I recently wrote about Louisiana Republican Senator Cassidy felled by Trump’s vendetta. Before that, most Indiana state senators who’d resisted his gerrymandering demands also lost primaries.
Then in Kentucky, he targeted Congressman Tom Massie, mainly for pushing to open the Epstein files. This seemed like a tough nut, Massie a really upstanding guy, long very popular and loved by his Republican constituents. His challenger not remotely his equal. Didn’t matter. MAGA zombies followed their master and obediently ousted Massie.
Now we come to Texas. Once upon a time in America, a hint of scandal killed a political career. But MAGA world seems to embrace candidates not in spite of transgressions but because of them; Trump the poster boy. People constrained by norms, in their own lives, are bedazzled by public norm-busters. A key ethos of the MAGA cult.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton flagrantly abused his office to instigate partisan legal actions against political targets. He actually sued other states on behalf of Trump’s 2020 “stolen election” lie. He’s also a law-breaking corrupt slimeball, including securities fraud, a sweetheart plea deal for a pedo crony, and even a cringeworthy soap opera of marital betrayal besides. So stinky that even his fellow MAGA Republican state legislators overcame their cultist loyalty and impeached him. Wow. Yet he still remained a MAGA favorite, so in the end the legislators shamefully lost their nerve and let Paxton slither off.
That encouraged him to seek higher office, challenging longtime Republican Senator John Cornyn.
Cornyn is one of those old-time standard Republicans who, for political survival, has genuflected at the Trump altar. Unlike Cassidy, Massie, and the Indianans, Cornyn never did anything to cross Trump. In the March primary, neither Cornyn nor Paxton secured a majority, so they face a May 26 runoff.
Trump had not initially made an endorsement, but now he backs Paxton. Totally predictable. Trump is himself ensorceled by transgressiveness. He just loves bad guys. Endorsing Paxton not in spite of his sins, but because of them. (Predictably too, Trump says Paxton has been treated “very unfairly!”)
The foreign leaders he sucks up to are the bad guys (Kim Jong Un!) while he scorns good ones; the only Democrats he likes are dirty ones (like former New York Mayor Adams, and convicted Illinois Governor Blagojevich, whom he pardoned), while falsely impugning squeaky clean ones like Adam Schiff.
Senate Republicans are reportedly livid at Trump’s shafting Cornyn, a respected team-playing colleague, in favor of one so smarmy. And of course the Paxton endorsement is political madness. Cornyn would have been sure of keeping the seat in Republican hands. Not Paxton. Yet a majority of Texas Republican primary voters will obey their god and abase themselves by elevating this repellent candidate.
Democrats, in their own primary, sensibly chose the more moderate electable candidate, Talarico. Hopefully the broader Texas electorate will gag at Paxton and elect, for the first time in decades, a Democratic senator — possibly giving control of the Senate to the party of sanity.
If not, it will show just how fucked up this nation really is.
