President Donald Trump unloaded on Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, on Wednesday evening, blasting the congressman for refusing to join the Republican Party after Trump pardoned him last year.
Shortly before taking the stage at a rally in San Antonio, where he faced numerous hecklers, the president posted a lengthy message on Truth Social calling Cuellar a “LOSER” and throwing his support behind the congressman’s Republican challenger, Tano Tijerina.
Cuellar was indicted in 2024 by the Biden Department of Justice on charges of bribery, money laundering and unlawful foreign influence. The DOJ alleged the congressman accepted bribes from a gas company controlled by the government of Azerbaijan and from a bank in Mexico City.
In December, Trump pardoned Cuellar, a moderate Democrat, arguing that the lawmaker had been targeted for criticizing the Biden administration.
A party switch by Cuellar could have carried real weight in the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority.
“To the people of Texas, I am headed your way, and one of the people that I am going to pay respect to today is Tano Tijerina,” Trump wrote. “Out of love and passion, he is running against a Dumocrat, Henry Cuellar, who, along with his wife, I pardoned, at the request of his daughters.”
The president said Cuellar and his wife would otherwise have faced more than 20 years in prison on federal fraud and conspiracy charges, and he noted that Cuellar’s brother, a sheriff, was later indicted on the same charges.
Trump insisted he made no deal in exchange for the pardons but said he believed Cuellar would naturally come over to the GOP.
“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.
Instead, according to the president, Cuellar announced just days later that he would remain a Democrat.
“Many considered this to be a tremendous act of disloyalty, and certainly, showed him to be an extremely ungrateful person,” Trump wrote.
The president also claimed he had heard that Cuellar’s wife wanted him to switch parties, but the congressman refused, and he warned that Democrats would now have another chance to go after him.
Trump heaped praise on Tijerina, calling him a “STAR” and expressing hope that he 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,” Trump wrote. “Henry Cuellar is a LOSER who, right now, should be serving a longterm jail sentence with his wife in a top level penitentiary.”
Later at the rally, Trump campaigned for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. The president had endorsed Paxton in the GOP primary over Sen. John Cornyn.
Polls show Paxton trailing his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, in the race. However, no Democrat has won statewide office in Texas since 1994.
