The Ship of Theseus

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

 

Count me among those who believe that the conventional wisdom about last night’s Texas Senate Republican runoff has the cause and effect backward.

 

It wasn’t the president’s endorsement that propelled state Attorney General Ken Paxton to a landslide over four-term incumbent John Cornyn. It was the likelihood of a landslide that propelled the president to endorse Paxton.

 

Donald Trump’s support is worth a lot in a Republican primary, but it ain’t worth 27.6 points. No one knows how much narrower the margin would have been had he followed through on his initial plan to endorse Cornyn, but I suspect Paxton would have won even in that scenario. Trump has always understood the right-wing brain better than movement conservatives do; he saw a freight train bearing down on Cornyn, it seems, and opted not to join him on the tracks.

 

If you’re committed to blaming the president for Tuesday’s outcome, though, there are better ways to do so than to obsess over his endorsement.

 

Regular readers know my theory about why Republican voters are suddenly hellbent on purging incumbents in primaries: They’re in their Jonestown phase. Disappointed in Trump’s economic failures yet psychologically unable to hold him (or themselves) accountable, they’re coping by turning more radically cultish and flogging heretics like Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy instead.

 

Surely things in America will improve if the president faces even less resistance inside the GOP.

 

Trump’s moral influence on the right after a decade of degradation was also obvious in the result. Ask Paxton voters to name something Cornyn did to alienate them, and I’d be surprised if more than two out of 10 could answer with specificity. Those two would likely point to the compromise he struck with Democrats on a gun bill in 2022—but I’d be even more surprised if either could explain in any detail what that bill did.

 

The truth is that Republican voters preferred Paxton because he’s a bad guy. Trumpism is a depraved anti-morality that treats sociopathy as a political virtue inasmuch as it’s defined by ruthless amoral determination in pursuing one’s interests. The challenger in this race fit that description to a T. The incumbent, a more dignified figure, plainly did not.

 

They liked Paxton because he’s a bad guy, not in spite of it. Which made it baffling that Cornyn chose to campaign on … what a bad guy Paxton is.

 

As late as yesterday afternoon, with Texas Republicans at the polls, the senator complained to CNN that his opponent has “gotten away with so much for so long and not been held accountable for it, but I think he is an embarrassment, his misbehavior. And he’s completely unrepentant. … It’s just emboldened him to the point of recklessness, and now to the point of self-destructiveness, especially with regard to his own family.”

 

All true, but I can’t imagine a less effective way to appeal to a group as degenerate as Republican primary voters. Watching Cornyn inveigh against Paxton, my sense was that he was blinded strategically by his own moral outrage: He was so mortified by the thought of a candidate being rewarded for flamboyant corruption that he couldn’t resist venting about it despite knowing how unpersuasive it would be to an electorate that adores Donald Trump.

 

“Does this guy know which party he’s in?” I wondered.

 

I wondered the same thing a few hours later as I watched his concession. “Tonight we’ve come up short in this primary runoff,” Cornyn told reporters after the race was called. But then he added this: “I’ve always supported the Republican ticket, and I intend to do so again in this general election.”

 

He intends to support a ticket led by someone he spent the last year rightly calling a scumbag?

 

Once more, with feeling: Does this guy know which party he’s in?

 

Character test.

 

Some might find John Cornyn’s affirmation of partisan devotion amid intense humiliation by his party affecting. I find it pitiful.

 

He’s a voyager on a ship of Theseus. The modern Republican Party bears the same name as the vessel Cornyn boarded decades ago, but nearly all of its components—including the senator himself as of last night—have been replaced. Morally and ideologically, the ship must be unrecognizable to a crewman like him who enlisted to join the small-government “character counts” Reaganite armada.

 

Now that he’s been fired, why doesn’t he disembark already, for cripes’ sake?

 

“As a moderate Republican, I have no place in this party anymore,” a Texas Republican staffer lamented to a reporter after Cornyn’s defeat. “There is no middle ground. No room for moderates. Only far right or far left.” That’s correct, but it should not have taken 10 farking years for the right’s dwindling population of non-lunatics to realize they’re on a ship of Theseus. And that realization should not have depended on whether a four-term incumbent might barely survive a primary runoff against a goblin like Ken Paxton.

 

But at least this person did realize it, however belatedly. Why hasn’t Cornyn?

 

I could understand him affirming his commitment to the GOP if he had spent the campaign hashing out his policy differences with Paxton. It makes sense for a defeated primary candidate to put aside those differences and back the nominee in the general election, knowing that the nominee’s policy preferences will resemble their own more closely than the other party’s will. It’s elementary “lesser of two evils” logic.

 

But Cornyn’s objection to Paxton wasn’t that his policy ideas were bad. It’s that he’s morally repellent, untrustworthy, and unfit to represent the people in Texas. How do you back a guy as the lesser of two evils after you’ve decided that he’s actually evil?

 

Why not just wash your hands of the general election instead?

 

Consider what Ken Paxton’s political success says about the right. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not quite true that his victory derives straightforwardly from Republican voters’ appetite for Trumpism. In an important way, Paxton’s rise is worse.

 

Trump’s ascendance in 2016 was tied to a particular policy agenda focused on ridding America of people whom his base found undesirable, either by removing them or by preventing them from entering in the first place. Build the wall, ban the Muslims, deport the illegals: All of that was very politically incorrect, far beyond what the average squishy Beltway Republican could stomach. Right-wingers seemed to intuit that only a person who’s unusually immune to moral pressure could be trusted to see a program like that through.

 

That was Trump. The “anti-morality” he espoused and embodied implicitly guaranteed that he would be ruthless about carrying out specific policies that the right supported. His sociopathy was a means to a political end.

 

Paxton’s victory on Tuesday suggests that the means have become the end. There’s no innovative suite of policies he proposed that only a scumbag would be capable of implementing; his agenda is no more creative or complicated than “whatever Trump wants.” His immorality itself, not anything useful that it’s supposed to accomplish, made him compelling to Republican voters. They’re now looking for the most ruthless, anti-moral performance artists they can find and pronouncing them ipso facto the sort of people America badly needs to “shake up” Washington or whatever.

 

That’s a new frontier in degeneracy, a kakistocracy’s bizarro-world version of a character test in which the familiar preference for the lesser of two evils becomes a preference for evil itself. John Cornyn failed that test, which is commendable—and then, incredibly, he turned around during his concession speech and validated it by confirming that he’ll support the party anyway in November. He spent the entire primary insisting that good character should matter, only to immediately decide that it shouldn’t if there’s a Democrat on the other side of the ballot.

 

That’s 10 years of Republican politics in one soundbite.

 

Why conservatives failed.

 

Another way to frame all of that is to say that Tuesday night was the ol’ Republican hostage crisis in microcosm.

 

Since 2015, postliberals have been far more willing than conservatives to act in ways that increase their leverage over the right even if doing so improves Democrats’ chances of winning general elections. That asymmetry has created a hostage standoff in which conservatives are forever reconciling themselves to postliberal candidates so that the party doesn’t end up dead.

 

Everyone but everyone understands that nominating Ken Paxton is risky business in a political environment like the current one. Democrats are far ahead on the generic ballot; Hispanics, of whom there are many in Texas, have trended sharply against Trump; James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, is raking in money; and Paxton is buried under tons of ethical baggage. At best, Republicans will hold Cornyn’s seat only by diverting tens of millions of dollars to Texas that they had hoped to spend in battleground states. At worst, Paxton will lose.

 

A primary electorate that prioritized holding the Senate would have considered all of that and renominated the “safe” incumbent Cornyn, reluctantly or not. An electorate that cares more about elevating anti-moral postliberals within the GOP would have done exactly what Texas Republicans did, despite the fact that they made a Democratic Senate takeover more likely as a result. They’d rather court disaster with Paxton than win with Cornyn.

 

Reaganites, moderates, anti-anti-Trumpers, and other normies could have deterred that sort of perverse prioritization by ensuring that their party lost in years past whenever it nominated someone unfit. They refused. Forced to choose between boycotting a general election to show postliberals that the normie vote can’t be taken for granted and reluctantly supporting sociopaths for the sake of keeping the left out of power, they’ve reliably defaulted to their ship-of-Theseus partisan conviction that it’s still better to be governed by the worst Republican than the best Democrat.

 

The people who voted for Paxton in yesterday’s runoff did so because they believed millions of other Texas Republicans who know better will dutifully turn out for him in November despite their misgivings. They are correct. And so the GOP will keep nominating garbage.

 

John Cornyn could have done something about that in defeat. The great advantage of losing his office is that the senator has nothing more to lose by catering to the right’s most loathsome impulses. No one’s asking him to endorse Talarico, which would contradict his policy preferences and could actually be counterproductive by antagonizing the sort of disgruntled Paxton-hating Republican partisan who might skip the general election.

 

But he surely could have declined to say anything Pavlovian about supporting the Republican ticket in November. His party’s voters made a morally inexcusable choice in choosing Paxton—yet there he was during his concession speech, unable to refrain from excusing them at literally the first opportunity despite being perfectly positioned to make them pay for it by withholding his support.

 

It’s preposterous. Doubly preposterous, in fact, when you consider what comes next.

 

Long term and short term.

 

A Paxton victory this fall will convince the president and his fans that there’s no downside to trying to purge other so-called RINOs from the party in 2028.

 

If they can win in this national environment with a moral derelict like him, they can surely win with other derelicts during a presidential election year, when Republican turnout will be robust. I assume John Cornyn believes his party will benefit more from being represented by figures like Lisa Murkowski and Todd Young than by some dissolute fascist Trump might pull from a trash can somewhere in Alaska or Indiana. Yet by calling for party unity last night, the senator made the trash-can option more viable.

 

Texas Republicans who are considering supporting Paxton reluctantly should also consider what they’re signing up for, short term and long term.

 

The long-term political risk of letting your party be led by cretins should be evident from the president’s polling. He’s already chased away many of the young and nonwhite voters who tilted right in 2024 out of frustration with Joe Biden’s economy, saddling them with a higher cost of living as he chased personal glory with a stupid trade war and stupider Iran war. The backlash that’s building to that and to his flagrant just-try-to-stop-me corruption could put some formerly persuadable voters off of Republicans for years.

 

And Trump at least has charisma. Paxton gets you all of the same moral downside with none of the retail upside. He’d be a horrendous advertisement for the party in the Senate, especially once the scandals begin piling up.

 

The short-term risk in supporting him is this: I all but guarantee that Paxton, Trump, and Texas’ Republican government will connive to try to overturn the result if Talarico ends up winning a tight race.

 

Character is destiny. For the president, seeing his anointed crony fumble America’s most ostentatiously red state will be almost as unacceptable as his 2020 defeat was. His enemies will blame him for not having endorsed Cornyn, and he won’t like it. For Paxton, the sitting attorney general, it’ll be a business-as-usual matter of abusing his power to attempt to benefit himself. He dipped a toe into overturning elections six years ago when he tried to get Joe Biden’s victory tossed out, remember, but was batted aside by the Supreme Court. He and his allies in Texas’ government will have more levers to pull this time.

 

The right will struggle mightily to understand how a guy like Talarico, whose masculinity they’ve gleefully impugned, possibly could have won in cowboy country. In the end, true to form, and despite the fact that Texas’ electoral administration is under Republican control, they’ll decide that he couldn’t have. Especially if control of the Senate hangs on the result.

 

That’s what reluctant Republican voters are signing up to enable by turning out for Paxton this fall—another wrenching, country-destroying, self-serving “rigged election” fairy tale. There is no bottom to this candidacy or to this party and it’s long past time for well-meaning people to stop pretending otherwise, even if John Cornyn can’t. (Yet.) You’re on a ship of Theseus. The lifeboat is waiting.