"We Don't Agree on Everything"

The five words Democrats are using to launder the Trump years.

The haunted collage of modern Democratic politics: Black women thanked, institutions invoked, Trump normalized, and moral compromise renamed strategy. Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Unsplash.

Last night Ken Paxton defeated John Cornyn.

James Talarico posted this:

James Talarico@jamestalarico

I want to thank Senator John Cornyn for his years representing our state.  We don’t agree on everything, but we both still believe in public service. To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: you have a place in our campaign.

1:03 AM · May 27, 2026 · 1.46M Views

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3.49K Replies · 4.66K Reposts · 41.6K Likes

It is an understandable political strategy and a little bit discomforting morally. The tweet does not exactly call Cornyn honorable, but it does something more elegant and more troubling. It thanks him for his service, locates him and Talarico inside a shared civic vocation called public service, and waves toward “everything” they disagree on as if disagreement were the relevant category. It is the grammar of a difference of opinion between two reasonable men. The grammar of what John Cornyn has actually done in the Trump years does not survive contact with that frame.

To accept that frame is to wave away a record that, even by the slumped standards of the post-2016 Republican Party, reads as a quiet capitulation dressed up in judicial robes. The framing requires that we forget, and it seems like Talarico’s communications staff is betting that Texans will.

We should not.

Begin where the rot first showed. When the House impeached Trump in December 2019 for leveraging military aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on a political rival, Cornyn, a former Texas Supreme Court justice who likes to invoke his judicial impartiality the way other men invoke their grandmothers, pledged in a fundraising email to “wrap up this sham impeachment with an acquittal” before the Senate trial had even begun. The juror promised the verdict and then delivered it. A year later, after a mob Trump summoned to Washington attacked the Capitol while Cornyn was inside it, he voted to acquit again, allowing himself, characteristically, to offer the gentleman’s footnote of a mild rebuke of Trump’s “reckless” conduct, as it was paired with the vote that mattered, and then cast the way the party needed it cast.

The certification of the 2020 election is the moment the public-service narrative most wants to lean on, and it is thinner than it looks. Yes, Cornyn declined to join Ted Cruz in objecting to the electoral count on January 6. But the letter he sent Texans the day before praises Trump’s administration for “so many successes, almost too many to name,” entertains the legitimacy of Cruz’s audit fantasy in principle while quibbling over its timeline, and concedes only that “allegations alone will not suffice.” He did the bare procedural minimum a former judge could be expected to do, and then spent the next four years building a campaign website headlined “The Trump-Cornyn Record.”

Cornyn’s own campaign — not his critics, not the DSCC, his campaign — boasts that he voted with Trump 99.2 to 99.3 percent of the time, a figure he placed in television ads as part of a nearly $100 million air war. As Senate Whip during the first term, he was not just a passive vote, but the man literally whipping the votes for the tax cuts, the border wall, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. The institutionalist’s role in the Trump project was to make the machinery run, and he ran it.

The second term clarified what the first had merely suggested. When Trump returned and nominated a slate that included a weekend Fox host as Secretary of Defense, an anti-vaccine activist for Health and Human Services, an Assad-sympathetic former Democrat for Director of National Intelligence, and a man who had published an enemies list as FBI Director, Cornyn voted yes on every single one. Mitch McConnell (another relic of an era when racist and misogynistic grievance was peddled as Burkian desire) even voted no on four. Collins and Murkowski found a spine for Hegseth. Cornyn, the former judge, the institutionalist, found none. He issued a press release calling Hegseth “my friend.” And when Paxton dared him on the SAVE Act, Cornyn, who is a self-described institutionalist and whose entire brand was the dignity of Senate procedure, wrote a New York Post op-ed declaring he was now open to nuking the filibuster if Trump needed it nuked. The conviction lasted as long as the primary required.

The detail that condemns him most, though, is the one his campaign would prefer everyone forget. In May 2023, with Trump fresh off a civil verdict for sexual abuse and a CNN town hall in which he mocked the woman a jury had just believed, Cornyn told Texas reporters that Trump’s “time has passed him by” and that Republicans needed “an alternative.”

This is the part of the record Trumpworld remembered and punished.

It is also the part that matters morally because Cornyn saw what Trump was, said so out loud, and then, once Trump won the primary anyway, went home and rebuilt his career around making Trump’s agenda law. He is not a man who resisted Trump and was destroyed for it. He is a man who delivered for Trump and was discarded anyway, because the decades-long GOP identity crisis requires not just the votes but the kneeling. That is a tragedy of a kind, but it is not merely a difference of opinion between two men who believe in public service.

So, this is where the moral discomfort of Talarico’s framing comes into focus.

Talarico’s strategy is to appeal to Trump voters through a veil of Christianity. That is admirable, but also seems quixotic in today’s time frame. If politics is a substitute for warfare, then people are voting due to power and all of its unsavory realities. That means that power translates within an American context, a context that has supremacy and anti-intellectualism wrapped together like a hermit in a duvet in the dead of winter. To not even consider the things that much of the Democratic base has been a moral witness to, as Cornyn proselytizes himself for Trumpism, is to insult the intelligence of that base. And to offer Cornyn’s supporters “a place in our campaign” without a single word about what they were supporting is to suggest, quietly, that what they were supporting did not really count.

The standard pushback at this point comes in two flavors, and they are worth taking seriously because they are sincere, not because they are correct.

The first is consequentialist: we have to beat Trump at any cost, and if the cost is letting Cornyn off the hook on the way to flipping a Senate seat, that is a price worth paying.

The trouble with this argument is that it has been the working theory of Democratic strategy for most of the last twenty years, and the empirical record is not kind to it. The “any cost” coalition was the theory in 2010, 2014, and 2016, when Democrats lost ground in the suburbs they were courting, and in the base communities they assumed could not go anywhere else. It was the theory in 2024, when the party’s quiet bet on the never-Trump Republican turned out, once again, to be a bet on a voter who did not exist in the numbers the strategy required, while Black, Latino, and young voter turnout slid in precisely the places that decided the election. The cost of “any cost” is paid by the voters whose turnout the strategy quietly assumes. They are the cost. And every cycle, fewer of them are willing to be it.

The second pushback is the appeal to political gravity: this is just how politics works.

Coalitions shift, voters are persuadable, you take them where you find them, and moral accounting is a luxury of people who do not have to win elections. This argument has the virtue of seeming worldly and the defect of being historically false. It is not how politics has always worked. It is how a particular American consensus has worked since approximately 1968, a consensus that produced Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Carter’s stagflation, Reagan’s Philadelphia speech, the 1994 crime bill, welfare reform, the Iraq vote, and, in the fullness of time, Donald Trump. Treating that consensus as gravity rather than as a series of choices made by specific people for specific reasons is the rhetorical move that makes the choices invisible. Gravity is not a strategy. It is the thing strategies have to account for. And the strategy of accommodating the post-1964 White backlash coalition has been, on its own terms, losing for the better part of two decades. The people insisting it is the only realism available are defending the realism of a coalition that is, in real time, failing.

There is a third pushback worth naming, the one that does not get said out loud: that the base will come home in November because where else are they going to go? This is the argument the Cornyn voters are not being asked to accept, because no one would dare. It is reserved for the voters the party feels safest taking for granted.

This seems to be the strategy of the Democratic Party that has decided to sacrifice its minority voters and look away from its base to chase after voters who left the party after the Civil Rights Act was passed. That migration was not an accident of personality or a single bad election cycle; it was a deliberately built coalitional project. Goldwater in 1964 voted against the Civil Rights Act and carried five Deep South states, no Republican had carried since Reconstruction. Nixon read the returns and built the Southern Strategy around them, trading the explicit grammar of segregation for the laundered grammar of law and order, busing, and welfare. Reagan opened his 1980 general election campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were murdered, and gave a speech about states’ rights. The continuum is unbroken because the contract underneath it is unbroken.

Trump did not invent this coalition.

He stripped the laundering off it and ran on the original text.

A bridge can be politically useful and morally incomplete at the same time. When “public service” becomes the language of reconciliation, the question is who gets asked to stand underneath it and what history they’re told to leave behind. Made with Artificial Intelligence.

The conventional pushback is that times have changed, and people aren’t just voting on bigotry.

However, Trump has broken political gravity and consolidated power through the promise of backlash toward historically voiceless groups. The invisible contract between cis White male supremacy and class denial is still strong in American politics, and to ignore that, as most of the centrist commentariat does, is to deny historical structures sixty years, arguably longer, in the making. A Democratic party that thanks John Cornyn for his public service to peel off voters who have been in that contract since 1964 is not running against the contract. It is bidding for a junior partnership in it.

I know that Democrats not winning in November is purportedly bad for democracy. However, it is also grotesque for a party to take voters for granted while simultaneously ignoring them.