With voters already headed to the polls, President Donald Trump is breaking his silence on the heated primary runoff between U.S. Sen John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Attorney General Ken Paxton.
In a 600-word social media post, Trump said Tuesday that the decision came down to loyalty.
“John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump wrote.
In Paxton, Trump said, he’ll have a partner in “terminating the filibuster” that requires most major bills to receive 60 votes in the Senate, and pass the so-called SAVE Act, which would — among other things — put stricter requirements on the types of legal identification required to vote.
“Ken is a true MAGA warrior who has always delivered for Texas, and will continue to do so in the United States Senate,” Trump wrote.
Texas GOP old guard turns out for Cornyn
The endorsement comes a day after the start of early voting in Texas’ May 26 primary runoff election, and it’s unclear what impact it might have this late in the race.
Trump has been racking up victories in the races he’s endorsed in lately — and Cornyn himself conceding he’s “now the dominant figure in Republican primary politics.”
But a Paxton victory could make Texas a riper target in the eyes of national Democrats in 2026, and many Republicans see value in protecting Cornyn as their nominee.
“We don’t need to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in November trying to pull another Republican across the line,” Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) told roughly 200 people gathered to see Cornyn in San Antonio on Monday.
The event featured many popular former GOP officials who’ve also found themselves growing further apart from the modern Republican Party, including former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, former U.S. Sen. Phil Graham (R-Texas) and former state Rep. Steve Allison (R-San Antonio).
While speakers made no bones about the changes they’re seeing in Republican voting preferences, they implored the luxury, 55-plus community to protect the gains they’ve made for future generations.
Perry recalled Graham and Cornyn standing alongside him on the steps on the Texas Capitol the day he switched to the Republican Party in 1989 — part of a major political shift in a state where Democrats had been dominant.
“I will be forever thankful that I had someone like [Graham] and Ronald Reagan and John Cornyn as people I could look to and say, ‘I want to be like them, I want to be on their team,'” Perry said.
A new kind of Republican Party
Now three decades into the GOP’s rein, however, many of those Republicans have become a victim of their own success.
Conservatives have been sweeping primaries across Texas and elsewhere, and as TX23 hopeful Brandon Herrera told a gathering of roughly 200 people at a Paxton meet-and-greet in April, Cornyn is among the last of his kind.
“Especially in Texas, it’s a little embarrassing when we have some of the least conservative, so-called conservatives in the entire country,” Herrera told the crowd at The Divide, a Hill Country bar.
Paxton wooed the audience with tales of his 11 years as attorney general, from fighting the Obama Administration’s executive orders to suing pharmaceutical companies over the COVID-19 vaccine.
But among the most impactful cases he made was about Cornyn, whose ads in the primary have stressed loyalty to the president.
“Did he love Donald Trump before I got into the race? No,” Paxton said. “In 2016 he said Trump was an ‘albatross around our neck,‘ and then in 2024, he said, ‘His day has come, I’m supporting somebody else.'”
“All he’s done is spend millions of dollars — the most expensive primary in U.S. history — misleading you.”
