Donald Trump is like the husband that wives hope they can change — but can’t, grumbled GOP Texas Sen. John Cornyn, indicating Republican senators are like the president’s dissatisfied spouses.
“I think what we found is that we’re not going to change President Trump,” the senator told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “He is who he is. You either love him or hate him, and there’s not much in between.”
The Trump situation is “like a lot of women who get married and think they’re going to change their spouse, and that doesn’t usually work out very well,” Conyn conceded.
Cornyn, currently in a tight race for reelection against his Democratic rival, Air Force vet MJ Hegar, says he has disagreed with Trump on some major policy issues — including the administration’s record deficit, Trump’s tariffs on Chinese exports, and using Pentagon money for the southern border wall.
“This idea that China is paying the price” for Trump’s trade war, and “we’re not paying the price here at home is just not true,” Cornyn told the newspaper.
But the senator said he has expressed his concerns quietly with the president’s staff in private discussions.
“What I tried to do is not get into public confrontations and fights with him because, as I’ve observed, those usually don’t end too well,” he told the newspaper.
Hegar has another theory about why no one’s heard about Cornyn’s opposition to Trump’s policies.
She attacked Cornyn as a hypocrite on at least one of the issues he singled out. The senator “publicly supported and voted for Donald Trump’s plan to steal money from our troops to pay for his useless border wall. Now today he says he privately opposed it,” she tweeted. “Either John Cornyn’s a coward — or he’s a liar.”