Playing hardball with a president almost nobody in his party dares to cross looks, at first glance, like real political courage. There’s just one problem.
John Cornyn concedes GOP runoff to Ken Paxton in Texas
Senator John Cornyn concedes the Texas primary runoff as Attorney General Ken Paxton claims victory and looks ahead to November.
John Cornyn has finally found the nerve to defy President Donald Trump.
The U.S. senator from Texas recently held up two of Trump’s ambassador nominees, Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano, until the White House agreed to release more than $270 million in funding for PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program that has saved more than 26 million lives since President George W. Bush launched it in 2003.
Playing hardball with a president almost nobody in his party dares to cross looked, at first glance, like real political courage. There was just one problem: Cornyn had already lost his Republican Senate primary. He found his courage the moment it stopped costing him anything.
When courage becomes free
Weeks earlier, Trump had endorsed Ken Paxton, Texas’ indicted attorney general, over Cornyn in the GOP primary, and Cornyn got crushed. His 24-year Senate career ends in January. For the first time in years, Cornyn no longer has to worry about Trump deciding his political future – and it shows.
He “seems to revel in chaos,” Cornyn recently said of the president he spent years defending. He’s begun using his vote as leverage, first to secure border reimbursement money for Texas, and now to force loose funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
Cornyn also grilled Todd Blanche, Trump’s attorney general nominee, over the Justice Department’s controversial $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund and says he remains unconvinced by Blanche’s answers.
Asked about his new hobby of bucking Trump, Cornyn said it was “kind of fun.”
Cornyn’s stance on Trump has always depended on whether Trump had the power to punish him.
In 2023, with Trump under indictment and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis surging to the front of the 2024 presidential pack, Cornyn told reporters that Trump’s “time has passed him by” and that Republicans needed “an alternative.”
Strong stuff for a sitting Republican senator to say about the party’s former standard-bearer. Then Trump started winning primaries, and by early 2024, Cornyn had fallen in line.
“It’s clear that President Trump is Republican voters’ choice,” he said in January 2024, even though only two states had held their primaries.
By the time his own primary arrived, Cornyn was reversing one of his longest-held positions. For years he had defended the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster. Then Trump made passage of the SAVE America Act his top legislative priority and signaled Cornyn’s endorsement depended on helping deliver it.
Cornyn suddenly discovered what he called “an evolution in my own thinking,” writing that Republicans should scrap the filibuster if necessary. He denied that his reversal had anything to do with currying favor with Trump. Of course, it didn’t matter: Trump endorsed Paxton anyway.
Every time Cornyn has broken with Trump, either Trump looked like a loser or Cornyn already was one. The one stretch where neither was true – the years in between when Trump was ascendant and Cornyn still needed him – produced nothing but capitulation.
And now that Trump can’t do anything to him beyond a mean tweet, Cornyn has rediscovered his nerve, which was suspiciously absent for the entire stretch when the president’s approval actually mattered to his career.
Washington’s safest act of bravery
Cornyn is only the latest example of a familiar Washington phenomenon: politicians who discover their bravest instincts only after voters can no longer punish them for using them.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, cast one of the genuinely courageous votes of the Trump era when he backed impeachment after Jan. 6, 2021, knowing it might end his career.
For the next four years, with reelection hanging over him, Cassidy voted with Trump almost without exception. Only after Louisiana Republicans finally ended his career did he begin openly challenging the administration again.
Mitch McConnell followed a similar script. Once out of Senate leadership and widely expected to retire, McConnell voted against three of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a level of defiance he’d never shown in years of toeing the Trump party line.
Days later, he made it official and announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in 2026.
To be fair, all three men genuinely agreed with Trump on many issues. The revealing moments came when conviction and political survival diverged. Each found their nerve only after it stopped costing them anything.
Daniel Allott, USA TODAY’s conservative opinion editor, is author of the book “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation.”