Hell Is Empty, and All the Ken Paxtons Are Here

Ken Paxton is not the first criminal with a narcissistic personality to run for and hold office in this country. In the Trump era, such traits might not seem worth remarking on at all. But Paxton manages to exceed most of his peers in his perfidy and his cruelty. He’s a man who seems to know absolutely no decency, down to a molecular level. And, sadly, he also may be the future of this country. 

Ken Paxton has accumulated two decades’ worth of misdeeds, from the illegal to the merely immoral, over a career in Texas politics that would shame many of the most illustrious charlatans in American history. 

Paxton became attorney general in 2015 and almost immediately began racking up investigations into his conduct and criminal indictments. That year, he was indicted for defrauding investors. The SEC subsequently charged the company involved with fraud. Paxton eventually manages to reach a deal that saw his charges dropped, but his malfeasance did not end there. 

In 2020, attorneys in his office reported Paxton for a litany of abuses, including taking bribes. When he fired those whistleblowers, they sued him and ultimately won in 2025. During this time, Paxton was impeached, an astonishing achievement for a powerful Republican in deep red Texas. Texas State Senate Republicans ultimately proved unwilling to convict him, but it’s significant that the trial ever happened at all. 

In 2025, State Senator Angela Paxton filed for divorce to end their nearly forty-year marriage due to infidelity. As Ms. Paxton explained in a post at the time:

Today, after 38 years of marriage, I filed for divorce on biblical grounds.

I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation. But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage. 

I move forward with complete confidence that God is always working everything together for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.

So, after enumerating many of his indiscretions, what marks Paxton out as a natural Republican standard bearer beyond his penchant for corruption and dishonesty? There, the answer is easy. He is as hateful as he is corrupt, directing both his personal prejudice and the full powers of his office as Texas Attorney General against LGBTQ Americans, especially trans children and their families. 

Paxton helped lead the charge against gender-affirming care for Texas youths, repeatedly branding it “child abuse” driven by “misguided ideology.”

Beyond working to make Texas one of the most hostile jurisdictions in the country for trans people, Paxton has imposed the closest thing I can think of to a kind of contemporary Fugitive Slave Act on women and LGBTQ people. This year, his office launched a suit against Debra Lynch, a Delaware-based nurse practitioner, for mailing abortion pills into the state. Paxton declared “the day of reckoning for this radical out-of-state abortion drug trafficker is here.”

Paxton has also attempted to reach beyond the borders of his state to police the treatment sought by Texas trans kids and their families in hospitals where they can still get care. Paxton’s office targeted Seattle Children’s demanding patient information about treatments provided there. A settlement was reached in which Paxton’s office dropped the request and Seattle Children’s relinquished its license to do business in Texas. In the aftermath, Paxton released this statement: 

Seattle Children's Hospital appeared to break Texas law and initially tried to evade accountability when investigated. When we merely began asking questions, they decided to leave the State of Texas and forfeit the opportunity to do business here. Let this make our position clear: medical providers in Texas must abide by our laws. In Texas, we vigorously protect children from damaging, experimental 'gender transition' treatments that can have life-altering negative consequences.

On an interpersonal level, Paxton has been reprehensibly cruel. He frequently mocks LGBTQ individuals, including misgendering trans persons. He has twice publicly misgendered Admiral Rachel Levine, who served as assistant secretary for health under the Biden administration.

Paxton has already couched his contest with Talarico in many of the same terms as his war against LGBTQ rights. As Shefali Luthra observed this week for The 19th

In his same ad on Wednesday, Paxton highlighted a clip from 2021 in which Talarico said there are "six biological sexes" - a reference to the fact that humans can have six chromosomal karyotypes, including XX, XY, XXY, XYY, XXXY and X. The ad also points to an interview where Talarico expressed compassion for trans children.

Paxton's ad also highlighted a clip from 2022 in which Talarico said his state Senate campaign had become a "non-meat campaign." Trump and other Republicans have falsely accused Talarico of being vegan. (The Democratic nominee recently ordered breakfast tacos with egg, cheese and potatoes at a campaign event; neither eggs nor cheese are vegan.)

Paxton is of course lying about Talarico. But his attacks are telling. What Paxton considers manly appears to be sleeping around on his wife, defrauding investors and friends, and making life a living hell for queer and trans Americans. Paxton is an abuser in essence—of the law, of the powers of his office, of the basic trust put in him, and of the most vulnerable in his state. 

Stephen Miller piled on, posting on X that Democrats have nominated “their first transgender senate candidate.” The message is all fairly easy to grasp. Talarico is unmanly because he kind, empathetic, pro-immigrant, and affirming of how others choose to express their sexual and gender identities. 

Like so many in the GOP today, Paxton is a male supremacist with a record of villainies against women, children, and other men who do not conform to or uphold his authoritarian and misogynistic vision of society. That’s clear in his attacks on Talarico. It’s clear in his terrorizing of trans kids and their parents. And it’s clear in his own wife’s words about their marriage. For Paxton, the world must submit to his needs and his hunger. If it doesn’t, he feels he can take what he wants. In that sense, he is a paragon of the Trumpian politician—a man whose fascism flows as much from his prejudices as his own adolescent, libidinal self-indulgence. 

And Paxton’s defeat of Cornyn has been hailed as another sign of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and its electorate. This is true enough. Trump has dispatched other Republicans this year for having the temerity to step out of line, including Kentucky representative Thomas Massie. But Paxton, despite whatever early polls might say, is well positioned to become the next senator for Texas. It is still Texas after all, a state that has stubbornly resisted turning purple, much less blue, in national elections. 

Voters in America’s second-largest state have made this man—a scheming, invidious heel of a man—into a potential national star. On some level, male supremacy is an exercise in narcissism. It’s an ego play for men about how they and others exactly like them should rule in perpetuity. And it’s not distinct from Paxton’s seeming insistence that God must, like him, have a penis. But that self-obsessed, self-referential politics has to find purchase with some public to be effective. Over the last decade, Republicans have proven more than amenable. 

The very fact Paxton was in a position to seek and win this nomination is an indictment of the Texas GOP, both the party as an institution and the people who fill it from the electorate up to the leadership. With the midterms arriving amidst a wave of anti-Black gerrymandering not seen since before the Civil Rights Era, the moral descent of the Republican Party looks set to be even more deeply entrenched. Ken Paxton doesn’t deserve to be anywhere near the United States Senate. But that chamber has already fallen to disgrace and ruin. And, even if Talarico manages to win in Texas this November, it seems to me that the senate will only add more men like Paxton as time goes on. 

Featured image is Ken Paxton, by Gage Skidmore