One small but welcome story out of Texas last night: Democrat Johnny Garcia easily won his House primary in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, dispatching loony sex-therapist candidate Maureen Galindo, who had promised “prison for American Zionists”—and been backstopped by substantial spending from Republicans who had hoped to secure her the nomination to throw them an easy win in the purple district. Happy Wednesday.

Mark Hertling and Ben Parker will be live on Substack and YouTube for Command Post today at 10:30 a.m. EDT. Make sure to tune in!

Big John Deflated

by Andrew Egger

If Donald Trump’s base is a cult, we’re rapidly approaching the Comet Hale–Bopp phase. Outside his party, he’s already a lame duck with catastrophically low approval and a stalled agenda. But as he weakens outside the building, his remarkable influence inside seems only to grow over a party eager to drink the Kool-Aid at his request.

Yesterday’s Republican Senate primary runoff in Texas was the clearest sign of this yet. It pitted a formidable, well-funded establishment incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, against a sad-sack rabble-rouser MAGA type in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton is damaged goods in fifteen different ways—uncharismatic and dull, loathed by those who have worked with him in state government, beset by serial adultery scandals, impeached by his own party over his extraordinary corruption and self-dealing. Paxton had exactly two strengths: The perverse intuition of the MAGA base that his run of bad behavior and scandal meant he was actually a strong conservative fighter, and his obsequious, servile loyalty to Trump, for which the president rewarded him with a late endorsement.

Which turns out, of course, to be all you need. In the end it wasn’t even close. Paxton walloped Cornyn by more than 27 points.

This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges.

You couldn’t find a better poster child for the accommodationist approach that the GOP Senate old guard took than Big John. For years, he was the consummate grin-and-bear-it Trump ally, steadfastly supporting his agenda from his post in Senate leadership. But as it turns out, that posture wasn’t as bulletproof as guys like Cornyn thought. It kept him in Trump’s good books as long as the president had bigger, more openly mutinous fish to fry. But once he had rid himself of the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys of the world, Trump found himself at his leisure to start punishing smaller and smaller crimes: an unwillingness to abandon the legislative filibuster, a curiosity toward other candidates early in the 2024 presidential primary, the inescapable scent of belonging to a pre-Trump establishment at all.

In another world, I would lament Cornyn’s ignominious defeat. It seems impossible to deny he is a better man than Paxton, and a better and more reasonable negotiator of the sort the Senate needs to function.

But in this world, it’s hard to respond to last night’s outcome with anything but grim, bleak pleasure. What, in the end, did Cornyn’s decade of Trump accommodation get him? Nothing but the futile hope that he might outlast the era—a hope that finally brought him to the greatest humiliation of all, a yearlong fruitless effort to woo Trump into blessing him with his endorsement by posting pictures of himself reading The Art of the Deal and introducing bills to rename Texas highways after the president. He made himself a dog for Trump, and Trump put him down like a dog.