Sen. John Cornyn, once one of Trump's biggest ass kissers, is now changing his tune

After years of unyielding public fealty to Donald Trump, Sen. John Cornyn has decided that the former reality show president is no longer his BFF.

“We need to come up with an alternative,” Texas' senior Republican senators said on Thursday press call, the Dallas Morning News reports. “I think President Trump’s time has passed him by, and what’s the most important thing to me is we have a candidate who can actually win.”

The comment makes Cornyn one of the highest-profile GOP lawmakers to publicly reject Trump's effort to take back the White House in 2024.

Trump's reacted with predictable vitriol. In comments to the Morning  News, a spokesman for the former president blasted Cornyn as part of the “deep state rotting through government.”

Cornyn's announcement that he'd joined the anyone-but-Trump caucus came after the Morning News' reporter asked him about Trump's performance last week during his venom-filled CNN town hall.

That prime time TV appearance must have generated a lot of heartburn for Cornyn, who apparently had no trouble defending Trump during some of the one-time commander in chief's worst moments. For example, Cornyn:

• Voted against impeaching Trump in his February 2020 trial in the U.S. Senate. Further, Cornyn railed against the trial itself as "insane" and made legal arguments during interviews against even allowing witnesses to appear.
• Tweeted 50 times in a single week to defend Trump during the whistleblower scandal that led up to the impeachment trial.
• Broke with other Republicans to publicly defend Trump for pulling troops out of Syria and leaving the U.S.'s Kurdish allies high and dry.
• Sent out a 2020 fundraising letter specifically telling voters he wanted more money to help blame China for the spread of the coronavirus and deflect criticism away from Trump.
• Refused to acknowledge Joe Biden as president-elect following the 2020 election, even as Trump's recount attempts became a laughing stock.
  

Following the 2020 election, Watergate reporter Carl Bernsteinpublicly outed Cornyn among a group of GOP senators who privately badmouthed Trump while publicly staying silent about his dismantling of democratic norms.

Here's the apparently bottom line: Cornyn only has a problem with wannabe despots when they look like they're going to lose the next election. 
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