President Donald Trump railed against U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar in a post on Truth Social Wednesday night, calling the South Texas congressman “disloyal” and “ungrateful” for sticking with the Democratic Party after Trump pardoned him last year.
In his post, Trump said he expected Cuellar to switch parties and run for reelection as a Republican, but was shocked when Cuellar subsequently filed for reelection as a Democrat.
“I did the pardons, and made no deal, where a crooked politician would have, but I thought there would be a good chance that Cuellar, who was persecuted by Democrats because they didn’t like him, would have routinely gone over to the Republican Party — The people that saved him from years in prison,” Trump wrote.
In response to Trump’s post, Cuellar said in a statement that he remained focused on the work in his district, “where reining in ICE overreach, bringing costs down, and protecting Medicare and Social Security are top priorities.”
“As I’ve previously shared, my family and I are grateful that this weaponized case is behind us,” Cuellar said. “My full attention will continue to be on serving our friends and neighbors in South Texas, as I’ve done for years. As with all public servants, regardless of their party, we will hold the President and his family in our prayers.”
Cuellar is locked in a competitive race for Texas’ 28th congressional district that, under its newly redrawn boundaries, Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024. However, the district would have been won by Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke in 2018.
In his post, Trump promoted Cuellar’s election opponent, Tano Tijerina, a Webb County judge who left the Democratic Party in 2024 to run for Congress as a Republican.
But the majority of the post served as a diatribe against Cuellar in which Trump said that the congressman should be serving a long-term jail sentence in a top level penitentiary with his wife, Imelda, whom Trump also pardoned.
Cuellar and his wife were indicted on a dozen charges of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy in 2024 based on allegations that they accepted nearly $600,000 in bribes from an oil company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan and a Mexican commercial bank.
The indictment alleges that the two entities funneled money to shell companies owned by Imelda and that, in exchange, the congressman used his position in Congress to advance the interests of Azerbaijan and the bank.
Before Trump took office for a second time, he accused the Biden administration of unfairly targeting Cuellar for supporting border enforcement.
“Biden just Indicted Henry Cuellar because the Respected Democrat Congressman wouldn’t play Crooked Joe’s Open Border game,” Trump wrote in a May 2024 Truth Social post.
Then, while in office, Cuellar’s daughters wrote to Trump in November 2025, requesting the president grant their parents clemency. Trump did so the following month.
But in his post Wednesday, Trump said he wished the two women could have convinced Cuellar to switch parties.
“I only wish Henry Cuellar’s daughters, who begged for his survival, would have used the same level of charm to convince their mother and father to do the right thing,” Trump wrote. “I am very proud of the fact that I didn’t make a deal with Cuellar, which I easily could have, but relied on his character, which turned out to be a faulty one.”
Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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