Cornyn reaps the MAGA whirlwind

Riding the fences will always result in saddle sores

May 27, 2026

Two undefeated political gladiators entered the arena; one emerged. So ends the political career of Sen. John Cornyn, Republican fence-rider. This is how one who voted almost in lockstep with the Trump MAGA agenda, the second most powerful Republican in the Senate, is disposed of like a used handkerchief. Until Tuesday, Cornyn had never lost an election; and after Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s streak of wins remains unbroken.

Sen. John Cornyn, Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

It wasn’t that Cornyn was ineffective in the Senate; he could whip like few senators in modern history. It’s that he dared to touch the third rail of Texas politics—guns—in 2022, pushing a gun safety bill through the Senate, that got him booed for nearly a minute at the Texas GOP convention. At the time, Cornyn’s seat-mate Sen. Ted Cruz, smelling the whiff of political death, turned on him.

And like the cyclops played by John Goodman in the Coen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, Ken Paxton smelled an opportunity to beat the snot out of a sucker. Paxton is the kind of guy for whom no debasement or corruption is too much or too far. In MAGA circles, the man is legendary. Allow me to expand on it, just a little.

Paxton was one of Donald Trump’s chief Kraken-hunters in 2020, putting the odds that Trump could lose in four swing stages at “one in a quadrillion.” MAGA needed a Kraken, and Paxton was more than happy to fabricate one, making a mockery of the legal profession.
Paxton’s Texas AG office sued Google in late 2020, for bullying Facebook (now Meta), but the real reason was that these social media and advertising giants didn’t give enough air to Trump supporters.
I described Paxton as “the cockroach in the movie WALL-E; he survives despite the universe’s best attempts to do away with him.” And, I once called him “the very image of a modern MAGA general.”

Honestly, I could continue for another 10,000 words on Ken Paxton’s indelicacies and peccadilloes. I will indulge only a little:

No matter the topic, this Texas lawyer could be reliably counted on to file the most facially embarrassing and legally insulting lawsuits in the service of one Donald J. Trump. The depth and breadth of Paxton’s legal asshattery and general malfeasance is legendary. He will go down in the history books to rival Duke Cunningham or Kwame Kilpatrick. But that’s not enough for Paxton. He wants to upgrade to the big-time, you know, the Nixon or Boss Tweed class, where the real action is. That is, if he can do what Trump has done, and by that I mean avoid prison.

Avoid prison, he did. Despite 20 articles of impeachment passed by the Republican-dominated Texas House of Representatives, the state senate refused to convict him; his own spurned ex-wife withheld her vote.

Riffing prophetically, last July I wrote: “Perhaps running for Senate is just the thing to finally get rid of Ken Paxton. Or perhaps not. There’s still plenty of room for people of his ilk to occupy positions of great power and influence in the Trump puzzle palace.” It was President Trump’s race to call, and he went for the cyclops, not the fence-rider. Of course he did.

And the people of Texas, the MAGA whirlwind, dutifully fulfilled their leader’s wishes, or perhaps Trump merely echoed the desire of the Texas Republican Party to go all-in for the Kraken-hunting, wife-cheating, corruption-loving, self-aggrandizing, master of infidelities of all kinds.

The question is really: did the whirlwind just give enough lift to Democrat James Talarico, the darling of the left’s obsession to look like a Bible-believing, regular plaid-wearing, gun-toting guy, in the mold of Graham Platner, or Beto O’Rourke, or Tim Walz? One thing is for sure: the Texas Senate race’s price tag will approach a billion dollars. The opportunities for grift and taking a few pennies on the dollar off the top are astounding. Even if Paxton loses, he can’t lose.

I would not count out the undefeated MAGA mad dog. He’s got his biggest supporter behind him, along with the hive mind of the Texas MAGA party, and their money. They will have Ken Paxton for many years to come.

But Texas (and the rest of America) won’t have the fence-riding John Cornyn, who in the end was insufficiently servile to the Ballroom Blitz Brother, and insufficiently fringe for his Texas constituents.

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