President Trump finished off Tom Massie’s congressional career Tuesday in what has become a pattern of successful primary challenges against incumbent Republicans, the most expensive House primary in history ending with a Trump-backed challenger defeating a twelve-year incumbent. With Trump now endorsing Ken Paxton over Senator John Cornyn in Texas, the pattern is set to continue into Senate territory. JD Vance endorsed the Paxton decision at a press briefing, saying Trump wants people who fight for the good and that Paxton was there for the country when it counted.
Stephen Moore, economist and co-author of The Trump Economic Miracle, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer and offered a notably different assessment.
Moore said he does not understand the Cornyn decision and thinks Trump made a mistake. He said he helped found the Club for Growth and endorsed Cornyn when he first ran, and that while Cornyn is no hero and is a quiet, understated figure, he has consistently voted the right way on major issues when his vote was needed. The problem with Paxton, Moore said, is not a matter of conservative credentials but character. He called Paxton a bad guy who is in the hip pocket of trial lawyers and whose personal conduct has been problematic, and said even setting those concerns aside, the political calculus makes no sense. Betting markets currently show a fifty-fifty chance that Democrats could win a Texas statewide election for the first time in fifteen years in this race. Republicans will have to spend fifty million dollars fighting for a seat that Cornyn would have won without spending a dime. Moore said if Cornyn were a genuine squish who had voted wrong on major issues the calculus might be different, but the record does not support that characterization.
He acknowledged that Trump almost certainly remembers Cornyn suggesting during the lead-in to the 2024 cycle that the Republican Party needed to move on from Trump, and that such things are not forgotten. He also raised the point that the Cornyn endorsement is as much about Thune as it is about Cornyn specifically, since the NRSC under Thune is backing Cornyn and Trump is clearly frustrated with Thune’s inability to build the votes needed to pass the Save America Act, with or without a filibuster fight.
On the filibuster question, Moore was emphatic and colorful. He called eliminating the filibuster the stupidest idea he has ever heard and said he has been making the case against it for thirty years. His argument is fundamentally that most laws Congress passes are bad, that the founders deliberately designed the system to make legislation difficult to pass, and that conservatives should not be trying to make it easier to pass more laws. He said without the filibuster, Democrats would have already passed universal healthcare, eliminated right-to-work laws nationwide, granted statehood to Washington DC and Puerto Rico, and imposed tax rates he estimates could reach eighty percent at the top bracket if they regain power. He said if Republicans eliminate the filibuster, the Democrats will use its absence against them the moment they return to power, and conservatives will have sacrificed their most important procedural protection with no philosophical leg to stand on.
Proft acknowledged the force of that argument while pressing the case that conservatives have spent decades restraining themselves from using power in ways the left would not hesitate to use, and that the trajectory suggests preemptive action may be more defensible than principled restraint that the other side does not reciprocate. Moore acknowledged moving somewhat in Proft’s direction but held his position, saying he wants more votes required to pass legislation rather than fewer.
On the economic picture and Trump’s approval numbers, which a New York Times Siena poll shows below forty percent with the president underwater on Iran, affordability, and even immigration, Moore said the administration’s messaging needs adjustment. He said Trump’s comment that he does not particularly care about gas prices because of the necessity of dealing with Iran sounded elitist and landed poorly with ordinary Americans who are making real budget decisions. He said what the administration should be communicating relentlessly is that it is doing everything possible to bring prices down.
His specific policy recommendations included suspending the federal gas tax temporarily to provide immediate relief, aggressively cutting Medicaid fraud, which he said runs to hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and indexing capital gains on primary residences for inflation. On that last point, he made it personal, saying as a sixty-six-year-old empty nester in a five-bedroom house he cannot practically sell because the tax bill on inflationary gains would be prohibitive. He said that dynamic is trapping older homeowners in houses they no longer need while younger people like his sons in their early thirties cannot find anything affordable to buy. Allowing people to exclude inflationary gains from capital gains taxation on primary residences would unlock housing supply at minimal actual tax revenue cost since the gains being taxed are illusory rather than real. He closed by noting a Wall Street Journal report that California’s Medicaid program reimburses for exorcisms, which he said tops free teeth for meth addicts as an illustration of how completely out of control government spending has become.