The Last Ride of Big Bad John

The first thing to know about John Cornyn is that everyone says he looks like a United States senator. He’s six feet four in boots, with blue eyes, a strong chin, and silvery white hair that hasn’t been brown since he was in his twenties. In 1999, two years before he even ran for the job, the Austin American-Statesman noted that “if you went to Central Casting for someone to play a United States senator, you might well pick John Cornyn.” Nearly a decade later, in Texas Monthly, Paul Burka wrote, “If you were to encounter John Cornyn at, say, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport . . . you would immediately think to yourself, ‘That man is a United States senator.’ ” Even Cornyn’s longtime opponents concede this point. “He’s a dull guy,” Tom Pauken, a former state Republican Party chair who once ran against him for attorney general, told me. “But he kind of looks like a senator.”

The second thing to know about John Cornyn is that he sounds like a United States senator. He’s mastered the art of the nonanswer. (When asked recently on Fox News about Florida’s plans to rescind its vaccine mandates, Cornyn’s ambiguous reply arrived at “Politics and science don’t mix.”) He gets genuinely excited when talking about legislative inside baseball. Ask him what he’s achieved in the Senate, and he’ll give you an enthusiastic paragraph about working with Virginia Democrat Mark Warner to incentivize semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, or he’ll tell you how he helped strong-arm his caucus into reimbursing Texas for $11 billion in border-security spending. (“The Speaker didn’t want to add that to the bill early on because he was worried that it raised questions.”) Cornyn’s voice is a pleasing baritone with little regional character—he spent his youth following his Air Force officer father from Texas to Mississippi to Maryland and, eventually, Japan—which only adds to his generically senatorial affect.

The third thing to know about John Cornyn is that by the standards of the institution, he has been a highly successful United States senator. He has chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and over the course of his career has raised more than $400 million for his party. He has served as the Republican whip, the second-most-senior position in his party’s Senate leadership, corralling votes to confirm Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh and rallying partisan support to pass President Trump’s sweeping 2017 tax legislation. Over the past decade, according to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, Cornyn has sponsored about twice as many bills as the average Republican senator and gotten nearly ten times as many bills passed into law. “It is a long-standing measure in the Senate, whether somebody is a workhorse or a show horse,” Phil Gramm, a Cornyn endorser and his predecessor in the Senate, told me. “And I think anybody that knows John Cornyn puts him in the workhorse category.”

Cornyn takes pride in that label. “The things I’ve been able to do require somebody who understands how to navigate a system that’s designed to make you fail.” 

They say every senator looks in the mirror and sees a future president, but it seems likely that when John Cornyn looks in the mirror, he sees a senator. Yet after more than forty years in elected office and in his fourth term in the Senate, Cornyn, who turns 74 in February, is confronting the very real possibility that he won’t be one next year. In April, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was mounting a primary challenge to unseat Cornyn, deriding Texas’s senior senator as a RINO (Republican in name only) who has held the job too long, is too willing to compromise with Democrats, and is insufficiently loyal to President Trump. Paxton surrogates piled on. Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee, who represented Paxton in his 2023 impeachment trial, mocked Cornyn as a “disconnected D.C. powder puff.” Tucker Carlson, the influential MAGA opinion maker, characterized Cornyn as a “puppet of the left, obviously.”

Cornyn responded by calling Paxton’s Senate bid a “con man’s vanity project,” and the Republican establishment in Washington and Texas are prepared to spend tens of millions in his defense, fearing that the perpetually scandal-plagued attorney general might be so loathed by wide swaths of the electorate that he could do the seemingly impossible and lose to a Texas Democrat in the general election in November. But so far, nothing has radically upended the race—not the ads touting Cornyn as a staunch ally of President Trump and an unwavering border hawk, not Cornyn’s efforts to make the race a test of personal morality by highlighting Paxton’s history of legal woes and his contentious divorce from his wife of 38 years, who alleged that he had committed adultery. 

Although Cornyn’s numbers have improved since the start of the race, he still trails Paxton in most polls. In early October, Houston Congressman Wesley Hunt announced that he, too, was running for Cornyn’s seat, all but guaranteeing that the primary would go to a runoff, which could be bad news for Cornyn because runoffs tend to favor the candidate with stronger support among  the right-wing base. By the end of the year, even Cornyn’s most steadfast supporters began to wonder if his political career was swiftly coming to a close. 

Cornyn was contemplating this state of affairs when I first met him one Saturday morning last October. We were sitting in a conference room at the Grand Hyatt on the River Walk overlooking downtown San Antonio, the city in which he attended college and law school and began his career in public service. Thunderstorms had been moving through the area all morning, and San Antonio felt almost tropical. The senator was upbeat and energetic but also struggling to make sense of the challenge he was facing. “I guess the current campaign is kind of the most bizarre I’ve ever run in,” Cornyn said, with a detachment that made it seem as if he hadn’t quite accepted that it was all unfolding this way.

Cornyn had just finished delivering a speech to the biennial convention of the Texas Federation of Republican Women, and there, his political universe still made sense. He’d quoted conservative philosopher Edmund Burke and evangelist Billy Graham, talked about the importance of character, and basked in a standing ovation. Looking out at the crowd, Cornyn saw the familiar voters he’d been winning for his entire career—Republican women,
many of whom were now, like him, of a certain age, with carefully coiffed gray hair and tasteful red outfits with dashes of patriotic pizzazz. (I saw red-sequined blazers, bejeweled Betsey Johnson sneakers with five-point stars, and a T-shirt with a stenciled portrait of Ronald Reagan and the words “Old School Conservative.”) But this roomful of polite Laura Bush types was no longer the throbbing heart of his party.  

As we sat in the Grand Hyatt conference room, I told Cornyn that I’d recently visited other venues, where voters had dismissed him as a “RINO” and an “establishment hack.” He had heard it all. “So I think a lot of this is sort of cut-and-paste arguments,” he said, eager to bat them down.  

Was he a RINO? “I voted with President Trump 99.3 percent of the time. Does that make Trump a RINO? I think not,” Cornyn said. 

Was he an establishment hack? “I don’t know what being a hack is, other than occasionally I’ve talked to a Democrat. Even worse, on occasion I’ve committed the mortal sin of working with Democrats when it’s in the best interest of our state and nation, and I plead guilty to that.”

Somehow Paxton, Hunt, and the rest of Cornyn’s adversaries had seized upon what he saw as his greatest strengths—his experience, his ability to craft the compromises necessary to pass legislation—and flipped them, judo-like, into his greatest weaknesses.

“It may be that I’m not mad all the time. My hair isn’t on fire, and I’m not condemning my political opponents as evil,” he said. “Maybe this comes from my legal training, but I’ve always felt like my adversaries, my opponents, are not my enemy.”

Cornyn said he thought these attacks would fail. He believed, at the end of the day, that “people are looking for a little bit of stability in an ocean of, I won’t say chaos, but churning waters.” 

But the national mood these days is trending toward mad as hell. Only one in five Americans say they trust the government in Washington. How many voters are really looking for a senator who has mastered the intricacies of advancing bills out of committee? What if everyone agrees you’re a workhorse, but they hate the thing you’re working on?

John Cornyn’s problems with his party’s activist wing did not begin in 2025 with Ken Paxton’s primary challenge. Since the start of his long political career, Cornyn has been trying to convince the state’s most right-wing voters that he is, in fact, one of them—that his sober temperament and occasional willingness to compromise should not outweigh his overwhelmingly conservative record. 

When Cornyn ran for attorney general, in 1998, he faced accusations that he was too liberal for his party. As an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court in the nineties, he had earned the ire of conservatives by siding with three Democrats and writing the majority opinion in a 5–4 decision to uphold the so-called Robin Hood school-finance plan, which required the richest districts to share some of their property tax revenue with the poorest. Cornyn’s opponents, particularly the former state party chairman Tom Pauken, attacked him for the decision, and Cornyn responded by saying, “I do not like the Robin Hood scheme of public finance, but I do not agree with Mr. Pauken, who says that if you do not like the law you should strike it down.” It would become a familiar position for Cornyn: espousing conservative convictions while simultaneously arguing that he had a duty to adhere to the rules and traditions of his office.

Cornyn won the race, and he presided over an attorney general’s office that strongly championed a Republican legislative redistricting effort. But he still elicited wariness from the base. In 2001, Texas’s senior U.S. senator, Phil Gramm, announced that he wouldn’t be running for reelection, and Cornyn quickly launched a bid for the seat. He won an essentially uncontested primary and coasted to victory in the general election. Gramm had gotten behind Cornyn’s candidacy, but Cornyn hadn’t yet established a clear political identity. At the time, his attorney general’s office had been considered partisan by many observers, but by the standards of today, he had been an almost neutral legal arbiter. He liked to talk about his dispassionate legal judgment, not how many times he’d sued the Clinton administration. “There was a real question about how conservative politically Cornyn was,” Gramm said. “You never know what people are going to do until they hold that position.” 

What Cornyn did was follow both of his political instincts: He would be an establishment dealmaker and a conservative partisan, simultaneously. Pete Olson, a former suburban Houston congressman who served as Cornyn’s first chief of staff, told me that Cornyn started building a rapport with his colleagues soon after he arrived in Washington. “He never said, ‘I’m targeting this person,’ but he kept saying ‘I just kind of want to meet everybody,’ ” Olson said. And “everybody” included members of the other party. “John knew and still knows that there’s always a filibuster possible, and to get something actually passed into law, you have to get some Democrats on board.”

But Cornyn also knew that his party was becoming increasingly conservative and that rising through the ranks meant being willing to follow that trend. In his first term, Cornyn became, in the words of The New Republic, “the hard right’s soft new face.” When the Bush White House wanted to shore up its base for reelection by pushing constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage and make flag burning illegal, Cornyn signed on as a Senate cosponsor. He wrote op-eds fanning the flames of culture-war issues. (“Courts Are to Blame for War on Christmas” was the headline of one for the conservative publication Human Events.) And in 2007, Cornyn reportedly torpedoed a bipartisan immigration-reform effort, leading Arizona Senator John McCain to accuse him of being, in the Washington Post’s telling, “a curse word associated with chickens.” (Cornyn confirms that McCain called him chickenshit.) By that point, the Beltway publication National Journal had rated Cornyn as the third-most-conservative member of the Senate.

Cornyn was rewarded for his record and his loyalty. Before the end of his first term, Republican senators elected him to be their conference vice chair, and he would soon go on to serve as the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. 

But Republican voters were beginning to embrace candidates like Sarah Palin, who promised to put a wrecking ball to Washington. Cornyn, in style and substance, was the opposite. As Olson put it, “With Phil Gramm, people loved him, people liked him, and a few people hated him. But no one hates John Cornyn.” Not being hated was, perhaps, the root of Cornyn’s problem.

In 2008, Cornyn’s campaign tried to reintroduce him to Texas voters as less of an insider. In a two-and-a-half-minute video first shown at the state Republican convention, Cornyn, a former medical-malpractice attorney and longtime judge who spent his entire adult life living in San Antonio, Austin, and D.C., was rechristened as Big Bad John, an earthy Texas folk hero. 

Cornyn first appears on-screen riding a horse in a white hat and a Western vest. “He rose to the top in just one term, kept Texas in power, made lesser states squirm,” a narrator intones to the tune of Jimmy Dean’s 1961 country hit “Big Bad John.” Other footage shows the senator and his wife, Sandy, waving to an admiring crowd from the back of a convertible. They are wearing matching suede jackets with copious amounts of fringe. 

As soon as the ad hit the internet, Democrats and left-leaning media outlets pounced. Gawker dubbed it a “complete self-parody,” and a spokesperson for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee said Cornyn “appears to have raided the wardrobe closet of the Kilgore Rangerettes.” It wasn’t quite Michael Dukakis looking like a seven-year-old driving around in a tank, but the ad exposed Cornyn’s great political weakness. When he took off his suit, he struggled to seem authentic.

Cornyn still won reelection easily, just as he did in 2014 and 2020. His prowess as a fundraiser and his clout within the party crowded out serious Republican challengers, and Democrats only once got within single digits. But he had difficulty keeping up with Trump’s GOP. Unlike Ted Cruz, Cornyn voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and although Cornyn had long been seen in the Senate as an immigration hard-liner, he had said Trump’s border wall “makes absolutely no sense” in some areas. Both positions put him at odds with many Republican voters. 

And then in June 2022, Cornyn’s uneasy accommodation with his party’s base seemed to fracture irreparably. A month earlier, the shooting at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, had left nineteen students and two teachers dead, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had deputized Cornyn to lead negotiations with Democrats to craft legislation in response. The bill that would come to be known as the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was modest in the face of the nationwide problem of gun violence. It mandated enhanced background checks for young gun buyers, stepped up enforcement to end illegal gun purchases, and, most controversially, created a grant program to fund state red flag laws, which allow for the confiscation of firearms from people whom a judge has deemed dangerous to themselves or others. For the thirty or so states that didn’t have a red flag law, including Texas, Cornyn fought aggressively for funding to implement mental health crisis-intervention programs that did nothing to change gun laws. 

Even so, enacting stricter gun measures in any form was touching a third rail of Republican politics. As Cornyn stepped onstage at the George R. Brown Convention Center, in Houston, on June 17, 2022, for the Texas GOP Convention, he seemed caught off guard by his reception. Just as at the 2008 Texas Republican Convention, Cornyn was introduced with a “Big Bad John” video, this one with new lines rhyming “he wears a ten-gallon hat” with “knows Dems are little bitty gnats.” (The gnats had the bodies of flies and the heads of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez.) But this time, as soon as the video ended, the convention hall started ringing with boos. For an excruciating forty seconds, Cornyn just stood at the podium. His eyes darted back and forth over the crowd. He forced an awkward smile. Finally, he dived in. 

“Howdy, everybody,” he said over the uproar. The boos did not stop. 

Cornyn started his speech with red meat, tossing out the kind of lines that are designed to get applause in a crowd like this. He called out “Robert Francis O’Rourke.” He exclaimed, “We are still red.” He tried to claim the mantle of a gun rights defender. “They’re coming for your ARs and your shotguns,” he yelled. “They’d probably confiscate your air rifle and your BB gun if they could too.” 

The crowd didn’t buy it. They thought Cornyn was coming for their guns. 

“As Fox News recently pointed out, we fought and kept President Biden’s gun-grabbing wish list off the table,” Cornyn said. Up in the front, some delegates stood and waved their arms with dramatic thumbs-down gestures. It was medieval town square stuff. Cornyn tried a different tack. He encouraged everyone to go to Cornyn.senate.gov to learn the truth about his gun-safety bill, so people could stop relying on “rumor and the Twitterverse.” This went about as well as you’d assume. Mercifully, the speech ended shortly after. The crowd calmed down. 

A few minutes later, the next speaker walked onstage, and the same crowd that had been booing and heckling Cornyn just moments earlier broke into enthusiastic applause. The speaker waved to the crowd and soaked up their adoration with a big smile plastered on his face. 

The speaker was Ken Paxton.

On a chilly Tuesday night last fall, just off Texas Highway 87 several miles south of downtown Lubbock, a music venue called Cooks Garage glowed with retro neon glory. The vast parking lot, built to accommodate 10,000-person outdoor concerts from country stars like Dwight Yoakam and Ryan Bingham, was ornamented with towering vintage filling station signs, and inside the barnlike venue itself, emblems of fifties car culture peppered the walls. The place was so overstuffed and jumbo-sized that, upon arriving, I wondered if I’d been transported inside the Pixar movie Cars.

A couple hundred Lubbock residents had gathered there for an event sponsored by the Texas Tech University chapter of Turning Point USA, the campus conservative-youth advocacy organization founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk. Paxton was set to be the night’s featured speaker. 

Since Kirk’s assassination, on September 10, Paxton has made many of his scheduled public appearances at TPUSA events across the state. These aren’t officially campaign stops. He appears in his capacity as attorney general. But Paxton went to Cooks to testify and to preach. Kirk’s death had galvanized the base of the Republican Party, particularly its evangelical Christian wing, and Paxton—who once said his approach to winning his first election was to “get the church out to vote”—wanted to associate with the movement as much as he could.

The master of ceremonies was a redheaded Texas Tech freshman named Preston Parsons who’d restarted the university’s moribund TPUSA chapter as soon as he’d arrived in Lubbock. (If you’re wondering how a freshman could end up in this role, all I can say is that Parsons is the kind of precocious mover and shaker who, at the age of nineteen, already has a business card advertising his services as both a college scholarship adviser and a mobile notary public.) Parsons hadn’t reached out to Paxton to invite him to campus; Paxton had initiated the meeting. But Parsons was more than happy to host him. He pronounced himself a “huge Ken Paxton fan.” 

Earlier that day, Paxton’s office had put out a characteristically overheated press release advertising “undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Texas,” a strange and likely symbolic announcement. (Putting aside the question of whether these terrorist cells actually exist, it would be highly unusual for a law-enforcement agency to tip off targets and risk officer safety by revealing an in-progress undercover operation, and the Texas attorney general’s office is not set up to pursue sprawling counterterrorism work.) Parsons cited the announcement to me as an example of what Paxton has “done personally for the state of Texas.” 

Paxton has made a career out of using his office to telegraph his values and assert his status as a conservative fighter, turning the attorney general’s office into one of the conservative movement’s most active litigation firms. He has proudly sued the Obama and Biden administrations more than one hundred times, and has won incremental victories to restart construction of the border wall and to dismantle the Deferred Action on Child Arrivals immigration program. He has attacked Big Tech for allegedly censoring conservative voices and sued Google and Meta on privacy claims, winning settlements of more than $1 billion. He has pursued dead-end investigations of voter fraud and a legally spurious case against Beto O’Rourke’s voter-mobilization organization. After the 2020 presidential election, Paxton led a group of Republican states in an unsuccessful effort to overturn the results. 

The Texas attorney general’s office wasn’t always like this. Paxton’s predecessor, now Governor Greg Abbott, liked to say that his workday consisted of getting to the office, suing the Obama administration, and going home, but Abbott also defended state agencies even if he disagreed politically with their policies (the University of Texas System’s affirmative action program, for instance), and he gave wide latitude to the career lawyers working less overtly partisan cases in areas like consumer protection and Medicaid fraud. Paxton has taken a different view of his office’s duty to represent the state. He has refused to defend Texas agencies and public universities against dozens of legal actions against them, particularly from conservative groups. And as many experienced attorneys have been fired or departed, Paxton has relied increasingly on expensive private law firms to do the office’s work, paying out tens of millions of dollars in fees.

Chris Toth, the former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, told me that attorneys general across the country, of both parties, have politicized their offices, but that Paxton stood out. “He has turned this into an art form beyond just about any AG I can think of in terms of putting ideology before substance,” Toth said. “And when you’re pursuing a lot of these ideological goals, most of them ultimately are tilting at windmills anyway. You’re not using those resources to do the things that an AG is supposed to do.”

Paxton’s activist lawsuits are wildly popular among his party’s base, but even at the TPUSA event at Cooks, the crowd was more Paxton-curious than Paxton-committed. A lot of the attendees told me they had watched Charlie Kirk videos online, but that they didn’t have any strong feelings about Paxton or Cornyn. A group of college students waiting in line to participate in a brief backstage meet and greet with the attorney general mostly shrugged when I asked them about the race. (This isn’t all that surprising—in the last midterm GOP primary in Texas, only 3.8 percent of voters were under age thirty.) A middle school math teacher who was sitting next to me said he didn’t like Cornyn, but he wasn’t planning to vote for Paxton either. “If you can’t keep your own house in order, how can you run the government?”

During his speech, Paxton had an answer, and it began with his Christian faith. When I heard Cornyn address the Texas Federation of Republican Women, he said the word “God” only once. He never mentioned Jesus. At Cooks, Paxton invoked God and Jesus fifteen times in just under fourteen minutes. 

To Cornyn, Charlie Kirk was “a bold and fearless voice for freedom, who inspired millions of young Americans to stand up for their country and for their faith.” To Paxton, Charlie Kirk was a spiritual martyr whose legacy might just end up mirroring the divine. “Look at the history after Jesus,” Paxton said. “The turning point was the death and resurrection of Jesus. The turning point, I believe, for Charlie Kirk’s life was not the thirty-one years. The turning point was the horrific death of Charlie Kirk.” 

Paxton did not say these words with the ferocity of a televangelist or the crispness of a champion debater. He spoke softly and a little tentatively. He didn’t seem like a type A politician who had it all figured out. And with his drooping right eye and slightly awkward stage presence, no one was writing that he looked like he was born to be a U.S. senator. He looked and sounded like . . . some guy who had just happened to become attorney general of the state.

Paxton leaned in to that relatability as he told the story of his notorious legal and political travails. “When I got into office, I had never been in trouble in my life,” Paxton told the crowd. “I didn’t get kicked out of school. I didn’t do drugs. I had never even gotten a speeding ticket. I walked into the attorney general’s office, and suddenly I was in trouble from the day I got there.” 

At Cooks, Paxton invoked God and Jesus fifteen times in just under fourteen minutes.

In Paxton’s account, his persecution began as an almost Kafkaesque nightmare; the system began to pursue him quietly and insidiously. Shortly after taking office in 2015, he got a notice that his credit card had been canceled because he was a “reputational risk.” Then the real trouble began. A host of government entities began pursuing him, and he eventually had to fight fifteen different legal battles, so many that “a lot of people don’t even know all of these legal battles, and each time they would add another.” Paxton tried to defend himself, but the trials kept coming. Speaking to the TPUSA crowd, he addressed the most public one, “when the Texas House supposedly controlled by Republicans decided to impeach me in three days, and they did it without me having the opportunity to answer any of what they were saying.” 

To Paxton, this saga had an Old Testament parallel. If Kirk was Jesus, then he was Joseph—favorite son of Jacob and wearer of the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—who was cast off by his scheming brothers, only to prosper in exile, where he rose to prominence by interpreting the dreams of  the all-powerful pharaoh and then turned the tables on his betrayers. 

“It turns out his brothers have to come to Egypt . . . and they end up standing in front of him and ultimately through a long process, he identifies himself as their brother, and they are terrified,” Paxton said. “And what should really happen to these guys is they should be punished. And that’s not what happened. Joseph had grace, he forgave them, and he said to them, ‘What you meant for evil, God meant for good.’ ” 

Paxton believed that, like Joseph, God put him “in a position to do good despite the evil that was put on me.” But Paxton did not show mercy to his brothers like his biblical counterpart had. Instead, as soon as his impeachment trial was over, he worked to purge them from the party.

This is not a story about Ken Paxton’s scandals. They are so numerous, so byzantine, and so wide-ranging that any full accounting would be tedious. Some involve the easily understood sins of lust and adultery, others the far less tabloid-friendly intricacies of state securities law and federal mortgage regulations. One scandal concerns him pocketing a $1,000 dollar Montblanc pen that another lawyer had left in a security bin at the Collin County courthouse. (Paxton eventually returned it.) When the Texas House impeached him, in May 2023, it managed to marshal nearly four thousand pages of evidence against him. We have neither the time, nor the space. 

But since Paxton realizes he can’t just get up onstage at places like Cooks Garage and ignore the proverbial herd of elephants in the room, it’s probably worth a quick accounting of how this trouble began in the first place. (A spokesperson for Paxton declined to comment for this story, writing, “You must be crazy if you think that myself or the Paxton campaign would respond to anything asked by a tabloid rag like the Texas Monthly.”)  

Paxton first won a seat in the state house in 2002, representing the Dallas suburb of McKinney, and for the next decade he made little political impact. He introduced conservative-messaging bills that went nowhere and did not hold major leadership positions. He was perhaps best remembered for introducing successful legislation in 2005 that required all 66 “Welcome to Texas” highway signs to say “Proud Home of President George W. Bush.” Two years later, he introduced successful legislation that removed the phrase when the president left office.

But in late 2010, in the wake of the Republican landslide in the midterm elections, Paxton seized his moment, challenging Joe Straus for the position of House Speaker. Paxton’s candidacy was doomed from the start, but his long shot bid put him in good stead with Tim Dunn, the Midland oilman and longtime ultraright kingmaker, who strongly opposed Straus. After withdrawing his candidacy on the first day of the legislative session, Paxton came to the dais in the House gallery and said, “Even though we lost this race, I’m encouraged to say we have not lost the fight. . . . This is just the beginning.” He was right.

Marginalized by Straus and his allies in the lower chamber, Paxton ran for an open seat in the state Senate and won. Then, after just one legislative session, Paxton jumped up a rung again, declaring his candidacy for attorney general. He came into the race with plenty of money from major conservative donors, including a $1 million loan secured by Dunn, and his campaign ran ads touting the tacit support of the state’s new tea party star, Senator Ted Cruz, who had called Paxton a “tireless conservative warrior” who is “fighting to defend our religious liberty.” But the primary also brought to light that, contrary to Paxton’s claim that his record was clear before his stint as attorney general, he had a history of private legal and business dealings that had been sloppy at best and quite possibly much worse. 

It turned out that as a lawyer in private practice in McKinney, Paxton had occasionally referred clients to a local investment firm called Mowery Capital Management, without disclosing that he was receiving a commission from the company for 30 percent of his clients’ asset-management fees. (He said he was relying on Mowery to do that.) For several years, in which he advised clients to invest with Mowery, Paxton also hadn’t bothered to register as a securities dealer with the state. In the middle of the runoff in the attorney general’s race against state Representative Dan Branch, Paxton had admitted to this behavior, agreeing to a $1,000 fine for violations of the Texas Securities Act. He won anyway. 

A year later, a Collin County grand jury indicted the new attorney general on charges of a third-degree felony for failing to register as an investment adviser. Then it added two first-degree felony charges for similar behavior, in which Paxton had allegedly encouraged associates to invest in a McKinney tech start-up called Servergy Inc., again without disclosing that he was a paid client referrer. To make matters worse, both Mowery and Servergy had been unreliable investments. Both would face fraud allegations. It looked as if the political career of Paxton, who has denied criminal wrongdoing in the case, might be over. A few weeks after the Servergy-related indictments, one poll found that 62 percent of Republicans felt that Paxton should resign, and even a slim majority of self-identified tea party voters wanted Paxton out. 

But Paxton still had powerful allies. Dunn wrote a fiery op-ed in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, claiming that Paxton’s prosecution had been orchestrated by centrist Republican House leaders and their Democratic allies. “The entire thing stinks to high heaven,” Dunn wrote, stating that Paxton was just the latest conservative to be targeted with “spurious complaints that trigger outrageous misuses of our justice system.” Other supporters pitched in, countersuing Paxton’s accusers and helping him hire an experienced legal team that managed to repeatedly delay his trial. The stalling tactics worked. In October 2016, just a year after the charges were filed, a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found that 55 percent of respondents had heard little or nothing about Paxton’s legal problems. 

The longer Paxton stuck around, the more he seemed to put his troubles in the past. His shambling vibe gave a plausible veneer to his claims that his legal scandals were a result of “paperwork error.” A lawyer who worked closely with Paxton at the attorney general’s office told me that for years he bought the Dunn line that Paxton’s difficulties were the result of the government persecuting a strong conservative. “I just thought, until I see evidence that he’s really guilty of some wrongdoing, I’m not going to choose to believe that,” the lawyer said. But the sheer volume of Paxton’s scandals eventually seemed to make the idea he was the target of political persecutions increasingly implausible. “Well, maybe one case can be,” the lawyer said. “Maybe two can be. But when they just keep coming, at some point there’s so much smoke, there must be fire.”

You might assume that a politician who had managed to skirt his pending securities-fraud charges might go out of his way to conduct himself with the rule-abiding punctiliousness of a choirboy. Instead, like a gambler on the run of his life at the slot machines, Paxton couldn’t help but keep pulling the lever. For years in Austin, rumors had been swirling that a flashy young businessman named Nate Paul was building a real estate empire whose numbers didn’t seem to add up. Investors and employees had begun to sue, and in August 2019 the FBI raided the headquarters of Paul’s firm, which is just a short walk from the attorney general’s office. Paul had donated $25,000 to Paxton in his 2018 election, but instead of distancing himself from Paul, Paxton made Paul his cause célèbre.

According to impeachment testimony from some of Paxton’s closest aides—most of them card-carrying movement conservatives whom he had handpicked—Paxton essentially used the weight of the Texas attorney general’s office to do Paul’s bidding, deputizing an outside lawyer to harass Paul’s opponents with government subpoenas.

The deputies and other top staff later testified that Paxton had asked them to investigate Paul’s adversaries and rewrite rules to benefit the businessman. (More comically, according to documents released during the impeachment proceedings, Paxton and Paul allegedly shared a secret Uber account under the alias “Dave P,” which Paxton used when visiting his alleged mistress, whom Paul, coincidentally or not, employed.)

These allegations led to a whistleblower lawsuit from some of the same staffers, rumors of an impending federal indictment, and, in May 2023, Paxton’s surprise impeachment by the Texas House on articles of bribery and abuse of public trust among other charges. Before the trial commenced in the Senate, though, the head of a political action group associated with Dunn, Paxton’s longtime backer, threatened to fund primary challenges to any legislators who voted against Paxton. The Dunn-backed group also gave $3 million in loans and contributions to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who was presiding over the trial. Donald Trump had made his feelings known as well, writing on social media that impeachment was a “very unfair process” led by “the Radical Left Democrats, RINOs, and Criminals.” He signed off his post with the words “Free Ken Paxton . . . !” Soon after, the Texas Senate acquitted Paxton on all sixteen charges, and he quickly pivoted to campaigning against his House accusers. 

One by one, the ominous clouds looming over Paxton were clearing. In March 2024 prosecutors agreed to drop the nearly nine-year-old felony charges against Paxton in exchange for one hundred hours of community service, fifteen hours of legal-ethics courses, and the payment of $271,000 to the investors he had been accused of defrauding. (Paxton did not admit any guilt as part of the settlement.) A year later, on April 3, 2025, the Associated Press reported that in the final weeks of the Biden administration, the Department of Justice had decided not to pursue federal criminal charges related to the Nate Paul corruption allegations. Five days after that, Paxton announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.

More than two million Texans voted in the last Republican Senate primary, a lightly contested affair in which Ted Cruz won 88 percent of the vote. But among the consultants and politicians I spoke to, there was widespread agreement that the support of one individual would likely be decisive: President Trump.

Since the campaign kicked off, all three of the candidates have been circling the president. Cornyn has said he’s repeatedly asked Trump for his endorsement, and groups backing Paxton and Hunt have reportedly run campaign ads in the Palm Beach, Florida, market—in the hope, presumably, that the president is at Mar-a-Lago and happens to be tuning in. 

In late July, Paxton flew to Scotland to try to persuade Trump to back him. Trump was staying at his Turnberry resort for the first leg of a five-day overseas trip, and Paxton encountered the president on the golf course Saturday morning. Paxton hadn’t been officially invited by Trump. But according to reporting by CNN, Paxton managed to secure some face time. Overlooking the Irish Sea, he spoke with Trump about the Senate race for a few minutes, then the president carried on with his day. Paxton went home empty-handed.

At the time, Paxton was still up in the polls, but there were signs of trouble. Cornyn and his allied super PACs had been raising money at a strong clip, and Paxton was struggling to keep up. Some of the major donors who had backed Paxton previously were contributing little or nothing at all, apparently including Dunn. According to multiple sources, the megadonor had been adamantly opposed to Paxton’s Senate bid from the start, seeing it as a drain on resources that would only weaken the Republicans for the general election.

“Tim sat down and told Ken, ‘I don’t want you to be a senator; I want you to be a good attorney general,’ ” said a source familiar with Dunn. “Tim tried to talk him out of it. And then when you look Tim Dunn in the eye and say, ‘Sorry, I’m doing it anyway,’ that doesn’t go all that well with him.”(Dunn did not respond to requests for comment.)

More than two million Texans voted in the last Republican Senate primary. But this year the support of one individual will likely be decisive: President Trump.

And then there were Paxton’s divorce proceedings, which could turn out to be even more damaging than losing Dunn’s backing. Paxton’s wife, Angela, had once been an eager political spouse, introducing her husband in his early years as attorney general with a tune in which she called herself a “pistol-packin’ mama” whose “husband sues Obama.” As a state senator, she had supported her husband during his impeachment trial even as his alleged affair with former Senate aide Laura Olson became a focus of the proceedings. But the Olson relationship had, according to more recent reporting, not been the end of Paxton’s alleged infidelities. The Daily Mail reported in September that he was carrying on a new affair with a married Christian influencer whom he’d met at the 2024 Kentucky Derby. (“The Daily Mail is a foreign propaganda rag ignoring the fact that its own country is crumbling to the ground due to Islamification and instead it’s trying to take down a true America First warrior,” a Paxton spokesperson responded.) 

After the divorce announcement, several prominent Christian leaders withdrew their support. “I think Angela was an important character witness in helping the grassroots get past the womanizing or the egregious Ken stories that are out there,” one Republican operative told me. “That’s gone now. It’s like, Ken, really? I was with you right until this chapter. You wonder if the ship has taken on too much water.”

Cornyn’s campaign had dubbed Paxton’s divorce part of his “summer from hell,” gleefully publicizing every fresh piece of reporting that cast doubt on Paxton’s ethics and judgment. They had plenty of material to work with. In July the AP broke a story that the Paxtons had listed three separate properties in McKinney and Austin as their primary residence, raising legal questions. In October The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton had amassed a net worth of millions of dollars, including eleven properties assessed at a total of $7.5 million, during his time as a public servant. 

Former Governor Rick Perry, who endorsed Cornyn in August and has been raising money for a Cornyn-aligned super PAC, told me he thought voters were still mostly ignorant of Paxton’s scandals. “I’m not sure he has really been exposed,” Perry said. “People are raising their kids, they’re going to work, they’re distracted. How many people actually watched what went on in the impeachment hearing? I’m going to suggest to you it’s a small number.”  Perry believed that once voters were fully apprised, “this won’t be close.” 

If you only look at money and endorsements, the race doesn’t appear close. Seemingly every week, Cornyn’s campaign is announcing a murderers’ row of new Republican supporters, from Perry to the National Border Patrol Council to the most powerful leaders in the U.S. Senate. Paxton’s most prominent endorsements are from backbench Republican Texas congressmen Lance Gooden and Troy Nehls, who is retiring. As of the last FEC filing deadline, Cornyn had twice as much cash on hand as Paxton. Meanwhile, groups backing Cornyn have spent $40 million so far on the race. Paxton has been abandoned by his wife, by many of the lawyers who worked most closely with him throughout his career, and maybe even by his biggest donor. 

The attorney general’s resilient polling lead in spite of everything suggests an almost mystical Trump-like connection with his base, but there’s another possibility: that Paxton and Cornyn may both be limping into the primary. Some recent polls have shown Wesley Hunt running neck and neck with Cornyn, and if Hunt can beat Cornyn and force a runoff with Paxton, the underlying story of the election—Mr. Senate status quo versus scandal-a-minute MAGA martyr—would radically change.

Cornyn has overcome a big polling deficit once before, in his race for Texas attorney general, in 1998, but today’s party looks nothing like the one in which he cut his political teeth. George W. Bush hasn’t spoken at a Republican National Convention since 2012, and even that was a prerecorded video. Karl Rove is now reviled by the populist right. Cornyn has always stayed ahead of the shifting passions of his party, but it’s looking increasingly likely that this time his party has finally shifted too much.

The challenge of Cornyn’s campaign, as one former adviser of his put it to me, is: “Can I be Mitch McConnell’s best friend for eighteen years and Donald Trump’s best friend for eighteen months?” How could the longtime aide-de-camp to the Republican Senate leader convince voters that, in fact, he also had hot MAGA lava flowing through his veins? 

Cornyn is trying to thread the needle. You can see it just by looking at his Senate activities in October. That month, far from the headlines, Cornyn introduced bipartisan bills focusing on combating child exploitation in generative AI, preventing unregistered foreign agents from lobbying the federal government, and boosting transparency in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was also busy bolstering his primary bona fides, partnering with Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville to introduce a bill to ban sharia law in the United States if “inconsistent with U.S. law,” a bit of Paxton-style MAGA signaling that seemed designed to inflame xenophobic fears. 

In the Trump era, some Republican senators who found themselves increasingly out of step with their party—Jeff Flake, Mitt Romney—decided to leave the chamber. Cornyn has stuck around. He has stood by Trump, as the president has launched foreign military actions and dismantled agencies without the approval of Congress. He has gotten behind Trump nominees like Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom even Mitch McConnell opposed. Cornyn has been a party loyalist first and foremost no matter what the party was doing. He told me, in fact, he viewed that as part of his role. “Obviously the party has changed dramatically,” he said, “but I’ve always viewed my job as a Republican senator is to support the policies of the Republican president. And I did that in the case of George W. Bush, and I did that in the case of Donald J. Trump.”

But Cornyn’s power within his party has waned. In November 2024, a week after Trump was elected president of the United States for his second term, Cornyn ran for Senate majority leader. For a politician who had made his career as a loyal and successful party insider, the position would have been the ultimate prize. The last Senate majority leader from Texas was Lyndon Johnson, who had showered his home state with federal benefits. Cornyn wasn’t likely to do that, but becoming head of the chamber would have been a powerful credential and a career capstone. Instead, he lost by a narrow vote to South Dakota Senator John Thune. Afterward, Cornyn’s allies attempted to install him as the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who was in line for the position, reportedly refused those entreaties and took the chairmanship himself.

Cornyn had been at least entertaining the idea of riding off into the sunset before this election. One conservative donor told me he was under the impression that Cornyn wouldn’t run again if he didn’t succeed McConnell as the Republican Senate Leader. After all, what would be left for him? He’d already served four terms. 

But the prospect of Senator Ken Paxton had motivated Cornyn. “If I knew that I could hand this job off to somebody who I trusted and had confidence in, my attitude would be different,” he told me. “But I refuse to turn this job and the responsibility of representing thirty-one million Texans in the Senate over to somebody like the attorney general.”

As Cornyn spoke to me after addressing the Texas Federation of Republican Women, he sounded a little wistful. “I always knew that all good things must come to an end. And I’ve had a great career and a great run,” he said. “I can’t really think of what else I might do, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out when the time comes.”

But Cornyn assured me that time would not be now. He stood up. Gave me a strong handshake. Made good eye contact. He seemed in every way a U.S. senator. As I walked out, I watched a woman in a blue dress approach Cornyn. The senator, always game for a stop and chat, indulged her. They started speaking about the race. “I think this is a test,” Cornyn said. “Can a normal conservative win a Republican primary anymore?”  

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This article originally appeared in the February 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “The Last Ride of Big Bad John.” Subscribe today.