Despite U.S. Sen. Cornyn’s attempts to cozy up to President Donald Trump with increasingly inflammatory rhetoric, the four-term Republican senator told the Houston Chronicle that the White House’s current occupant is unswayed.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, this race would be over if you decided to endorse,’” Conryn said in an interview. “He said, ‘I know, I know.’ He’s obviously not ready to do that. And I think he wants to see how the race develops.”
Cornyn is facing off against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a MAGA loyalist, in the primary to keep his long-held position in the U.S. Senate. The contest is proving one of the Lone Star State’s most watched this election cycle.
Polls show a tight GOP primary race between Paxton and Cornyn, with U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt in third. At the moment, it appears no candidate is likely to hit the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
And with the primary set for March 3, that doesn’t leave much time left to tip the scales.
In obvious bids for Trump’s favor, Cornyn has shared effusive social media posts about the president, including one in which he posed reading the reality show real-estate mogul’s Art of the Deal. Last week, Cornyn defended Trump’s military strike on Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro using bogus claims of a made-up drug cartel and fentanyl trafficking.
Yet it seems no matter what Cornyn says, he can’t seem to shake the RINO — Republican in Name Only — label.
Cornyn wasn’t always so obsequious toward Trump. In 2016, he called the idea of a border wall “naive.”
Both Paxton and Hunt have seized on this point, accusing Cornyn of obstructing the construction of 1,200 miles of border wall in the Rio Grande Valley.
However, on Friday, Cornyn made a stop in the border town of Hidalgo, where he talked tougher. Speaking to the press, he said that migrant workers should not receive protections until the border is secure, answering South Texas MAGA Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz’s call for a visa program for construction workers to address the industry’s labor shortage caused by mass deportations.
“The first thing we need to do is secure the border,” Cornyn said during a news conference in the South Texas city. “There is no way that the American people, and certainly my constituents in Texas, would allow us to take another stab at reforming our immigration laws until we’ve got the border secure.”
Paxton and Hunt were quick to call the visit a bit of political theater.
“His 40-plus year career has been spent fighting for amnesty for illegals, cutting deals with Democrats, trying to stop President Trump, and standing in the way of building the wall,” Paxton said in a statement last week. “Texans aren’t going to forget how Cornyn’s betrayed our country, and no last minute trip to the border to try and act tough is going to change that.”
“Now that Trump’s secured our border, John Cornyn wants to take the credit for the wall he tried to block,” an attack ad from Hunt responded.
Cornyn has clarified in the past that he has a slightly amended vision for the border wall, but that doesn’t mean he is against it. Cornyn has argued that certain parts of the border are not topographically viable for building a 1,200-mile wall, adding that measures such as cameras and sensors could be used instead.
“I’ve always supported what I would call a smart wall,” Cornyn said in an interview on the latest episode of the Texas Take Podcast. “So the suggestion that I don’t support infrastructure, which is necessary, which is an important piece of that puzzle, is just ridiculous.”
Even though Daddy continues to ignore him, Cornyn has garnered other endorsements, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune who bested Cornyn in the contest for that position.
“He has been such an advocate through the years on the issue of border security — foremost expert on it,” Thune said. “Most of us, what we know about the border, we know from him.”
Cornyn has also had his greatest fundraising quarter ever, raising $7 million in the final quarter of 2025 for a total of $15 million cash on hand. Hunt and Paxton haven’t yet released their latest fundraising totals.
The Cornyn campaign and allied groups have also spent more than $40 million in advertising, much of it heaping praise on Trump — only to be ignored.
Spending $40 million without a return on investment doesn’t exactly sound like someone who’s mastered the “art of the deal.”
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