In a quite strange discussion on CNBC this week, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said that he’s supporting the Republican ticket, and as a loyal member of his party wants to see the GOP hold the Senate. But keep watching, because here’s the strange part:
I’m a loyal member of this fringe group of weirdos. If we believe him and take it all at face value, a Texas Republican who proudly supports his party thinks the really unfortunate thing in American politics is that the most reliable and consistent Republican voters are deplorable: extreme, crazy, out on the edges. 1.) I’m a loyal Republican, 2.) the Republican base is nuts. So…he’s…loyal to…dangerous extremists, while…
Hold on, trying to diagram a premise.
This is Cornyn’s argument: The good people, the reasonable people, aren’t the high-propensity Republican voters who always turn out behind their party; rather, the good people show up later, after the right-wing whack jobs who vote Republican have chosen their terrible extremist candidates, and then the decent centrist folk try to find the political center and undo the harm that the Republican trash have caused.
The logic doesn’t hold: If the base is extreme, why would you proudly support the party that’s built on the foundation of that dangerous extremism?
It makes less sense if you consider Cornyn’s political history, by the way, because Republican primary voters have been choosing him as their guy for literally decades. Cornyn first held public office in Texas in the 1980s, was elected as the state’s attorney general in the 1990s, and has been in the Senate for more than two decades. Republican primary voters chose him over and over again, and he’s appalled by the deeply negative effect that Republican voters’ extremism always demonstrates during primary elections. Try to parse the way those two claims fit together.
To simplify all of that to the point where it starts making any sense at all, Cornyn thought Republican primary voters were smart and decent when they chose John Cornyn, after which they chose somebody else and turned into wild-eyed extremist morons. Cornyn’s politics terminate at the end of his own arms and legs: Good people vote for John Cornyn, but dangerous extremists vote against John Cornyn. He has no politics, no view of the public world that persists under all circumstances. What he has is infinite self-regard and no self-awareness, which he reads as a set of policy preferences. Vote for John Cornyn so America can be good.
Now, as far as Thom Tillis: Same analysis, but multiply by a thousand.
The recurring message in the long and tedious published interview that came out of this discussion is that Tillis understands everything, and everyone else is dumb. The interviewer asks him if Trump is “benign, buffoonish, annoying, embarrassing, humiliating and inappropriate” (and “benign” fits in there poorly, but whatever), and if the president is just a simpleton who wants to be on TV and have “wrestling and fights on the South Lawn of the White House,” and Tillis says that yes, that’s exactly it:
See, you’ve actually done a better job of illustrating my point about his advisers being so important because you were absolutely right. That’s most what the president wants to do, and if you had people that were executing well on policy and working well with Congress, we wouldn’t be where we are, and he could go do that thing.
But Tillis is leaving the Senate after he broke with Trump on policy. He announced his retirement shortly after announcing that he refused to vote for the One Big Beautiful Bill. The end of his political career came in a package with a decision to oppose the Trump administration’s policy agenda, after which he talked to Politico and said that Trump doesn’t care about policy and isn’t capable of thinking about it.
Again, the logic doesn’t hold, but you can square it all by watching him admire his own image in the mirror. His political verdict is a personal verdict: Good politics is agreeing with Thom Tillis.
They’re not thinking about the country, they’re not thinking about good policy, they’re not thinking about the states they represent or the people they’re supposed to serve. They’re thinking about themselves, and their own infinite self-regard. What John Cornyn and Thom Tillis keep accidentally confessing, while bragging about how good they are, is that the American political class is primarily focused on the wellbeing of the American political class: How does this benefit me?
Their final message on their way out of the building would be deeply embarrassing to anyone with a little bit of self-awareness, but they keep proclaiming it with great pride and confidence. Remember this moment.
