Bunker Mentality

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 20, 2026

 

This newsletter is a sworn enemy of optimism. If there’s a gray lining in any otherwise silver cloud, rest assured that I will find it.

 

I can’t find it in the cases of John Cornyn and Thomas Massie.

 

Tuesday began with the president announcing his endorsement of Cornyn’s opponent, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, in Texas’ upcoming Republican Senate runoff. It ended with a Trump-backed challenger ousting Kentucky’s Massie in his House primary. All of that is, superficially, bad news.

 

Cornyn epitomizes normie pre-Trump conservatism, while Paxton is a gleefully corrupt MAGA slobberer. And Massie was one of the few Republicans left in Congress who still stood for antiquated priorities like avoiding trillion-dollar deficits and not letting the president bomb whomever he likes.

 

Seems bad that their careers are over (or soon will be, in Cornyn’s case). It isn’t.

 

John Cornyn’s Senate career long ago descended into pointlessness. Not once in my memory has he raised his voice in a meaningful way against autocracy swallowing the GOP, as Bill Cassidy did after January 6. On the contrary: In his desperation to earn Trump’s support against Paxton, Cornyn flipped on preserving the filibuster, proposed renaming a federal highway after the president, and posted photos of himself deep in thought while reading The Art of the Deal.

 

If that’s what being a “respectable” Republican now requires, the unrespectable alternative will do just as well. Good riddance.

 

Massie is a libertarian for good and for ill—mostly for ill, as libertarians tend to be. He opposes unsustainable entitlement programs … and pasteurized milk. He distrusts big government, as he should, yet too often lets that skepticism lead him straight into Kooktown. He’s tangled repeatedly with supporters of Israel, supposedly because he objects to most forms of foreign aid. But isolationism doesn’t explain why he cast the lone vote against a House resolution condemning antisemitism in 2022 or why he continues to push unsubstantiated theories that Jeffrey Epstein was tied to Israeli intelligence.

 

Pro-Israel donors put big money behind his opponent in the primary campaign, which Massie took to describing as a referendum on “whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.” After the results were in last night, he told a crowd of supporters that “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

 

That’s what it takes in 2026, it seems, to build an independent bloc of right-wing support capable of putting up a spirited fight against Donald Trump.

 

The good news on Tuesday went beyond simply shedding dead weight like Cornyn and Massie, though. There’s a lot to be happy about in these results.

 

Declining odds.

 

For starters, the GOP’s odds of holding the Senate have declined.

 

If you believe, as any sentient human should, that maintaining what’s left of the constitutional order depends upon the opposition party controlling Congress next year, you should thank the president today for making that more likely. Democrat James Talarico has a much stronger lesser-of-two-evils pitch to make to Texas swing voters against the slimeball Paxton than he would have had against the bland Cornyn.

 

Even if Talarico falls short, the GOP will be forced to divert campaign dollars that would have been spent on competitive races elsewhere to keep Paxton buoyant in a right-wing stronghold. Democrats narrowly winning in Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, and Alaska in November because Republicans had to plow their cash into saving a bad candidate in Texas will not be a good outcome for the president’s party.

 

Tuesday will also make it harder for Trump to move legislation for the rest of this year.

 

He would say that it was already too hard, which is why he felt no compunction about opposing the more electable Cornyn in Texas’ runoff. If the stiffs in the Senate won’t advance his most radical proposals, he’ll need to replace them with radicals. But do the math: Assuming Paxton wins next week’s runoff, there will be no less than nine lame ducks in the Republican conference with a 10th, John Curtis of Utah, possibly soon to join them. Four of those nine—Cornyn, Cassidy, Thom Tillis, and Mitch McConnell—have various axes to grind with the president. Meanwhile, Susan Collins is facing a tough race in deep-blue Maine and needs to separate herself from the White House. And Rand Paul, a libertarian Massie ally, is apt to feel considerably more aggrieved by Trumpism after last night than he already did.

 

That’s six Republicans who are incentivized to oppose the most dubious elements of Trump’s agenda, and I’m not counting the perennially maverick-y Lisa Murkowski. The White House can afford to lose only three on any vote. (Well, four, if you count crypto-Republican John Fetterman. But still.) It’s not a coincidence that a Senate war powers vote on Iran went against the president for the first time yesterday, with the newly liberated Cassidy joining the Democratic side on the procedural vote.

 

Lay aside all of the nuts-and-bolts political calculations, though. Yesterday’s events were also emotionally satisfying.

 

Just deserts.

 

It’s satisfying that the GOP is about to saddle itself with a cretin like Paxton. For too long, the party has benefited from having figures like Cornyn around to whitewash its depravity, tacitly signaling to right-wingers and swing voters that one needn’t forfeit one’s dignity to support Donald Trump’s GOP. The president may be a lout, but the right’s big tent is still a place for more-or-less decent people like Big John.

 

It isn’t, though, and it’s past time that its normie supporters stop getting to pretend otherwise. Replacing Cornyn with Paxton peels away another layer of denial from conservatives who’ve spent 10 years resisting the truth that they’ve empowered the worst people in America to wreck and loot the country. If they want to continue to vote for this populist criminal syndicate, let them do it without any fig leaves of respectability.

 

It’s also deeply emotionally satisfying to see Senate Republicans so distraught at Trump endorsing Paxton over their friend Cornyn. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of traitors.

 

For 16 months, these people looked the other way at every form of corruption, constitutional and pecuniary, that the president’s imagination could conjure. Illegal wars, blatant derelictions of duty, graft so rampant that it can scarcely be tracked: Through their inaction, Republican lawmakers have blessed all of it. Fittingly, the biggest political story in America on the day Cornyn’s and Massie’s fates were sealed was Trump creating a slush fund from taxpayer money to pay his fascist flunkies and getting the IRS to agree not to pursue him or his family for tax cheating they’ve done in the past.

 

His second term has been a sustained exercise in placing himself above the law, and congressional Republicans haven’t lifted a finger to stop him. Certainly, John Cornyn hasn’t. Even Massie, whose Epstein files obsession antagonized Trump, has had little of note to say about the corruption blitzkrieg. The surest way to make an enemy of the president and lose your job is to side with Democrats by holding him accountable for his moral failings, and Republican lawmakers knew that. So they didn’t.

 

It’s the most cowardly abdication of civic leadership in the history of the United States, betraying the Constitution to serve Caesar—and Trump thanked them for it by shanking Cornyn between the shoulder blades anyway, quite possibly squandering the party’s control of the Senate next year in the process. Tell me they didn’t deserve it. Tell me you didn’t laugh.

 

Why, there’s even a chance that Massie will seek revenge by running for president in 2028 as an “America First” independent, gobbling up precious right-wing votes from J.D. Vance and spoiling the GOP’s chances of holding the White House. Won’t that be fun?

 

So it seems to me that everyone won yesterday. America won because the angry Senate Republican majority should be marginally less in thrall to an autocrat for the next seven months. (If we get a Supreme Court vacancy before January and Trump nominates a toady in the Aileen Cannon mold, he might be surprised by the outcome.) Democrats won because their chances of a congressional takeover have improved. And Republicans won because—

 

Well, that’s a little more complicated.

 

An ‘incredible’ decline.

 

“Incredible few weeks for Trump’s political operation,” political journalist Rachael Bade declared last night once Massie’s defeat was assured. “Incredible” is the right word. Her assessment is somehow both true and absurd.

 

The president is on an incredible roll of ridding the GOP of non-sycophants. Within the past two weeks alone, primary voters in Indiana ousted most of the Republican state senators on the ballot who had resisted his demands for redistricting. Primary voters in Louisiana ousted Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump at his Senate trial after January 6. Primary voters in Kentucky ousted Massie, a perennial thorn in the White House’s side. And next week, in all probability, primary voters in Texas will oust Cornyn.

 

In each case, voters acted at Trump’s urging. The evergreen advantage of incumbency in American politics was no match for the president’s wrath. It’s genuinely incredible.

 

But even more incredible is the fact that all of this is happening while his support nationally is halfway down the crapper.

 

A few days ago, for the first time in his second term, Trump’s approval rating dipped below 40 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. Yesterday Nate Silver’s polling tracker had him at 38.4 percent approval and 58.6 percent disapproval—higher than Trump’s disapproval after January 6, higher than Joe Biden’s disapproval after his infamous 2024 debate disaster, and higher than any disapproval number Barack Obama posted throughout his eight-year presidency.

 

A New York Times survey published Monday put the president’s overall approval at 37-59. His net approval on the economy and the war in Iran was more than 30 points underwater; his net approval on the cost of living was more than 40 points in the red. Among independents, his approval stands at 26 percent, below Biden’s following the 2024 debate. Democrats now enjoy a 10-point lead on the generic ballot, enough to take back the House comfortably if it holds up despite Republicans’ recent court victory on redistricting.

 

It is, in fact, “incredible” in light of all that to believe that this has been a good few weeks for Trump’s operation, particularly when you remember where most of his political energy has been spent.

 

On Monday alone, in the span of a few hours, he flipped out because the Senate GOP hit a procedural snag in funding his billion-dollar White House ballroom. Then the Justice Department unveiled the new slush fund that will be used to make the January 6 chuds rich. And then Trump surprised Americans by revealing that he was about to resume his extraordinarily unpopular conflict with Iran, only to be talked out of it—for now—by a bunch of Middle Eastern strongmen.

 

We’ve all grown inured to the insanity of the right since 2016, but sit for a moment with the fact that this is the political posture from which the president is steamrolling his enemies within the GOP. The country is struggling with a cost-of-living crisis that voters elected Trump to solve; he made it much worse instead by starting a war that tanked the global oil supply; and now he wants to extend that war while looting the treasury to pay off his cronies and strong-arming Congress into building him a gilded White House annex.

 

And it’s working for him, at least in Republican primaries.

 

A traditional president who’d been damaged as badly as Trump would be lying low instead of intervening aggressively in primaries, not wanting to taint potential general-election candidates with his tarnished brand. And if he was foolish enough to intervene, his endorsement would inevitably hold less sway with primary voters than it did in better days. Their disappointment in his presidency (so far) and their desire to maximize the party’s chances in November would make them less, not more, likely to follow his lead.

 

That’s not what we’ve seen happen this month, though, and I don’t think there’s any political logic that can explain why. Only psychology can.

 

The Jonestown phase.

 

Last month I wrote about Trump entering his “YOLO phase,” coping with the anxiety of watching his political support erode by replacing deputies like Pam Bondi with even more abject flunkies.

 

The president has lost control over events in Iran and will lose a meaningful degree of control over events domestically if Congress flips in November, a hard pill for a megalomaniac to swallow. Go figure that he might soothe himself by exerting tighter control over the things he does still control, like his Cabinet. Or his party’s primaries.

 

He may be powerless to stop his coalition from eroding, but he’s not powerless to purify what’s left of it by purging dissenters. “Trump appears to have all but given up any pretense that he’s concerned about the increasingly fragile Republican majorities on Capitol Hill,” Punchbowl News marveled this morning in a post bluntly titled, “Trump is doing whatever he wants now.”

 

That’s correct, and that’s the YOLO phase. The president has stopped restraining himself to try to improve congressional Republicans’ midterm chances and is now living his best authoritarian life, letting the chips fall where they may. Endorse Paxton! Launch the slush fund! As for November, que sera, sera.

 

If Trump has entered his YOLO phase, though, Republican voters have correspondingly entered their Jonestown phase.

 

It’s hard to make firm pronouncements about what the average right-wing joe is thinking in 2026 because it’s hard to know whether he or she is still in touch with basic political reality. GOP primary voters might be so punch-drunk after a decade of propaganda about “fake news” that they earnestly believe Trump is popular among Americans, notwithstanding the mountains of polling to the contrary. A red wave is building this fall. They can feel it.

 

But I’m skeptical that their denial runs quite that deep. They’ve been to the gas station recently. They know what’s up.

 

My guess is that they’re mirroring the president’s own bunker mentality in rallying to purge his enemies in primaries, a sort of cultish folie à deux in which punishing Republican heretics at the polls compensates for the right’s declining ability to punish Democrats. Most couldn’t tell you in any detail why they need to be purged, I expect: If you asked voters last night in Kentucky to name a specific vote Massie had cast that warrants turning him out of office, how many could? Twenty percent?

 

More likely is that, having slavishly bound themselves to Trump over the past 10 years, they don’t know what to do as Trumpism falls apart around them except to bind themselves to him even more slavishly. Case in point: When NPR interviewed a group of voters recently and asked them to grade the president’s term so far, one awarded him an A++. Aren’t gas prices hurting you, though, NPR wondered? Absolutely, the voter said, but he’s figured out a way to cope.

 

“Me and my wife have been fasting,” he told the outlet, “and there's a lot of benefits, including one of those benefits is saving money on groceries.”

 

That’s the Jonestown phase, and that’s what Republican primary voters won last night in sending Cornyn and Massie into retirement. They’ve invested every ounce of honor they have in a miserable political project that’s growing more undeniably miserable by the day. Admitting now that they made a mistake would be unbearable.

 

So instead they’re doubling down, purging Trump’s enemies as an emphatic vote of confidence in his leadership—and their own investment in it—at a moment when the rest of the planet has no confidence at all. They would sooner wreck the country than confess their error, and by the end of this, I suspect, they will. Last night was the latest opportunity for them to signal that they have no regrets about what they’ve done to America and that Trump’s critics certainly weren’t right about him all along, nosirree. They took it.