On Supporting Trump

If you like President Donald J. Trump, then you’ll love Senator John “Mini-Don” Cornyn. According to The Payback Project, Cornyn rubber-stamps whatever Trump wants a staggering 94.8% of the time.

Instead of doing his job for Texans, Cornyn has been spending his time trying to defend Trump and fundraise off of his relationship to the White House. Quite literally, as shown in this screenshot of the page at www.johncornyn.com/trump-support.

This story on how Trumpism has come to define the Republican party explains what has happened to our desperate white-haired senior Senator:

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who decided to retire this year after periodically sparring with Trump, described Trump’s support in stark terms: “It’s more than strong, it’s tribal in nature,” Corker said.

“People who tell me, who are out on the trail, say, ‘Look, people don’t ask about issues anymore. They don’t care about issues. They want to know if you’re with Trump or not,’ ” he said.

And, hoo-boy, is John “Mini-Don” Cornyn ever with Trump. A (very) limited set of examples in the press:

Sen. John Cornyn becoming one of Trump’s most outspoken Twitter defenders from impeachment push (Dallas Morning News):

Cornyn has directly tweeted or retweeted criticism of the inquiry more than 50 times from his personal Twitter account over the course of the past week. The tweets question the motivations of the whistleblower, who first called attention to the phone call, criticize Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who announced the inquiry last Tuesday, and accuse media coverage of the inquiry of being “disinterested in gathering the facts.”

John Cornyn Bets Big on Trump (Texas Observer):

[Cornyn] eagerly took on the role of a top Trump surrogate during impeachment proceedings. When the House’s hearings got underway in December, Cornyn insisted that the inquiry… was a farce. As far back as October, at a time when Trump was even more embattled than usual, Cornyn made it clear that, come what may, he and his GOP colleagues wouldn’t budge. “Republicans, I don’t believe, think it’s in their long-term policy interest to divide the party in order to elect Democrats,” Cornyn told reporters. “That’s what I think the calculation is.” He even said he wouldn’t bother to watch or read any of the House testimony. “I’m just not going to—I do not approve,” he declared.

John Cornyn defends Trump’s firing of Sondland, Vindman: ‘That’s within his prerogative’ (Dallas Morning News):

The Republican senator said Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was ousted Friday from the National Security Council, and Gordon Sondland, who was removed Friday as U.S. ambassador to the European Union, both worked “at the pleasure of the president.”

“He lost confidence in them,” Cornyn said. “So that’s within his prerogative.”

Asked if he would’ve counseled the president against those moves, the senator demurred.

“Given the nature of the adversarial relationship, I don’t think it was possible to repair,” Cornyn said. “So I understand why he did what he did.”

It does makes a certain kind of sense that people committing crimes on the daily would have an “an adversarial relationship” with patriots that are duty-bound to report those crimes when they learn about them. Firing Vindman (and his brother, and Gordon Sondland, et al) has a chilling effect on whistleblowers from top to bottom. This is exactly where the Senate should provide a check on abuses of power in the executive branch. Instead we have Cornyn smiling along with Trump’s vindictive “prerogative”, weakening the military he’s always in such a rush to praise.

Cornyn defends Trump’s use of term ‘Chinese virus,’ citing markets that sell bats and dogs as meat (Dallas Morning News):

Speaking with reporters at the Senate later in the day, Cornyn explicitly defended Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus” and reiterated his comments about meat from bats and other animals.

“They have a fundamental problem and I don’t object to geographically identifying where it came from… we’re not talking about Asians. We’re talking about China, where these viruses emanate from and which created this pandemic,” he said.

At the White House, Trump himself defended his use of the phrase, rejecting the idea that it’s at all offensive.

John "Mini-Don" Cornyn and his daddy — John “Mini-Don” Cornyn appears at a campaign rally with his ideological mentor