Trump is more bipartisan than people give him credit for. But how is that repaid?
Now Donald Trump torches Democrat for betraying him after receiving this huge favor.
President Trump has never been shy about naming the people he believes crossed him, and this week he trained his fire on a Texas Democrat who, in his telling, accepted a lifeline and then went right back to the party that wanted him locked up. In a lengthy Truth Social post Wednesday, Trump called Rep. Henry Cuellar “a loser” and threw his full weight behind the Republican trying to unseat him.
The backstory matters. Trump pardoned Cuellar and his wife last year while the couple faced charges tied to bribery and money laundering. Cuellar, who has served in the House since 2005, is now seeking another term, and the president made clear he is not pleased with how the congressman handled the gift of a pardon.
“In any event, I did the pardons, and made no deal, where a crooked politician would have, but I thought there would be a good chance that Cuellar, who was persecuted by Democrats because they didn’t like him, would have routinely gone over to the Republican Party — the people that saved him from years in prison,” Trump wrote. In plain English: the president says he asked for nothing in return and expected, perhaps naively, that gratitude would lead to a party switch.
That did not happen, and Trump let the Texas voters know exactly how he feels about it. “In any event, the man running against him, Tano Tijerina, is a STAR and, hopefully, will WIN! We call that payback for a disloyal and ungrateful person, a person whose life has been saved only to go back into the clutches of the people that tried so hard to destroy him. Henry Cuellar is a LOSER who, right now, should be serving a longterm jail sentence with his wife in a top level penitentiary,” Trump declared.
It is classic Trump: unvarnished, personal and designed to be impossible to misread. The president continued with a long pitch for the challenger. “Tano, a legendary Baseball Star, Great Athlete, respected County Judge, and fine person, will hopefully beat Cuellar so that people can show how bad it is when you are recognized and humiliated as being one of the most disloyal political people on Earth!” Trump wrote. He closed the thought with a note of pride about what he did not do: “I am very proud of the fact that I didn’t make a deal with Cuellar, which I easily could have, but relied on his character, which turned out to be a faulty one.”
The challenger is Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, the Republican nominee in Texas’ 28th Congressional District. Tijerina wasted no time amplifying the president’s message on X. “Everyone in South Texas knows anything after Hello coming from Henry Cuellar is a lie. President Trump just confirmed that,” he wrote. Expect that line to show up in plenty of South Texas campaign material before November.
Trump posted the message before delivering similar remarks at a rally in San Antonio, so the attack was not a late-night impulse. It was a deliberate message aimed at voters in a border district where Republicans see a real chance to flip a seat that has been held by the same Democrat for two decades.
There is a history here that gives the president’s frustration some context. When Trump announced the pardon, he argued that President Biden had weaponized the justice system against a member of his own party. According to an earlier Truth Social post, Trump claimed Biden “used the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders, and the Biden Border ‘Catastrophe.'” He added that Biden went after the congressman and “even the Congressman’s wonderful wife, Imelda, simply for speaking the TRUTH.”
That framing is worth remembering, because it was Trump himself who cast the case as political persecution. Conservatives who cheered the pardon at the time on grounds of fairness are now watching the recipient tout his Democratic credentials rather than express any particular debt to the man who spared him a trial. Whether that frustrates you or strikes you as an ordinary feature of a pardon with no strings attached depends on what you think a pardon is for.
The president’s critics will say a pardon should never come with an expectation of loyalty, and in the strictest legal sense they are right. Trump himself stresses that he made no deal. His point is political rather than legal: he believes Cuellar owes the Republican Party his thanks, and he is making sure voters in Texas know it.
Cuellar, for his part, has tried to carve out a reputation as a Democrat who breaks with his party on important issues. He has criticized open border policies and has even rejected the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America, saying the socialists are trying to use his party. That independent streak is the reason Trump believed he might cross the aisle, and the reason South Texas Democrats have kept sending him back to Washington.
Fox News Digital reached out to Cuellar’s campaign for comment Thursday. Absent a response, the congressman will have to answer for himself on the campaign trail why he remains a Democrat after accepting a pardon from a Republican president, and whether voters in his district want a representative whose party leaders are pouring resources into defeating the very person who spared him a trial.
Whatever happens in November, the episode is a vivid reminder of how Trump views politics: as a world of loyalty and consequences, where favors are remembered and slights are never forgotten. For Tijerina, that translates into the full-throated backing of the most powerful Republican in the country. For Cuellar, it means the toughest campaign of his career, against an opponent with the president’s endorsement and a very personal grievance from the man who pardoned him.
