A Republican senator ousted by President Donald Trump’s pick tore into his own party in a scathing postmortem of this week’s midterms.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday that the GOP’s Election Day “beat-down wasn’t only foreseeable, it was foreseen,” because Republicans forgot the “basic rules of coalition politics.”
Cornyn won’t be returning to the Senate. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated him in the GOP primary runoff in May after Trump endorsed Paxton and knocked Cornyn as someone who “was not supportive of me when times were tough.” Paxton then lost the general election on Tuesday.
The first rule, Cornyn wrote, is that “successful coalitions add, they don’t subtract.” He accused losing candidates, including Paxton and Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), of shrinking the party by fixating on “RINOs” and political theater. He also singled out Texas candidate Bo French for “blatant bigotry against Indian-Americans.”
“When nominees show contempt for voters and request a smaller Republican Party, voters oblige them,” Cornyn wrote.
He also knocked what he described as a “strange reverse personality test” in GOP primaries. In that test, candidates who come across as reasonable get branded sellouts, while oddball comments and old scandals pass for authenticity. Cornyn pointed to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who lost his own primary this year. Massie once said his base wanted “the craziest son of a b— in the race.”
“This is a losing mindset that Republicans must outgrow,” Cornyn wrote.
Cornyn didn’t spare Trump. He argued the president “repeated Mr. Biden’s mistake and misread his mandate,” saddling voters with higher prices and aggressive immigration enforcement when they wanted lower costs and secure borders. He also mocked Trump’s fixation on “sideshows” like pool liners in the Reflecting Pool. Americans elected the candidate who donned a McDonald’s apron, Cornyn wrote, but “got a plan for a Triumphal Arch instead.”
His sharpest warning was on character. Forcing voters to pick between policy and integrity “is unfair to them and suicidal for us,” Cornyn wrote. He said party leaders “have to stop excusing the inexcusable” and rein in their own side, or “voters will continue to police it for us.”
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