[Liz]

Cornyn’s strained relationship and public/private
frictions with Trump stem from several key factors:

• Policy Disagreements: Cornyn has privately and sometimes publicly disagreed with Trump on issues such as trade agreements with China, tariffs, border security approaches, and federal budget deficits.

• Lack of Personal Alignment/Chaos: Following his defeat in the May 2026 Texas Republican Senate primary—where Trump endorsed state Attorney General Ken Paxton over Cornyn—Cornyn remarked that Trump “seems to revel in chaos” and noted that they no longer spoke regularly.

• Institutional Pushback: After losing his Senate seat, Cornyn adopted a more defiant posture toward the Trump administration, using his remaining time in office to block or challenge certain Trump-backed administrative and judicial nominees over policy and funding disputes.

Despite these friction points, Cornyn historically maintained a high legislative voting alignment with Trump during his Senate career, though tensions escalated sharply around the 2026 primary election.

[fwdude]

Cornyn developed the fine art of appearing to champion conservative stances while working to sabotage them behind the scenes. For example, he backed Trump's attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census questionnaire but expressed doubt as to it's actual implementation. “As a practical matter, I don’t know how they are going to be able to do it,” he said.

He was duplicitous in a lot of other critical issues throughout his political career, so much so that he only earned 68% rating on the Heritage Action political scorecard. That was likely being very generous.

[Flaming Conservative]

In other words, he showed his middle school mean girl side. (Feel free to use that in your letter; I don’t think that would constitute libel).