President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton in a runoff for the Texas Senate—so long that many thought he would never decide. That’s why, when Trump endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of retired Republicans at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from MAGA heaven.
Paxton was supposed to meet and greet that day at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, humming gently with a Top 40 Country selection, began blasting “YMCA.” People read Trump’s Social Truth post aloud from their phones and waved their hands in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man next to me with slicked back hair shouted into his phone, “We made it!” And when the next song started-A roar of thunder! Ahh-ahh!-waiters were walking around with trays of free margaritas. “I’m cold!” an old woman told me happily. Another raised his plastic cup to the sky and shouted loudly, “What a time to be alive!”
It’s true. Donald Trump is a historically unknown politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and war with Iran are all hot-button issues for Republicans in November. Yet here he was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, accused, and accused of being unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, DC, Senate Republicans were furious at the president’s apparent betrayal of one of their own. But here at Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was as welcome as a hug from Oprah or the title of “Lonely Savior,” an American award of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way they love Trump: wholeheartedly, without question.
By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his foundation’s—devotion. He is also likely to secure Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in doing so, Trump may have created a very difficult environment for his party. If Paxton wins Tuesday, Democrats will likely be in a better position to win a statewide sweep in Texas than they have been in the last 40 years.
Iin the beginningthere was a pen. The $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, is a writing instrument for celebrities, heads of state, and other types of people who recognize the traditional cachet of the customizable gold nib. It seems that Paxton knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, State Sen. Paxton spotted one—next to the metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney accidentally left it. Paxton took it and put it in his pocket. Later, after a call from the officer, Paxton he returned the pen to its rightful owner; It was a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, Paxton’s spokesman said. But that didn’t stop the ads. “This is Attorney General Ken Paxton, rummaging through the metal detector trays and stealing that $1,000 pen,” the narrator says. one from 2018.
Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.
Over the next decade, Paxton would create a litany of legal and ethical entries so long and complex that it is difficult to summarize quickly. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a technology company. (The charges were dropped after Paxton agreed to do community service and take an ethics class.) In 2020, some of Paxton’s aides reported their boss to the FBI, accusing him of using his office to benefit a certain donor; Paxton later fired the employees, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge found that the attorney general had violated the state’s Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Stealing” attempt to overturn presidential election results in four states that Joe won.
By 2023, Paxton was under full investigation for charges based on part of the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including a majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s support. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life were leaked, including by a witness testimony that Paxton had cheated on his wife, State Senator Angela Paxton. Later, in 2025, Angela announced that she was divorcing Paxton on “biblical grounds,” which is the Baptist way of saying that Ken was. there again. (Paxton has denied allegations of having an affair.)
Despite all this, Paxton continues to win. He has been re-elected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but Paxton’s oncoming river of controversy is difficult to navigate. Earlier this year, Cornyn’s campaign released a a six-minute ad expose all the allegations of Paxton’s corruption that no voter can be expected to answer. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing AI-powered space focused on Paxton’s alleged infidelity which was difficult to follow and painful.
Ask any Paxton supporter what he has to say about these accusations, and he’ll usually respond with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin may cast the first stone.” Most of them seem to be just angry. “Who cares?” a man named Eric told me in Allen. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” The truth is that grassroots conservatives in Texas are standing by Paxton because he has consistently sided with them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against deep government. As attorney general, he sued the Obama administration more than a dozen times, with mixed success; later, he filed more than 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. (Both of these things are applause lines in Paxton’s stump speech.)
As attorney general, Paxton sues like he breathes. This month, he won a $10 million settlement from Texas Children’s Hospital that called for an end to gender reassignment surgery on children. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, given the volume and credibility of all the allegations against him, is tantamount to a fox giving a lesson on manners.
Paxton’s greatest strength is his ability to adapt to the changing dynamics of his party and, as president, he seems completely shameless. He has always “dismissed electability as a concern,” Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told me. “He has no brakes.”
Voters I interviewed proudly made the same comparison. People thought Trump couldn’t win in 2016, a man named Doug Snyder told me after he wrote a $1,000 check to Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We have a hat. And we’ve been to Mar-a-Lago,” he said.
Politics needs more leaders like Paxton and Trump, Diane Truitt told me at the same event—alpha males, she explained, like Bambi’s father “coming out of the woods with those big whales.”
Wwhich brings usas always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to confirm Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired gentleman evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an effort to curry favor with Trump, Cornyn tried to rename a highway after him. But Trump was not to be swayed. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he did not support me when times were difficult,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Paxton’s supporters can dismiss Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was too late to endorse Trump in 2016, and he wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build a border wall. Worse, he voted with Democrats to pass a gun control package after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. He is, in short, a RINO, or Republican in Name Only. Paxton’s publicity campaign against Cornyn has been disastrous. This month, the attorney general put out ad saying that the incumbent senator supports “mass Muslim immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” Paxton’s spokesman told me.)
Next week’s primaries will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will likely give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will face James Talarico, a baby-faced state legislator and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign is based on faith and economic popularity. Talarico, in some ways, can be attacked a lot: He has said, for example, that “God is not of two kinds” and said that the opposition to abortion is not based on the scriptures. Paxton already workshop his nicknames, including “Sex Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”
But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would have a better chance than Paxton to defeat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s fundraising ability and his popularity among primary voters. Especially in a year when the political climate seems to favor Democrats, running for someone as controversial as Paxton, they say, would be dangerous. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would enter a fully competitive race.”
Of course, this is the outcome many Republicans fear most: that Paxton won’t be able to win over the moderate Republican and independent voters he’ll need to succeed in November—and that Texas will make Talarico the first Democratic senator elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep trouble, which is Pashitson, former Texas Pashitson, Pashitson, Texas Korean. commissioner, and assistant of Cornyn, he told me. (Paterson is clearly not a fan of fermented vegetables.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price.”
At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—one where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA rules with lots of margaritas. “I don’t know where they get those numbers,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s declining national popularity. In Rancho, voters don’t see Ken Paxton as an electoral liability any more than they believe Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. For them, November looks very bright.
