its latest casualty.
Trump has made purging the GOP of his enemies a top priority since returning to the White House. But it could come at a cost, both to the White House and the Republican Party, because by backing ultra-MAGA candidates in winnable primaries, he often risks handing the general election races to Democrats.
On Tuesday evening, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) lost his primary after he bucked Trump and led the charge to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein despite Trump’s initial opposition.
Massie wasn’t the only revenge Trump got Tuesday night. Down in Georgia, his preferred candidate for governor, Lt. Gov Burt Jones, earned enough votes to head to the runoff with businessman Rick Jackson. Brad Raffensperger, who spurned Trump and refused to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, placed a distant third and netted only 15 percent of the vote. Ironically, Geoff Duncan, the Republican lieutenant governor in 2020, had switched parties and ran the Democratic primary and placed third.
This came after Saturday, when Sen. Bill Cassidy, who had voted to convict Trump in 2021 over the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, lost his Louisiana primary.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted to convict Trump alongside Cassidy in 2021 but survived in 2022 thanks to ranked-choice voting, echoed the sentiment of her Republican colleagues.
“Because Senator Cornyn has been an exceptional senator, and he has been one who has worked with the Trump agenda,” she told The Independent. “And the fact the President would choose to endorse not Sen. Cornyn, but a candidate who probably is going to struggle mightily in general is a problem.”
And Democrats are already licking their chops.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said he planned to campaign for Democratic nominee James Talarico down in Texas, as did the Lone Star state’s Sen. Ruben Gallego. Sen. Chris Van Hollen said he was holding a fundraiser for Talarico.
Purging Republicans for personal reasons in favor of opponents who only appeal to the MAGA base is a risky move and one that Sen. Thom Tillis has warned against in the past.
“They’re not even in the same league, Paxton and Cornyn, in terms of the quality of the member in the U.S. Senate,” the North Carolina Republican told The Independent.
“I respect the President for taking his pick,” he said. “I think he made the wrong pick. It’s going to be a lot more expensive to hold that seat.”
Tillis’ fate is Exhibit A. When he came out against Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” Trump went nuclear. Tillis later announced he would not seek re-election.
But the move backfired tremendously. Yes, Trump got a yes-man in former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley as a candidate in the race. But has Tillis become the administration’s sharpest Republican critic, and his retirement opened the door for Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s popular former governor, to run for the seat.
The conservative Carolina Journal released a poll earlier this month showing Cooper defeating Whatley by a whopping 11 points.
So far, Trump has kept his powder dry on the GOP’s other endangered incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. When Vice President JD Vance visited the state last week, he even gave her a little bit of a love tap.
“I almost wish she was more partisan,” he said. “But the thing I love about Susan is that she is independent because Maine is an independent state, and frankly if she was as partisan as I sometimes wish she that she was, she would not be a good fit for the people of Maine.”
Trump has occasionally hit Collins, such as when she supported a War Powers Act resolution to restrain Trump’s military actions in Venezuela, which prompted him to say she and her fellow compatriots “should never be elected to office again.”
But other than that, he likely recognizes that Collins is the only Republican who can hold that seat and faces significant headwinds eve as she faces a controversial candidate like Graham Platner, who has faced criticism for some of his incendiary comments on Reddit about sexual assault and race in the past.
Curiously, while Trump goes on a tear against his enemies, he does not seem as maniacally focused on helping Republicans flip two seats they have a chance to win: Michigan and Georgia.
While he endorsed former Rep. Mike Rogers in Michigan, who narrowly lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024 despite Trump winning Michigan, he doesn’t pay as much attention to the state even as Democrats in the open Senate primary slug it out.
And while he put his thumb on the scale in Georgia’s gubernatorial race, he stayed out of the primary to defeat incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Kemp, who is retiring, threw his support behind Derek Dooley, a former University of Tennessee head football coach and son of former University of Georgia coach Vince Dooley. Reps. Mike Collins and Buddy Carter also ran, and Dooley and Collins will now go into a runoff.
The fact that Trump has stayed out bears striking resemblance to how he mostly complained about the election being stolen after November 2020 at the expense of trying to hold the two Georgia Senate seats, which allowed for Ossoff and Sen. Raphael Warnock to win.
Trump’s political superpower has always been his ability to occupy people’s attention. In the same token, his own perceived slights have diverted Trump’s eye off of helping Republicans keep the majority. And it might come at a massive cost.
