“The last of the gentlemen Republicans”: John Cornyn’s four-decade political career ends with a MAGA uprising

By Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune
May 26, 2026

The beginning of the end for John Cornyn came in 2022, when he was doing the thing he was once praised for: whipping votes to pass difficult, bipartisan legislation.

That year, moved by the Uvalde school shooting, Texas’ senior senator convinced 14 Senate Republicans to buck the National Rifle Association and join him in passing the most significant gun safety bill in a generation.

“This was fundamentally important to the country at a time when things are so polarized and people are so intolerant of others that have different points of view,” he said after it passed. “I thought it was important to demonstrate the Senate could work.”

It was legacy defining, but not in the way he had hoped. Later that year, he was booed at the Texas GOP convention for an agonizing 45 seconds straight before he even began his remarks. When he launched into his speech, packed full of red meat, the jeers did not stop.

He dismissed the reception at the time, but it would prove to be prophetic — as would President Donald Trump’s decision to torch him as a “RINO,” or Republican in Name Only, for his efforts negotiating the bill.

On Tuesday, Cornyn lost his first ever election, putting an end to his more than four-decade career in public office.

A former Texas Supreme Court justice, the first Republican to become Texas attorney general since Reconstruction and a four-term U.S. senator, Cornyn had held on in the GOP as it transformed from the party of Bush to the Tea Party movement, and eventually the dominion of Trump.

But in the end, Texas Republicans rejected the august senator for a MAGA darling. Despite a record of voting in near-perfect alignment with Trump’s agenda, serving as the No. 2 most powerful Republican in the Senate, using that post to drive the president’s priorities through the chamber and working to elect Republicans across the country — Cornyn fell to Attorney General Ken Paxton, his political nemesis and a man he battered for months as morally unfit for office.

“He’s an incredibly sophisticated and talented political operator,” said Enrique Marquez, a Republican consultant who previously served as chief of staff to one of Paxton’s erstwhile rivals, former Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan. “He just happened to be running against the one person more loyal to Donald Trump than he is. And ultimately, loyalty is the attribute that Trump values the most.”

Cornyn’s list of MAGA sins included voting to certify President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election (even as he opposed Trump’s impeachment over the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection) and suggesting in 2023 that Trump’s “time has passed him by” (before later endorsing him for his third run at the White House). He was also seen, in the eyes of Trump and the grassroots, as failing to push hard enough to pass the SAVE America Act, a voting restrictions bill at the top of Trump’s priorities, this year. Notably, he was also one of the few Texas Republican leaders to criticize Paxton’s 2023 impeachment as “a source of embarrassment” to the party — igniting a feud that would carry through their primary battle.

“Cornyn created his own vulnerabilities by really allowing himself to become untethered from the desires of the average grassroots Republican in Texas,” said state Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville, who served on Paxton’s defense team during his impeachment trial. “It was really the perfect storm of Paxton being optimal in all the areas where Cornyn was weak.”

For the past several months, Cornyn ran primarily on his allegiance to the president — and on the basis that Paxton was unfit for office and would threaten Republican dominance in Texas. Even while gluing himself to Trump, who has faced similar scrutiny to the attorney general, Cornyn hammered Paxton for his long list of since-resolved civil and criminal accusations and for his divorce over his alleged infidelity.

“Character is on the ballot,” Cornyn said ahead of the March 3 election. “Ken Paxton is betting that character doesn’t matter to Texas Republican primary voters. I’m betting the opposite.”

Trump all but sealed Cornyn’s fate last week when he issued a last-minute endorsement of Paxton a day after early voting began. He did so over the protests of Cornyn’s colleagues in Senate Republican leadership, who argued that Paxton would make a weaker general election candidate and force the GOP to spend millions more defending Texas instead of other, more competitive seats.

“John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “John was very late in backing me in what turned out to be a Historic Run for the Republican Nomination.”

Over Memorial Day weekend, Trump’s tune soured. In another post, he attacked Cornyn as “VERY disloyal to me, as President,” adding that he “didn’t fight hard enough for the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT.” The bill would require people to provide proof of citizenship in person to register to vote and to show government-issued photo ID at the polls. It would also force states to submit their voter rolls to the federal government to check for noncitizens.

Trump described Paxton, meanwhile, as “someone who has always been extremely loyal to me and our AMAZING MAGA MOVEMENT,” and “a true MAGA Warrior who has ALWAYS delivered for Texas.”

The outcome reflects Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party, despite his flagging approval rating and status as a second-term president pushing 80 years old. And it underscored the ever vanishing space within his GOP for a lawmaker of Cornyn’s tradition, in which bipartisan cooperation, statesmanship and staunch conservatism could outweigh a candidate’s devotion to Trump.

Cornyn and his allies dropped roughly $100 million on airtime over the course of the primary, seeking to convince voters of his conservative record while tarring Paxton as corrupt, adulterous and untrustworthy. Senate Republican leadership poured millions into the race on his behalf, helping make the primary and runoff elections the most expensive in the country’s history, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.

Cornyn also rolled out endorsements from titans past of Texas Republican politics, law enforcement, industry groups and more. And he nakedly sought to curry the president’s favor, posting photos of him reading Trump’s book, “The Art of The Deal,” and standing in front of Trump Burger in Houston, proposing Congress rename a highway “Trump Interstate,” and reiterating his consistent support for Trump’s agenda.

None of it was enough to save him.

“He was willing to be malleable, flexible on his issue positions, but what he couldn’t ever really do was change his basic style of engagement with politics,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “Cornyn is not by nature an ideological warrior, he’s not someone who gets up in the morning thinking about how he can own the libs. And that’s what Paxton is. … To the extent that that has become the dominant style of our politics, Cornyn is, in terms of tone and vibe, not a good match for that.”

Had Cornyn won the nomination and gone on to beat Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico for a fifth term, he would have set a Texas senatorial record. Instead, he is the first sitting senator in Texas to lose to a member of his own party since U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarbrough in 1970.

His final pitch to Texans as voting in the runoff kicked off reflected both the political style he embodied over more than two decades in Washington and one long out of vogue with a Republican base intent on taking a wrecking ball to the establishment.

“We know we can’t just win elections with Republican votes,” Cornyn said in Austin last week. “You need independents and the occasional convert from the other party. Ken Paxton will get none of those, and puts all of this at risk.”

That resistance to the base’s preferences did not go unnoticed.

Cornyn “assumed his final form, which is an ivory tower moderate Republican who was removed from the everyday concerns of Texans,” Little said. “He is out of touch with his voters and it cost him. And Attorney General Paxton is not out of touch with his voters — he’s with them all the time.”

The last major Texas Republican of his ilk, Cornyn’s defeat leaves behind a cast of political characters who have increasingly modeled themselves after Trump: brash, populist and set upon partisan domination.

“John Cornyn was part of a wave that helped usher in the Republican revolution in Texas,” Marquez said. “He is the last of the gentlemen Republicans in our state.”

The rise and fall of John Cornyn

Cornyn began his career in public office as a district judge in Bexar County. He sat on the Texas Supreme Court in the 1990s before winning election as attorney general in 1998, serving one term while George W. Bush occupied the governor’s mansion.

Historically, the attorney general’s office was not splashy or particularly partisan, and instead mostly handled child support and defended the state in bureaucratic lawsuits.

But Cornyn’s election to that office helped kickstart the Republican takeover of Texas at every level of government, laying the groundwork for Paxton’s rise — and Cornyn’s own eventual ouster.

“John Cornyn and the men and women that swept into office with him in those years are the reason that conservative government in Texas is … a model to the rest of the country,” Houston attorney Charles Eskridge, now a federal judge, told a Federalist Society gathering in 2017.

In the Senate, Cornyn reached the upper echelons of power. He sat on high profile, influential committees, such as the judiciary and finance panels, and he served as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, leading the effort to elect Republicans during the Obama administration and to retake the Senate majority in 2014.

As the GOP whip — the No. 2 Senate Republican — from 2013 to 2019, Cornyn was a key deputy to then-Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, playing a central role in the GOP’s reshaping of the judiciary. In the early Trump years, Cornyn helped shepherd three Supreme Court justices and various legislative priorities through the Senate, including Trump’s marquee 2017 tax law. He was also instrumental in passing major legislation including the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which incentivizes semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S., and up to $11 billion in federal reimbursements for border security efforts undertaken by Texas during the Biden administration.

Just 18 months ago, Cornyn was positioning himself to lead Senate Republicans. He had raised a staggering $414 million over the course of his tenure on behalf of GOP campaigns and developed personal relationships with each senator while serving as whip. He narrowly lost the post to U.S. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who maintained his support for Cornyn’s re-election bid even after Trump’s endorsement.

Through it all, Cornyn established a reputation for working across political lines, mastering Senate processes, raising gobs of money for fellow Republicans and bringing federal dollars home to Texas.

“Senator Cornyn — you can criticize him saying he’s been there too long, but doggone it, he knows how to get that done,” said former U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville.

But all around him, the Republican Party was changing.

As anti-establishment energy took hold from the tea party movement through the era of Trump, the mold of the conservative, business-oriented, genteel Republican that Cornyn represented and that had dominated the Texas Republican landscape began to crack in favor of a more populist, flamethrowing and insurgent ideal.

“For much of Cornyn’s political career, people like him were riding high,” Wilson, the SMU professor, said. “It has really been over the last 10 years that their political world has started to unravel.”

The landmark bipartisan gun safety bill he championed came to encapsulate his Republican detractors’ chief criticisms: that he was insufficiently conservative, too willing to compromise with Democrats and a creature of the establishment that wanted to take away Texans’ liberties. The measure largely did not restrict gun owners’ existing rights and was supported by a host of law enforcement groups, but Cornyn was spurned at the Texas GOP convention later that year anyway.

Diverging from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Cornyn also voted to certify the results of the 2020 election. In 2023, he remarked that Trump’s “time has passed him by.” He broke with most Texas Republicans to call Paxton’s legal scandals a “source of embarrassment” for the GOP. He was dubious of Trump’s push for a wall along the entire southern border, even while supporting broader border security efforts, and he backed legal protections for migrants brought unlawfully to the U.S. as children — earning him attacks from Paxton and the right, who claimed he supported “amnesty.” This year, even as Trump and the base clamored for Senate Republicans to nix the filibuster to pass the SAVE Act, Cornyn initially resisted, maintaining his long-held position that the tool should be protected for the good of the institution.

“John was good at doing enough Republican things to cover over the things that were clearly in opposition to conservative Republicans’ values,” Little said. But “he wasn’t there when we needed him.”

At the same time, Paxton was ascendant.

He sued the Biden administration more than 100 times, making him a conservative hero as he worked to hamper the Democratic president on every hot-button issue from immigration and the environment to abortion and gender.

He was the first state attorney general to file a lawsuit contesting the results of the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf, and he stuck with the president even as most Republicans distanced themselves after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. When Trump launched his 2024 campaign for the White House, Paxton was one of few Republican elected officials to show up.

His legal troubles fell away, too. He was acquitted by the state Senate of his impeachment over charges of corruption and abuse of office; prosecutors dropped a set of felony securities fraud charges; the Texas Supreme Court dismissed a State Bar of Texas complaint against him; the Justice Department ended its investigation into the same allegations at the heart of his impeachment; and the state, not Paxton, would be on the hook for the $6.6 million he owed to his former senior staff who reported him to the FBI and later argued he fired them in violation of state whistleblower law.

And he was gearing up for what would become a nearly three-year journey to topple Cornyn.

“I can’t think of a single thing he’s accomplished for our state or even for the country,” Paxton said on the Tucker Carlson show in September 2023, freshly vindicated of his impeachment.

It would become the refrain of his campaign, which cast Cornyn as a fair-weather conservative and Washington insider long out of touch with the grassroots.

“We’re not putting up with that anymore,” the attorney general said in Dripping Springs last week. “We’re not gonna put up with the lies, we’re not gonna put up with the non-performance. We want somebody that represents our values that will go fight for us — that’s why I ran.”

Cornyn warned throughout the race that Paxton’s nomination, with all his legal and ethical baggage, would risk a Democrat winning a Senate seat in Texas for the first time since 1988, and would sink Republican candidates down the ballot. The general election began Wednesday on the third anniversary of Paxton’s impeachment by the Republican-dominated Texas House.

Cornyn’s closing plea to Texans came in favor of the political tradition he held onto over decades.

“We need to get away from this idea that when people disagree with you occasionally, as they will, that they are somehow a traitor,” he said in Austin as early voting began. “These are your fellow Texans, these are your fellow Americans and people you need to work with and try to do the hard work of building consensus, rather than deteriorate or degenerate or name call.”

At what would be the last campaign stop of his career on Friday, in a final push to carve out a path to survival in today’s GOP, Cornyn urged those in attendance in Corpus Christi to vote — and to get their neighbors who might not typically participate in runoff elections to join.

“The small fraction of people who actually vote [in runoffs] are not necessarily representative of the whole state and all voters,” he said. “Because I believe that character does still matter, and it is on the ballot.”

Gabby Birenbaum and Alejandro Serrano contributed reporting.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.