For the latest bit of proof that President Donald Trump has lost his political mojo and that his era is one of political rot, look no further than the curious case of Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat.
Here’s the timeline: In 2022, just weeks before a competitive primary, federal agents raided Cuellar’s home and offices. The Biden Justice Department was investigating Cuellar and his wife for accepting approximately $600,000 over seven years from an oil and gas company wholly owned and controlled by the government of Azerbaijan and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.
In May 2024, federal prosecutors secured a 14-count indictment on bribery and money laundering charges. In August 2025, U.S. attorneys working for Trump continued the case, but dropped two of the charges against the couple. Cuellar has denied the allegations and accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the charges against him because of his vocal disagreements over immigration policies.
Miscalculation
As Texas became a crucial backstop to retaining a majority in the U.S. House after the midterms, Trump started wooing Cuellar — a harsh critic of the Biden border policy — as a potential ally. When that didn’t bear fruit, Trump last week suggested the charges against Cuellar were politically motivated and issued the congressman and his wife a surprise pardon.
Cuellar immediately filed for reelection, as a Democrat. Trump immediately got mad.
“Such a lack of LOYALTY,” the president wrote in a social media post on Sunday, adding a warning: “No more Mr. Nice guy!”
Two things are evident here: The master of the art of the deal hadn’t sealed a deal before he impulsively issued the pardon, and the whole episode — the presidential abuse of the pardon power, the two-tiered justice system, and the corrupt disregard for the rule of law — is emblematic of our sorry times.
Trump assumed that because he hands out pardons to both the accused and convicted like penny candy, the Cuellars would respond with appreciation and consider the Democratic Party the archenemy, as the president does. Instead, a defiant Cuellar told CNN that he was not switching parties. “I’m an American. I’m a Texan and I’m a Democrat, in that order,’’ he said, adding that as a conservative Democrat he was “willing to work” with the president.
But Cuellar, the only federally elected anti-abortion Democrat in Texas, can read the polls. He has represented the border town for 21 years in Congress and has a loyal base of supporters in Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley.
Trump, by contrast, is losing ground among every demographic group he relied on to win reelection last year. Although 43% of Latino voters backed Trump in 2024, a survey in November by the Pew Research Center found 70% of Latinos “disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president,” and 61% believed “Trump’s economic policies have made economic conditions worse.”
Sinking party
What’s more, the 2025 elections in Virginia, New Jersey, California, Georgia and Tennessee have demonstrated that the president’s unique coalition has not shown a willingness to show up when he is not on the ballot. Why would Cuellar, now liberated from the indictment, want to hitch himself to a sinking party?
Despite the charges last year, Cuellar won re-election in a district Trump won by 7 percentage points and, heading into the midterms this year, potential Democratic challengers kept their distance, a sign that many in his party saw him as their best chance at keeping the seat.
But Republicans were confident they could flip the seat next year. As part of Trump’s mid-decade redistricting gambit, Texas Republicans reconfigured Cuellar’s district to give the party an advantage, removing half of his current constituents. Based on the 2024 election results, Trump would have carried the new district by 10 percentage points. The National Republican Congressional Committee recruited Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, a former Democrat turned Republican, to challenge Cuellar.
Meanwhile, Cuellar’s legal woes were getting more complicated. Although his trial had been postponed until April, which is after the 2026 primary, a verdict was expected before the general election. Cuellar’s political consultant and a former campaign chair had pleaded guilty to laundering bribes and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. The Cook Political Report switched Cuellar’s new district from lean Democrat to a toss-up.
Then Trump decided he had other priorities.
“Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — your nightmare is finally over!” Trump exclaimed in his social media post announcing the pardon.
Trump suggested that the charges against Cuellar were pushed by “very sick and deranged people” which, it’s worth noting, now included lawyers in his own Department of Justice, not the Democratic Party. He also undercut the best argument the Republican candidate had to challenge Cuellar.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries seemed relieved. He told CNN he agreed with the president’s pardon and called the indictment “very thin to begin with.”
Trump may have pardoned the Cuellars because he thought he was exacting vengeance against what he called the “weaponizing” of justice by the Biden Justice Department. If so, he did it without an ounce of self-awareness. It is the Trump administration that has turned the justice system into an instrument of force against the president’s critics. And, by all accounts, his impetuous pardon of Cuellar may backfire.
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades. ©2025 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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