This is an adapted excerpt from the May 27 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
We are getting a new look at just how weak strongman President Donald Trump has become as he wins ever-greater control over an ever-shrinking political faction. It’s a toxic dynamic we have seen play out in autocratic regimes and cults throughout history, and now we’re seeing it happen to what remains of the Republican Party.
We saw it in Texas on Tuesday, where reliably conservative Sen. John Cornyn, someone who has almost always voted with Trump, didn’t just lose his Republican primary but got walloped by the president’s candidate, Ken Paxton, the far-right, scandal-ridden state attorney general whose own party impeached him in 2023 for gross corruption. (He was later acquitted by the Texas Senate.)
It was, as The New York Times put it, a rout, with Paxton unseating Cornyn by more than 25 points. It wasn’t even close. It was so not close that the prevailing media narrative is that Trump’s power is only growing within the Republican Party.
Now, more than ever, it’s become clear that Trump is the Republican Party.
After all, this is just the biggest in a string of primary victories for Trump-approved candidates this month. His slate of MAGA challengers unseated six Republican Indiana senators who opposed Trump on gerrymandering.
Next in his crosshairs was Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who voted for Trump’s impeachment after Jan. 6. He lost his primary, too.
Then it was Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the most conservative members of the House. He angered the president by helping to force the release of the Epstein files. He lost to a Trump-endorsed challenger last week.
And now, Trump has unhorsed one of his party’s most-senior senators in Cornyn, a man who tried so hard to stay in the president’s good graces, from eating at a “Trump Burger” joint to posting a photo of himself reading “Art of the Deal.” In the end, it wasn’t enough.
The president told Republicans to vote for Paxton, one of the most notoriously unethical public figures in American politics today. But one thing Paxton has never done is cross the president, and now, more than ever, it’s become clear that Trump is the Republican Party.
As with any toxic relationship, the closer you are to it, the tougher it becomes to see reality clearly. The reality is that while Trump can dictate terms in Republican primaries, he is pulling the party further and further away from what most Americans want.
Just look at Starr County, Texas, which sits on the U.S. border with Mexico and has the highest proportion of Hispanic residents compared to any county, according to the 2020 Census.
Starr County famously flipped to Trump in the last election after more than a century of voting Democratic. He won it by 15 points, and it was widely seen as evidence of the president’s strength with Hispanic voters.
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If you looked just at the percentages of last night’s Senate runoff in Starr County, you would say Trump is still dominating. His candidate beat Cornyn there by nearly 50 points.
But what’s that percentage based on? How many Republicans actually voted in that runoff? The answer: virtually none.
Only 90 votes were cast out of more than 36,000 registered voters in the county, according to the Texas secretary of state’s office. In that same county, in a single Democratic primary for a local judge back in March, more than 13,000 Democrats turned out to vote.
That’s why Democrats are suddenly a lot more optimistic about flipping that Texas Senate seat — and possibly the Senate itself.
If you look at a map of Senate races being held this November, Democrats need to hold all their seats and flip four Republican-held seats to take the chamber. That feat looked nearly impossible before Trump endorsed Paxton, the atrociously fraught candidate Democrats hoped they would get.
It’s just clearer every day that Trump’s strategy for power has a tighter and tighter hold on fewer and fewer people. You see it in the polls where the president’s approval has plunged to new lows, as Democrats widen their lead on the generic congressional ballot. You see it in the increasing sycophancy of the Republicans who have so far survived Trump’s whims, as demonstrated by the coterie of kiss-ups who dominated Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting.
While Trump can dictate terms in Republican primaries, he is pulling the party further and further away from what most Americans want.
The level of bootlicking on display helps the rest of us see, as plain as day, what’s staring us in the face: People are abandoning MAGA and the Republican Party and distancing themselves from Trump. But as they leave and his base of support shrinks, the concentration of primary-voting diehards and Cabinet-level dead-enders in the president’s party will only increase.
It is the defining political dynamic right now in the country, and one that really can only be broken through mass mobilization and democratic election, which is why threats to upend democracy will only grow more intense as Trump’s faction of MAGA diehards keeps shrinking.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).