Why should John Cornyn go out of his way to help the president who ended his career?
Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Ninety-five days from the midterm elections, Donald Trump is struggling with Congress over his agenda. Not so much with Democrats, who have very limited ways of obstructing him, and not so much with House Republicans, who have so far cleared every bit of legislation he cares about. It’s Senate Republicans who are causing him fits at the very moment the GOP should be transforming itself into a lean, mean fighting machine for November. Indeed, Trump’s most insistent demand at the moment is that “his” Senate Majority Leader John Thune cancel its crucial (from an electoral point of view) August recess to agitate the air over the SAVE America Act, for which there is not even majority support in the Senate, much less the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Democratic filibuster. There are even fewer votes to satisfy Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans just kill the filibuster outright, exposing them to the wrath of a future Democratic majority. And at the moment, it’s not clear there is a majority for the House-passed budget resolution Trump wants that would set up big, controversial votes on funding his Iran War and creating a slush fund to encourage states to adopt elements of the SAVE America Act.
Thune is absorbing most of Trump’s outrage at the refusal of the Senate to do his bidding. As a pol focused on maintaining his party’s vulnerable majority, he’d prefer to pass a stopgap spending bill to avoid a campaign-disrupting government shutdown in October and send his troops home to beat the bushes for votes. But if you look at some of the specific problems Trump is facing with his agenda, the problem isn’t so much Thune as a group of YOLO senators that Trump has either turned into lame ducks or alienated by threatening to destroy them politically.
One agenda item Thune is fully willing to act on is the confirmation of attorney general nominee Todd Blanche. But it’s currently jammed in the Senate Judiciary Committee because two lame-duck senators (John Cornyn and Thom Tillis) want explicit “in writing” commitments by the administration to abandon two toxic by-products of the IRS’s settlement of a Trump lawsuit: the so-called “anti-weaponization fund” (which Blanche himself pronounced “dead” during his confirmation hearings) and presidential immunity from tax audits. As my colleague Nia Prater has reported, Trump has refused to make any concessions at all and launched a nasty attack on Cornyn on Truth Social:
On Thursday, Trump floated the idea of withdrawing the acting attorney general’s name from contention and letting him remain as acting attorney general until Cornyn and Tillis exit the chamber at the end of the year. But in a subsequent Truth Social post on Friday, the president made no mention of that proposal and instead focused his attention on attacking Cornyn. …
Despite the [anti-weaponization] fund being the root cause of the impasse, Trump then seemed to defend the concept, saying that the alleged conservative victims of lawfare were poorly treated and that he “felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them.”
Once again, Trump appears to have no interest in helping congressional candidates by abandoning some of the more outrageous things he has proposed. But beyond that, why would he expect any cooperation from Cornyn and Tillis? The former is ending a four-term Senate career because Trump at first tolerated and then endorsed his primary opponent, Ken Paxton. The latter preemptively announced his retirement just over a year ago in response to Trump’s threats of backing a primary challenge after he voted against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Aside from his efforts to make Blanche’s confirmation conditional, Tillis is also the most outspoken Senate Republican opponent of the SAVE America Act, focusing on its disruptive effects on preparations for the midterms. He’s even threatened to kill the budget resolution containing SAVE America Act components.
Another Republican senator successfully purged by Trump, Bill Cassidy, who originally earned the president’s ire by voting to convict him of impeachable offenses after the failed coup of January 6, has also vocally opposed both the anti-weaponization fund and public financing for Trump’s ballroom. And still another senator who survived Trump’s efforts to deny her reelection, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (protected by Alaska’s nonpartisan top-four primary election system), is a problem for Trump on a wide range of issues. But again, why should she play toady to him? He failed to purge her in 2022 and has threatened to go after her again in 2028.
The lesson that the president should take away from this situation is this: If you sow the wind with disloyalty to your party’s senators, you will reap the whirlwind in reciprocal disloyalty when you need their support. Blustery threats and authoritarian posturing cut little ice with people who have succumbed to or survived threats of political excommunication and career extinction. That’s ultimately why Trump is spending precious days and weeks browbeating the scapegoat John Thune and denying Senate candidates life-saving time on the campaign trail.
You may recall that Trump’s self-absorption cost his party a Senate majority in 2021, when he barnstormed through Georgia attacking that state’s election integrity (central to his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat) just in time to discourage Republican turnout in a general-election runoff and cost the GOP two Senate seats. It could happen again this year. If it does, he will have nobody but himself to blame.
Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice