The Other Bush Doctrine

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

I appreciate a shrewd political ploy even when my side doesn’t profit from it. (A good thing too, as I’ve been without a side since 2016.) So my hat is off to Zohran Mamdani for reeling in a big, orange, not very bright fish yesterday at Gracie Mansion.

 

The far-left mayor of New York City doubtless realizes that Republicans’ dwindling midterm chances depend on frightening swing voters about a far-left takeover of Washington. There isn’t much he can do to ease those voters’ minds apart from sending occasional reassuring sound bites out into the digital ether and hoping that they reach undecideds. But when Donald Trump agreed to meet him during a trip to NYC on Monday, Mamdani saw an opportunity. And he took it.

 

“GOP rank and file hoped to turn Mamdani into the midterm boogeyman,” Politico reports. “Instead, as Mamdani’s time to brief the press came, he asked Trump on the spot to join him, and the president agreed, according to a person familiar with the meeting.” Knowing that Trump couldn’t refuse a chance to be on camera, the mayor successfully baited him into another of their weirdly chummy odd-couple press appearances. The unmistakable takeaway: See? The far left isn’t so frightening after all.

 

It was an impromptu televised Democratic campaign ad with the president himself as the unwitting star, as even certain MAGA influencers instantly grasped. “Six weeks before an election Republicans portray as a referendum on socialism and communism, Donald Trump started the week praising a socialist and will end it feting a communist,” Politico observed, alluding to Xi Jinping’s imminent visit to the White House. So much for the GOP’s red scare.

 

As a coup de grâce, Mamdani ended up calling on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—the three outlets Trump just banned from the White House—during his joint Q&A with the president, which can’t have been a coincidence. I wonder which poor sap among Trump’s aides had to explain to him that he got pantsed.

 

The mayor wasn’t the only politician who had fun embarrassing a MAGA hero on Monday, though. In Dallas, two Republican leaders whose heyday has passed joined forces to endorse Democrat James Talarico in Texas’ Senate race.

 

Sort of.

 

The Dallas event featured Sen. John Cornyn and modern America’s most famous painter, the no-longer-very-political George W. Bush, as a special guest. It was held on behalf of a new joint fundraising committee whose proceeds will be funneled to six Republican Senate candidates: Susan Collins of Maine, Jon Husted of Ohio, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Ashley Hinson of Iowa, and Mike Rogers of Michigan. With Georgia and North Carolina now lost causes for the GOP, those six states represent every remaining competitive battleground on the map.

 

Every remaining competitive battleground, that is, except one.

 

Conspicuously excluded from the committee’s largesse is Texas’ own Republican nominee for Senate, Ken Paxton. Paxton won that nomination by trouncing Cornyn in this year’s Senate GOP primary, of course; he also trounced George P. Bush, son of Jeb and nephew of George W., in the Republican primary runoff for state attorney general in 2022. Whether due to personal grudges, disgust at Paxton’s flagrant corruption, or reluctance to support an especially servile Trump toady, Bush and Cornyn seem not to care whether Texas’ seat stays red and also seem not to care whether everyone knows it.

 

I don’t know how else to read that except as a backdoor endorsement of Talarico: It’s not that we want Paxton to lose, you see, it’s just that we don’t want him to win. If you’ve been yearning for old-school conservative leaders to create a “permission structure” for Bush Republicans in Texas to support the Democrat or stay home in November, snubbing Paxton at the fundraiser is as close as you’re going to get.

 

It’s welcome news. Bush and Cornyn sent a clear message about Paxton’s fitness for office—and, by going to bat for the other six Republican candidates I mentioned, an equally clear message about theirs.

 

‘Good’ ones and ‘bad’ ones.

 

All political coalitions make moral allowances for the sake of preserving themselves. Democrats are doing it right now in Michigan.

 

Kamala Harris is making her first campaign stop of the midterms today on behalf of Abdul El-Sayed, which is about as strange as “strange bedfellows” inside the same partisan tent get. El-Sayed joined the left-wing project in Michigan in 2024 to protest the Biden White House’s support for Israel’s Gaza campaign by voting “uncommitted” in that year’s Democratic presidential primary; that anti-war sentiment may have carried over to the general election and cost Harris the state in a tight race against Trump.

 

Some black Biden-Harris supporters are aggrieved by it, El-Sayed acknowledged recently, which helps explain why he fared so poorly with African Americans in this year’s Michigan Senate primary. So it’s time for coalition politics to work a little moral magic: Harris, the alleged génocidaire, is joining hands with El-Sayed, the progressive saboteur, to call for letting bygones be bygones and keeping that Senate seat blue.

 

It’s awkward but logical. Both are still active in Democratic politics, and both will benefit in different ways from victory in November. And both surely believe that America will be better off next year with Democrats in charge of the Senate, performing aggressive oversight and rejecting Trump’s sleaziest nominees, than it will with a Republican majority continuing to run interference for every illegal and malicious thing the president does.

 

I understand that belief and share it. What I don’t understand is why Bush and Cornyn don’t. In what way does continued GOP control of the Senate serve their interests? Why are they still part of Donald Trump’s Republican coalition?

 

Come January, when Cornyn leaves office, neither man will have any direct stake in the party’s fortunes. Nor will they have an indirect one: If their goal is to elect a Congress that will advance conservative policies, I regret to inform them that that ship sailed some time ago. Yesterday Kevin Williamson rattled off a few of the “conservative” initiatives that the current Senate, with John Cornyn’s help, has either actively enabled or cravenly neglected to stop:

 

the enrichment of the president and his family and his cronies; the campaign of wanton murder on the high seas; the illegal war against Iran; the illegal war against Venezuela; continued attempts to undermine confidence in our elections and to meddle with their administration; the illegal imposition of a new national system of taxation in the form of unconstitutional tariffs; a lawless campaign of presidential aggrandizement that runs from the serious (supplanting Congress with the pretense of ruling by decree) to the tellingly trivial (the president’s obsession with putting his name on the Kennedy Center); the attacks on allies undertaken while the president enabled actual literal enemies of the United States of America, including the Vladimir Putin junta in Moscow and the Kim Jong Un cult in North Korea; financial arrangements that run from the shady to the illegal and that stretch from Caracas to Doha.

 

That’s not exhaustive, as Kevin notes. We’ve reached the point of right-wing ideological degeneracy under Trump where it can be said, without hyperbole, that the state will be less likely to control the means of production if Democrats are in charge of Congress than if Republicans are.

 

Three of the six beneficiaries of Monday’s Bush-Cornyn fundraising event are incumbents who’ve done nothing meaningful in the Senate to resist the Putinization of the federal government. Of the other three, there’s no reason to think any would behave differently if elected. The eternal plea from anti-anti-Trump conservatives is to punish “bad” Republican candidates at the polls while rewarding “good” ones, but that request deliberately sidesteps the essential question. In 2026, who are the “good” ones?

 

The Bush-Cornyn fundraiser supplied an answer that’s not merely false but pernicious: The “good” ones are anyone who isn’t Ken Paxton!

 

The “permission structure” created by that fundraiser, implicitly, is that conservative voters have permission to withhold their support from a Republican if he happens to be one of the most cartoonishly corrupt figures in American political history—but not otherwise. (And even then, not if he’s named “Trump.”) You’re not morally justified in voting Democratic just because a Senate Republican is a tremulous handmaid to fascism like Collins, Husted, or Sullivan. But if he’s an embarrassing sleazebag who’s beaten Cornyn and the Bushes at the polls? Fine, go ahead.

 

Setting the bar for fitness for office at Ken Paxton is about as low as it can plausibly be set.

 

Dubya’s former right-hand man, Karl Rove, did something similar recently when he announced that he’ll support a Democrat for the first time in 30 years in the race for Texas railroad commissioner. The Republican on the ballot in that contest is Bo French, of what are all these Indians doing at Texas football games? fame; Rove wants to send the message that the GOP won’t tolerate such beliefs. As loath as I am to punish him for taking a virtuous stance against bigotry, how can this be the first time in the Trump era that a conservative like him has felt moved to vote Democratic in the name of depriving a postliberal kakistocracy of more political power?

 

Never mind what I said about Paxton. Setting the bar for fitness for office at Bo French is as low as it can be set.

 

The long game.

 

From all of that we can deduce what might be called the new “Bush doctrine,” a corollary to one of the ironclad beliefs of Trumpism. Trumpism insists that being governed by the worst Republican still beats being governed by the best Democrat. The Bush doctrine amends that to say, “Well, almost.”

 

In truly extreme cases of gross immorality by a Republican candidate—Paxton, French, possibly Max Miller—it’s acceptable to withhold one’s vote from that candidate. But if all that candidate is guilty of is abetting a coup plot or letting the president start illegal wars or thwarting every attempt by Congress to police his racketeering, well, that’s politics as usual. We can’t risk breaking up the right-wing coalition over stuff like that.

 

The most charitable thing one can say of Bush’s and Cornyn’s intentions is that they might be playing the long game. Trump will be out of politics soon, no longer able to bend Republicans to his will; once he’s gone, the hope and expectation is that senators will revert to their conservative roots. If so, there’s an argument that one should keep voting GOP now, maximizing the party’s representation in the chamber in anticipation of the day that its elected leaders are free to vote like Reaganites again. “It is still possible to work toward a Republican Party that is more like John Cornyn than Ken Paxton” is how Kevin summarized that line of thinking.

 

He’s skeptical, though, as am I. The choice is a false one: Everything that’s happened over the past 10 years has happened with Cornyn, not Paxton, rubber-stamping Trump’s policies in the Senate, so how much better can a party that’s more like the former than the latter realistically be?

 

The dispiriting truth is that if Republican voters turn to another charismatic demagogue to lead the party after Trump, whether the Senate is composed mostly of Cornyns or Paxtons won’t make a lick of real difference. A Cornyn-esque Senate will hem and haw and express “concern” occasionally about that demagogue’s policies before supporting them, whereas a Paxton-esque Senate will support them enthusiastically, no questions asked. Who cares which it is? One can easily argue, in fact, that a Senate of Paxtons would be better for America’s civic health insofar as a GOP shorn of any patina of respectability would repel swing voters more effectively than a GOP in which conservative statesmen provide a reasonable-seeming front for authoritarianism.

 

The best thing that could happen to the party and the country, though, would be burying Trumpism at the polls. A proper repudiation probably isn’t in the offing, but getting wiped out on Election Day is plainly more likely to persuade Republican voters to consider repenting of their loathsome ways than holding on to the Senate and discovering that they’ve paid no penalty with voters for lurching toward Putinism.

 

That’s the thing I can’t fathom about the new Bush doctrine, and about anti-anti-Trump conservatism generally. It encourages the GOP base to continue on a postliberal ideological trajectory away from conservatism by pledging, explicitly or implicitly, not to punish it for doing so by voting for Democrats in protest. Regular readers will recognize that dynamic as the “Republican hostage crisis,” but this is a strange episode in an otherwise familiar phenomenon: Why do George W. Bush and John Cornyn persist in being held hostage when both are free to walk away, unbeholden to Trump or his voters?

 

The Republican Party in its current incarnation no longer deserves your support: If the two convinced some critical mass of conservative voters of that, causing massive GOP losses this fall, Reaganites would gain more leverage over the direction of the party in the aftermath than they’ve had since 2016. “Win with us or lose without us”—for once, Trump would be on the wrong end of the ultimatum.

 

But doing that would mean shattering the Republican coalition temporarily, and that’s not how coalition-minded politicians like Bush and Cornyn think. That’s not how any right-wing politicians have thought for decades, the leftist writer John Ganz observed today. Addressing the recent infighting over Bo French and the inroads made by right-wing bigots, he argued that the story of the modern GOP is one of radicals arising from the grassroots, being absorbed by an accommodating establishment in the name of preserving the coalition, and then that establishment having to accommodate the next, even more radical wave of grassroots populism toward the same end.

 

Bushism begat the Tea Party, the Tea Party begat Trumpism, Trumpism begat postliberalism, postliberalism begat Bo French-style white nationalism. “The transformation proceeded through choices made by conservatives who saw enough of what was happening to object, yet repeatedly concluded that accommodation was politically preferable to rupture,” Ganz writes. “The process did not require them to become fascists themselves. It required only that they redraw the line of acceptable association each time the movement crossed the old one.”

 

George W. Bush and John Cornyn aren’t fascists, but they are quintessential party men who feel in their bones that accommodation must be a better option than rupture. Their right-wing enemies don’t feel the same way—and that’s why those enemies are now in charge of the party, why Cornyn is headed for retirement, and why Bushism has become a dirty word among the GOP’s Trumpist establishment. Postliberals won’t be deterred so long as partisanship obliges their right-wing enemies to continue redrawing, in their favor, the lines of what is acceptable for Republicans to support.

 

Under the new Bush doctrine, the old line about liberals turns out to be true of conservatives: They’re too broad-minded to take their own side in a fight. Their big tent turns out to be big enough for everyone except Ken Paxton and Bo French—and as for them, just wait until the next round of coalition-minded accommodation.