In early March, Donald Trump said he would “soon” issue an endorsement in the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Texas, adding that he expected the other candidate to drop out of the race after failing to receive his support. Two days later, The Washington Post reported the president had made up his mind: He would endorse Sen. John Cornyn over his intraparty rival, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, ahead of their May 26 runoff election.
The ostensible decision made sense, since GOP officials were in broad agreement that Cornyn was a safer bet in the general election. For a president terrified of accountability, it wasn’t too surprising that he was prepared to back the incumbent, if for no other reason than to improve the party’s odds of keeping the seat and preventing a Democratic-led Senate.
And then, nothing happened. The political world kept waiting for an endorsement that Trump suggested was imminent, only to learn that he wasn’t ready to make an announcement.
As this week got underway — and with time running out in the primary race — Cornyn said he expected the president to remain neutral. “I think that ship has finally sailed,” the senator said. One day later, the president proved him wrong. MS NOW reported:
President Donald Trump endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Republican Senate primary runoff on Tuesday, ending months of public neutrality in a race that could help determine the balance of power in Congress.
“I know Ken well, have seen him tested at the highest and most difficult levels, and he is a WINNER!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, touting Paxton’s support for ending the filibuster and passing the SAVE America Act. “Ken is a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate.”
At 657 words, the president’s online statement was unusually long and focused largely on conspiratorial grievances.
As for Trump’s earlier demand that the candidate who failed to secure his endorsement immediately drop out, Cornyn made clear in an online statement of his own that he plans to stick around for the final week of the race. (He didn’t mention his recent legislative effort to rename a highway after Trump, as part of a clumsy bid to impress the president.)
With polls showing a competitive primary contest, the new developments are likely to give Paxton at least some additional momentum. As far as Democrats are concerned, that’s great news.
Indeed, Trump didn’t just deliver the news the state attorney general hoped to hear; he also stuck to the script that Democrats have been daydreaming about for months.
In a written statement issued after the president’s announcement, a spokesperson for the Senate Majority PAC, the main super PAC aligned with the Senate Democratic leadership, said, “Donald Trump just endorsed a man who was impeached by his own party, indicted for felony fraud, reported to the FBI by his own staff, ordered to pay $6.6 million to the whistleblowers he tried to destroy, and whose wife is divorcing him on biblical grounds. And Trump did so despite the entire Republican political operation spending more than $100 million for the other guy.”
The statement added, “With all the baggage, it’s no wonder that one-in-four John Cornyn voters say they’ll vote for [Democratic nominee] James Talarico if Paxton is the nominee. Talarico has $27 million, leads in the polls, and has never once had his own staff call the FBI on him. We’ll take those odds.”
In the meantime, many of Cornyn’s GOP colleagues were despondent Tuesday afternoon. Punchbowl News reported that Senate Republicans are now “livid” with the president’s decision. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowksi said she expects Democrats to flip Texas’ seat; Maine Sen. Susan Collins said she “doesn’t understand” Trump’s decision to back Paxton, whom she described as “ethically challenged”; Montana Sen. Steve Daines conceded that he’s “disappointed”; and Senate Majority Leader John Thune similarly made his dissatisfaction clear.
We’ll learn soon enough how GOP voters in Texas respond, but stepping back, there are a couple of angles to keep in mind. First, it’s worth appreciating that many Republicans still believe Paxton can win (Texas is a red state, after all) but because of his many scandals and awful reputation, the party will have to spend heavily in the hopes of getting him across the finish line in the fall. Every penny Republicans have to spend to hold onto a seat in the Lone Star State is money they won’t have to spend elsewhere.
So a Paxton primary victory would create a competitive race in a state GOP officials weren’t prepared to worry about.
Second, it’s not yet clear how and why Trump shifted from Cornyn to Paxton, but it’s easy to imagine that the president is increasingly emboldened after orchestrating the defeat of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy in Louisiana and several GOP state senators in Indiana.
Or put another way, Trump appears to have embraced a “I’ll do whatever I want, whenever I want, for any reason I want” attitude, without any real regard for whether his decisions help himself or his party. Watch this space.
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