President Donald Trump on Friday said he is not ready to endorse either of the two conservative Republicans running for Texas’s U.S. Senate seat next year.
Earlier this month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he will seek to unseat incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn in the 2026 GOP primary, setting the stage for one of the biggest and most expensive intraparty fights of the election.
Trump in a press gaggle on Friday praised both candidates as “friends of mine” but deferred an endorsement.
“In a way, I wish they weren’t running against each other,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One. “… I’ll make a decision somewhere along the line.”
Cornyn has been representing the Lone Star State in the U.S. Senate for nearly two dozen years, and in that time has ascended to the top ranks of Republican leadership in that chamber. It was from that position that he campaigned, unsuccessfully, to succeed Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell as the party leader last year.
Before he was elected to federal office, he served on the Texas Supreme Court, and like Paxton served as the state attorney general.
Paxton chaired the Texas branch of each of Trump’s presidential campaigns and is emphasizing that connection on his campaign website, calling himself a “loyal supporter of President Trump and a staunch supporter of the America First movement,” the isolationist set of policies that Trump has been implementing since his election.
Though the attorney general is casting himself as an “outsider” in the contest, over the decade he has served as attorney general he has indisputably shaped the Texas Republican party’s policies. He also served in the Texas House for another decade and in the state Senate for two years.
Cornyn and Paxton have sparred in the past. The incumbent senator called Paxton a “con man” for the numerous criminal investigations into his alleged corruption, investigations that led to his impeachment by the Texas House and acquittal by the Texas Senate, as reported by the Texas Newsroom.
Paxton in turn has attacked Cornyn as insufficiently conservative and has criticized him for supporting military aid to Ukraine and for negotiating limits on gun access for convicted domestic abusers on a Senate gun violence bill.
Though Cornyn and Trump occasionally have differed, Cornyn voted for all of the president’s cabinet nominations in his first term and did the same this year with a more controversial batch of candidates, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.Both Senate candidates have been vying for the president’s endorsement, but recent polling has found that Trump’s popularity has been slipping since his election. If it continues to drop, an endorsement might not help either candidate, political scientist Mark Jones told the Texas Newsroom.
