President Trump took 11 weeks to choose between Senator John Cornyn and State Attorney General Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary runoff—so long that most people figured he’d never actually decide. Which is why, when Trump finally endorsed Paxton on Tuesday, the news hit a crowd of Republican retirees at a Tex-Mex restaurant like manna from the MAGA heavens.
Paxton was due that day for a meet-and-greet at Matt’s Rancho Martinez in Allen, but he was running late. Suddenly, the sound system, which had been vibrating gently with a selection of the Country Top 40, began blasting “Y.M.C.A.” People read Trump’s Truth Social post aloud from their phones and waved their arms in time with the president’s unofficial anthem. A man near me with slicked-back hair shouted into his phone, “We did it!” And by the time the next song came on—Thunderstruck! Ahh-ahh!—waiters were circulating with trays of free margaritas. “I have chills!” one elderly woman told me happily. Another lifted her plastic cup to the sky and shouted over the din, “What a time to be alive!”
It really is. Donald Trump is a historically unpopular politician. Gas prices, high inflation, and the war with Iran have all systems flashing fire-engine red for Republicans in November. Yet here was the president, throwing his political weight behind Paxton—a man who has been indicted, impeached, and allegedly unfaithful to his wife. In Washington, D.C., Senate Republicans were apoplectic at the president’s casual betrayal of one of their own. But here at the Rancho, an endorsement from Trump was welcomed like a hug from Oprah or the title of “Sole Survivor,” an American prize of inestimable value. These Texas Republicans love their attorney general the way that they love Trump: wholeheartedly, with no questions asked.
By choosing Paxton, the president is rewarding his—and his base’s—unwavering devotion. He is likely also guaranteeing Paxton a primary victory over Cornyn. And in so doing, Trump may have cemented a set of very difficult circumstances for his party. If Paxton wins on Tuesday, Democrats will probably be better positioned to win statewide in Texas than they’ve been in the past 40 years.
In the beginning, there was a pen. A $1,000 Montblanc, to be specific, the writing instrument of choice for celebrities, heads of state, and other kinds of people who recognize the cultural cachet of a customizable gold nib. Paxton apparently knows a good pen when he sees one, and in 2013, then–State Senator Paxton did see one—next to a metal detector at the Collin County Courthouse, where a fellow attorney had accidentally left it behind. Paxton picked it up and pocketed it. Later, after a call from an officer, Paxton returned the pen to its rightful owner; it had been a misunderstanding, a simple mistake, a Paxton spokesperson 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 in one from 2018.
Texas hadn’t seen anything yet.
Over the next decade, Paxton would build a rap sheet of legal and ethical entanglements so long and complex that it is difficult to quickly sum up. I’ll try: In 2015, his first year as attorney general, Paxton was charged with defrauding investors in a tech company. (The charges were dismissed 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 particular donor; Paxton later fired those staffers, who sued, alleging retaliation. (The FBI investigated Paxton, but the Justice Department ultimately declined to prosecute. A judge did find that the attorney general had violated the state Whistleblower Act, and Texas paid the aides $6.6 million.) In late 2020, Paxton became a star player in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, by suing to invalidate the results in four states that Joe Biden won.
By 2023, Paxton was the subject of a full-blown impeachment investigation based in part on the above allegations. Ultimately, the Texas House, including the majority of Republicans, voted to impeach him. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Senate, with Trump’s help. But during the Senate trial, sordid details about his personal life spilled out, including 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 at it again. (Paxton has denied allegations of an affair.)
Despite all of this, Paxton continues to win. He’s been reelected twice since 2014, serving 11 years as attorney general. Cornyn has run attack ads, but the rushing river of Paxton controversies is tough to channel. Earlier this year, the Cornyn campaign released a six-minute ad unpacking all of Paxton’s corruption allegations that no voter could reasonably be expected to sit through. Later, the campaign tried a different approach, publishing an AI-generated spot centered on Paxton’s alleged infidelity that was both hard to follow and painfully campy.
Ask any Paxton supporter what they make of these accusations, and they will usually reply with some version of “Fake news!” or “He who is without sin can cast the first stone.” Many of them simply seem exasperated. “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 stand by Paxton because he has consistently stuck by them. By the time Trump entered the White House, Paxton had already positioned himself as an enemy of the establishment, a warrior against the deep state. 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 facts 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 the Texas Children’s Hospital that required it to stop gender-transition surgeries for minors. He also ordered Texas public schools to show proof that they were displaying copies of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, which, considering the quantity and credibility of all the allegations against him, is a bit like the fox giving the henhouse a lesson on etiquette.
Paxton’s superpower is that he is highly adaptable to the changing dynamics of his party and, like the president, appears to be completely lacking in shame. He has always simply “ignored 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 writing a $1,000 check for Paxton in Dallas. “Guess what? We’ve got the hats. 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 elaborated, like Bambi’s dad “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”
Which brings us, as always, back to Trump. Senate Republicans had urged the president to endorse Cornyn, who has been in the Senate for 23 years, and whose white-haired politesse evokes a bygone congressional era. Last week, in an apparently desperate effort to secure Trump’s affections, 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 was not supportive of me when times were tough,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Paxton’s supporters can rattle off Cornyn’s sins without even pausing to think: He was slow to endorse Trump in 2016, and wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Trump’s efforts to build the 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 advertising campaign against Cornyn has been ugly. This month, the attorney general put out an ad arguing that the incumbent senator supports “Muslim mass immigration” and featuring Cornyn saying “Inshallah.” (“Ken Paxton has never said anything in Arabic,” a spokesperson for Paxton told me.)
Next week’s primary will be close, but Trump’s endorsement will probably give Paxton the edge. Whichever man wins will go up against James Talarico, a baby-faced state lawmaker and Presbyterian seminarian whose campaign has centered on faith and economic populism. Talarico is, in some ways, eminently attackable: He has said, for example, that “God is nonbinary” and argued that opposition to abortion isn’t rooted in scripture. Paxton is already workshopping nicknames for him, including “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”
But many Texas political observers and strategists believe that Cornyn would be better positioned than Paxton to beat Talarico in November, given Cornyn’s ability to fundraise and palatability among general-election voters. Especially in a year when the political environment seems so favorable to Democrats, running someone as controversial as Paxton, they argue, would be risky. The Cook Political Report has already said that if the attorney general wins next week, “Texas would move into a fully competitive race.”
This is, of course, the outcome that many Republicans dread most: that Paxton will be unable 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 it’s elected since 1988. If Paxton is the nominee, “we’re in deep kimchi, which is Korean for ‘shit,’” Jerry Patterson, a Republican, former Texas land commissioner, and Cornyn supporter, told me. (Patterson is evidently not a fermented-vegetable fan.) “We’ve excited a new group of voters,” he added, referring to Trump and Paxton supporters, “and now we’re paying the price for it.”
At least for now, the voters Patterson is talking about seem to exist in an alternate reality—a place where Donald Trump’s endorsement can only be a good thing, where MAGA reigns and margaritas abound. “I don’t know where they’re getting those numbers from,” a woman named Mary told me in Allen, when I asked about the president’s dwindling national popularity. There at the 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 is looking particularly bright.
