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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn for the Republican Senate nomination, the latest challenger backed by President Donald Trump to unseat an incumbent. Paxton will face Democratic state Rep. James Talarico in the general election.
But some Republicans fear Paxton’s past controversies — including an impeachment by the GOP-led Texas Legislature and a divorce from his wife “on biblical grounds” — could force the race in Texas to become a key fight for the Senate majority.
Trump, who threw his support behind Paxton with just a week to go until the primary runoff, said he “worked well” with Cornyn but that the senator “was not supportive of me when times were tough.”
Cornyn, a senator since 2003, disputed that he was disloyal to Trump and pointed out that he voted “yes on every major Trump law.” However, Paxton’s victory captured an important reality of the GOP in 2026: That’s not enough.
In Trump’s first term, Cornyn was part of a group of Republicans who sought to nudge Trump toward traditional conservatism. After the Jan. 6 riot, Cornyn remained deeply critical of the incident and said Trump shouldn’t run for president again in 2024 — though he later changed his tune. And more recently, Cornyn was among many Republicans reluctant to nuke the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold to pass the Save America Act to impose nationwide voter ID laws.
Trump, it seems, never forgot his past criticisms.
