Shortly after the 2024 election, John Cornyn nearly became the Senate majority leader. Today, he’s at war with his own party after suffering an embarrassing primary defeat. He wants to fight for his own particular brand of Republicanism and defy President Trump’s agenda.
But Cornyn is fighting a losing battle. His downfall illustrates the transformation of the American Right over the past decade, a development I cover in my new book, Whitepill. Cornyn no longer has a home in Trump’s party. Conservatism has changed dramatically over the last decade, leaving little room for Cornyn to advance his Business First Republicanism.
Cornyn has long been one of the most dubious Senate Republicans. Before Donald Trump left office in 2021, the Texas senator publicly trashed his party’s leader. He didn’t like Trump’s tough stance on illegal immigration and felt the Republican Party needed to move in a moderate direction after the Don left office.
He did his best to steer the GOP in that direction after 2020. Cornyn primarily concerned himself in the Biden years with pushing for the GOP to embrace liberal immigration legislation, make Juneteenth a federal holiday, and support foreign interventions. Throughout the early 2020s, Cornyn led negotiations with Democrats on a compromise immigration deal. When the Senate passed a bill placing restrictions on some gun purchases in 2022, Cornyn said immigration would be the next “bipartisan” measure he would shepherd into law. He never achieved his dream, despite his best efforts. He tried to get Congress to give permanent legalization to “Dreamers” (illegal aliens who came to the U.S. as minors), to no avail.
He was the lead Republican advocate for making Juneteenth a federal holiday. He denounced conservative critics as “kooky,” despite some of the holiday’s supporters explicitly wanting it to be an event to push for reparations.
Cornyn was able to find common ground with the Biden administration on Ukraine. There was arguably no other Republican more in favor of the Ukraine War than the Texan. He repeatedly urged the government to send even more money and weapons to Ukraine, even when the base criticized him over it. But the Biden administration wasn’t sufficiently hawkish for Cornyn. He criticized it for not supporting Israel enough in the Gaza War and called for America to send more weapons and funds to “our greatest ally.”
After Trump’s 2024 election win and his failure to secure the majority leader job, Cornyn pretended to be MAGA. He photographed himself reading Art of the Deal, he co-sponsored the SAVE Act (the bill that would require proof of citizenship to vote), he claimed to be an immigration hawk, and he was eager to act like Trump’s biggest ally in the Senate. He even discarded his past support for more foreign-worker visas, saying that we can only start that when the border is fully secure.
Cornyn changed in response to his Trumpian primary foe, Ken Paxton. Paxton has a well-established record supporting MAGA causes. He sued the Biden administration several times over its horrible immigration policy, took on tech censorship, and demonstrated a serious concern for conservative policy concerns. He didn’t need to post about reading Trump’s book to show he was MAGA.
When the two headed to a runoff, Cornyn tried to double down on his new MAGA image. He wrote an op-ed about how the SAVE Act was more important than the filibuster, and urged the GOP to take radical action to pass the legislation. It wasn’t enough for Texas voters, or Trump. Trump endorsed Paxton before the runoff, and the challenger beat the incumbent by nearly 30 points.
Since his defeat, Cornyn has returned to his original self with a vengeance. His main mission seems to be derailing Trump’s agenda. He openly criticizes Trump, claiming the president “revels in chaos.” He complains that the party is alienating “traditional conservatives” like himself and that this will cost them future elections.
What issues animate these so-called “traditional conservatives”? Cornyn seems to indicate that two of them are foreign interventionism and liberal immigration policies. Cornyn, unlike the rest of America, wants the Iran War to continue and is not happy with the peace deal that ended it. He’s eager to oppose GOP legislation if it doesn’t satisfy him. In spite of the op-ed he wrote in March, he’s now opposed to the GOP focusing on the SAVE Act, as he believes it can’t pass. He wants his party to focus on more important issues, such as college sports and giving more money to the Department of Defense.
He also wants America to know that he’s opposed to MAGA’s immigration restrictionism. He recently reposted a Wall Street Journal column claiming that the U.S. soccer team demonstrates the virtues of immigration. Cornyn endorsed that opinion, much to the chagrin of right-wing X users.
Cornyn is right about one thing: His ilk no longer feel in control of the American Right. It’s no longer a sphere where one can be a war hawk without being challenged, can worship mass immigration without being deluged with criticism, or can feel the most important thing is to secure corporate interests without facing the wrath of constituents.
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The Texas senator is obviously not happy with this. He spent over a year pretending to be MAGA and still lost his primary. Now he’s back to his true self and pretending he’s a prophet warning of the GOP’s doom if it doesn’t pick people like him to lead the party again.
Trump has permanently changed the American Right and the GOP. Of course, some elements of the old conservatism linger on. South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham is still in the Senate, and Republicans still keep many of the economic priorities of the past. But it’s increasingly hard for dinosaurs like Cornyn to maintain their influence and steer the base toward amnesty and foreign intervention maximalism. They want something new and different. They listen to voices that tell them it’s more important to secure the border and crack down on migrant welfare cheats than to enact regime change in Iran. They want a more combative GOP that pushes through legislation to secure elections rather than make deals to legalize illegal immigrants. As my new book documents, the conservatism of today is a different beast from that of the past.
Cornyn refuses to believe that. And that’s why he’s headed to retirement.
