Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) put President Donald Trump on notice that his party is about to get trounced in this autumn’s midterm elections.
“He’s going to have the most miserable two years of his life in the last two years of his term, I think, because I think November is going to be a disaster,” Cornyn told The New York Times.
Cornyn had been a loyal Senate ally, consistently voting for the president’s legislative agenda. But Trump complained Cornyn “was not supportive of me when times were tough” and that he was “very late in backing me” for the Republican nomination.
As a result, Trump endorsed Cornyn’s scandal-plagued primary challenger, Ken Paxton.
“If he would do that to me, he would do that to anybody,” Cornyn told the newspaper. “There’s never going to be good enough for him, other than 100%, you know, slavish adherence to whatever he wants. But obviously that’s not what the senator’s role is supposed to be, especially in terms of checks and balances.”
Read the full interview at The New York Times.
After Cornyn lost the primary runoff to Paxton, Trump tried to mend fences with a social media post insisting that “John will remain my friend for a long time to come.”
In the Times interview, Cornyn didn’t seem to take much solace in that.
“If that’s the way friends treat you, you wonder about his enemies,” he said.
While Cornyn said he is not out for revenge, he did say that Trump is facing “a pretty bumpy ride for the next seven months” as several GOP lawmakers are leaving and may no longer feel beholden to the president.
“It does give some of us a little more freedom, and certainly leverage,” he said. “As the president told President Zelenskyy when he was in his office a year or so ago — he said, ‘You don’t have any cards.’ Well, we’ve got some cards to play.”