Vanity Fair Profiles Ken Paxton: “Corruption And A Shortage Of Charisma”

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AUSTIN, TX — Vanity Fair is out with a devastating new profile of Ken Paxton with shocking moments from his disastrous bus tour as his campaign flails in the final days, cancelling events with small crowds, and longtime Republican voters come together to say they cannot support Ken Paxton’s corruption.

Vanity Fair met with Trump voters who “can’t stomach Ken Paxton” and followed Paxton’s failing bus tour, detailing how even amid only a crowd of a few dozen Paxton struggled: “On a good day, Ken Paxton is not a gifted orator. This was a bad day. [...] his delivery was pained. He seemed tired. He stumbled over his jokes, stopping and returning to the top after realizing he forgot the punchline.” At one point, an elderly man with a walker, fed up with Paxton’s poor delivery, even shouted “More enthusiasm!”

Now in the final days as Paxton cancels his events in El Paso, Texarkana, and Tyler, Texas after receiving small crowds, Vanity Fair says “The Paxton cocktail is the controversy without the charisma,” and a GOP pollster even says “Paxton is in deep shit.”

By Aidan McLaughlin

October 30, 2026

At Coyote Crossing Saloon, a smoke-filled dive bar off Interstate 37, a 64-year-old Texas native named Tracey was showing me his teeth. He’s missing about half of them—a casualty, he said, of toothpicks soaked in horse liniment that serve as a potent stimulant for truckers looking to stay up late on long-haul drives. Tracey is a big fan of President Donald Trump. He voted for him three times and still supports him, even after all the excesses of his second term. But he can’t stomach Ken Paxton.
“How are you gonna fix Ken’s fuckups?”
Dragging on a cigarette, he pointed to the Texas attorney general and Republican Senate candidate’s alleged corruption, his reputed infidelity, and the case of a plea deal his office offered to a Waco man charged with sexually abusing a young boy. “Just because you have all this money, how are you gonna just do as you please and nobody’s gonna say nothing?” Tracey remains a fan of the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott. “He’ll win, so I’m happy about that.” But Paxton? “Get him out of there.”
If Paxton has lost voters like Tracey, Republicans might be in trouble. Texas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988, and this seat could determine who will control Congress for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. Yet the collapse in Trump’s approval across the country has put even red states like Texas in play for Democrats, creating a powerful undercurrent that Paxton’s opponent James Talarico has surfed to a narrow but steady lead in the polls. That’s turned Texas into a money pit: $500 million has been blown on advertising already, thanks in part to at least $168 million pumped into the state by Elon Musk, and it’s on track to be the most expensive Senate race in history.
It didn’t have to be this difficult. Since 2002, the seat has been occupied by Senator John Cornyn, who ran for re-election with the backing of the Republican establishment and a sizable war chest. But in the primary, the president backed Paxton, a scandal-plagued culture warrior who went above and beyond Trump’s loyalty tests while Cornyn drew suspicion that he was fair-weather MAGA. Now Trump has placed a risky bet. These midterms are a referendum on the president, but this race more than any other is a gauge of his movement: Can a candidate with many of Trump’s failings but little of his charisma careen into the United States Senate?
This is the final sprint of the Paxton campaign, a frenetic bus odyssey dubbed the “Come and Take It Tour.” (There’s a cannon printed on the side of the bus.) The voyage has swept through the border towns of McAllen and Laredo, up through exurbs like Selma, just outside San Antonio, on to Austin and Waco and Dallas, then out through hundreds of miles of High Plains to the West Texas towns of Amarillo and Lubbock, then down to Corpus Christi for a rally with Trump himself.
“A MAN WITHOUT FLAWS?”
“The person that is without sin, please cast the first stone,” said Pastor Ruben Mendez in his opening prayer at Paxton’s campaign event in Selma. The room was silent. “I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s anybody that can do that.” Mendez, the pastor of Iglesia Shalom, a small nondenominational church tucked down an alleyway in a suburb nearby, was speaking to a crowd crammed into the Blue Bonnet Palace, a country music venue in a corrugated iron barn just off the highway. A cardboard cutout of Brooks and Dunn hung above the stage alongside a motionless disco ball.
The pastor’s reminder that “King David was a flawed man” was met with scattered applause. If the subtext of this homily wasn’t clear enough, a protester soon made it explicit. “Why were you in Dubai?” a young man yelled as Paxton took the stage. He was swiftly bounced by security to chants of “USA!” from the faithful.
The protester was referencing the latest chapter of the biblical Paxton oppo file. The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton spent New Year’s Eve 2024 partying in Dubai with Tracy Duhon, his rumored mistress, as well as two men who were then fugitives from U.S. justice, one of whom had donated to Paxton. This indiscretion joins a long list of scandals that supporters of Paxton are willing to overlook to back the candidate (and, perhaps more importantly, keep Texas red). On the tour, they often invoked faith to make their case.
Some would argue Paxton’s sins are more exotic than those of your ordinary Texan. He was charged with two counts of felony securities fraud by Texas prosecutors and in 2024 reached a deal to avoid a trial that involved paying nearly $300,000 in restitution. Separately, the Texas House impeached him in 2023 on charges of bribery, corruption and abusing his office. (Paxton has denied the allegations that led to his impeachment.) With state legislators under intense pressure from Trump, he was acquitted by the Senate. “Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down,” Trump boasted afterwards.
There’s also Paxton’s reputation for jet-setting: In his 11 years as attorney general, an Associated Press investigation found, Paxton spent an extraordinary amount of time traveling to plush locales including “California wine country, Caribbean resorts and European tourism hot spots.” It cost the taxpayers at least $1.9 million to cover the expenses of his security detail. And of course, there was the 2013 surveillance video that caught Paxton pocketing a man’s $1,000 Montblanc pen. (His campaign called the incident a “mix-up,” and Paxton returned the pen after he was contacted by a sheriff’s deputy.)
Even some of the ads supporting him carry a bit of a shrug. Angela Paxton, who is suing her husband for divorce on “biblical grounds,” which is King James for cheating, appears in a spot urging Texans to vote Republican down the ticket. “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” she says at the start of the ad, which ends without any further mention of the elephant.
In a quaint historic town north of Fort Worth, I met Steve Bannon at the Texas headquarters of his War Room podcast. A longtime Paxton backer, Bannon has spent much of this campaign season in the state, broadcasting to the Trump base while helping to advise the Republican’s campaign. “We have not seen the data yet that shows part of our coalition actually coming out and voting against Trump,” Bannon told me. “I think most of them are staying home. That’s a huge win for us. If they come out and vote against us, we’re fucked.”
“We have not seen the data yet that shows part of our coalition actually coming out and voting against Trump,” Steve Bannon told me. “I think most of them are staying home. That’s a huge win for us. If they come out and vote against us, we’re fucked.”
At a stop in Sanger, a small town in a ruby red county north of Dallas, the star of the warm-up acts was Brandon Gill, a young House Republican who has emerged as a favorite among the party’s hard-line base. He emerged to a roaring welcome, and one man shouted “Brandon for President!” The heckle was deftly parried by Gill: “Let’s say Ken Paxton for Senate first.” As Gill ran through the list of well-worn criticisms of Talarico’s liberalism, Stacey, a woman in the crowd, shouted: “It’s demonic!”
“That’s right,” Gill replied. “It is demonic.”
Outside the venue, I spoke with Stacey and her friend Claire, two Paxton super-fans from nearby who called themselves “MAHA moms.”
“He seems like a nice man,” Stacey said of Talarico. “He’s just misguided. If he was my neighbor I’d vote for him to be on my HOA board. But not for the Senate.” They were confident that Paxton would keep the seat red. But Claire was concerned that her parents, both Republicans, had written in names in protest of Paxton’s candidacy.
On a good day, Ken Paxton is not a gifted orator. This was a bad day. It was Sunday night, the last stop of the weekend, and the candidate walked onto a stage in Schulman’s Movie Bowl Grille in Sherman, a highway town 60 miles north of Dallas, to speak to a few dozen supporters picking at tacos while leaning back in big pleather recliners.
By this point I had seen Paxton deliver his stump speech, a 15-minute case for his Senate candidacy, some half a dozen times. At Schulman’s Movie Bowl Grille, his delivery was pained. He seemed tired. He stumbled over his jokes, stopping and returning to the top after realizing he forgot the punchline. He struggled through a section meant to serve as a blistering indictment of his opponent, and he eventually spent several minutes looking down at the podium and listing Talarico’s crimes against Texas off a piece of paper as the crowd sat in silence.
At one point, an elderly man with a walker had had enough.
“More enthusiasm!” he shouted from the audience.
Paxton looked up from his papers and out into the crowd. “What?”
“More enthusiasm!” the man shouted again.
“Yes,” Paxton said meekly. “We all need a little more enthusiasm to go to the polls.”
Trump never hesitates to remind voters at his rallies that Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen.” The candidate has a lazy eye, a casualty of a childhood accident in which a berry was thrown at his face, requiring multiple surgeries, and a subsequent college basketball injury. He presents as meek, almost sheepish, and speaks in a monotone that belies his reputation as a bare-knuckle radical. He slurs his words and stumbles over his lines.
“Darrell,” he said at one stop, addressing Issa, “California arreddy has tt—you already have two senators, you d—we don’t need a third.” He’s less the guy you want to get a beer with, per the old campaign cliché, and more the guy you feel a bit sorry for when it’s his turn to address the room at a regional sales conference. At a Trump rally for Paxton in Lubbock, the president told the crowd that his praise of Jon Husted’s “very powerful ass” boosted the Senator’s election campaign in Ohio. “Maybe I should do that with Ken Paxton,” he mused, “but I’m not sure your body is going to qualify.”
For Talarico and the Texas Democrats, who haven’t won a seat in the United States Senate since 1988, the Paxton campaign presents an extraordinary opportunity. “Billy Begala says: For the last 30 years, all you had to do to win in Texas is win the Republican primary and then go on vacation,” says veteran Democratic strategist Paul Begala, whose son Billy works in Texas politics. Paxton may have taken that truism a little too far. After announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, he “cleared his calendar and booked a hotel in Augusta, Georgia, during the storied Masters golf tournament,” according to the Associated Press, “a trip that cost Texas taxpayers at least $25,000.” Over July 4th weekend, while Talarico hit the trail, Paxton was in Europe, sightseeing in London and Iceland with his rumored mistress. As Talarico raised tens of millions of dollars from small-dollar donations throughout the summer, Paxton struggled to keep up. A week before the general election, Talarico had raised $158 million to Paxton’s $39 million.
“Ken is a different type of candidate in modern times,” Bannon said. “He has a hardcore grassroots base…. But he’s not a good fundraiser. He’s a populist fire breather who is not particularly charismatic.”
“PAXTON IS IN DEEP SHIT”
The last-ditch operation to save the populist fire breather who is not particularly charismatic came this week in the form of two Trump rallies. They might be the last major events of the campaign. On Thursday, the Paxton campaign announced it was canceling a rally in El Paso scheduled for Sunday, just two days before the election.
“Paxton is in deep shit,” Rich Baris, a pro-Trump pollster, said in a podcast appearance this week.
Trump may rally the base, but it’s hard to see how a historically unpopular president making the race about him helps with the broader electorate. After the president commanded Republicans to host a “Trumpapalooza” midterms convention that served more as a celebration of his presidency than a typical party congress, Paxton privately told donors the event hurt his campaign. “When we did that convention — it dropped our numbers,” Paxton said, according to audio of his comments obtained by The New York Times. “Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”
At the rally in Corpus Christi, Trump spoke for more than an hour. He extolled the glories of his presidency and made little mention of Paxton. After airing a supercut video of Talarico’s cringiest comments, Trump turned to the crowd. “The only man standing between Texas and this raging lunatic is a man named President Donald J. Trump, thank you!” he said. As the crowd went wild, Trump added: “And I need the help of Paxton.”
On the “Come and Take It” bus tour, Paxton was less a glimpse of Trumpism’s future than a showcase of what might be left behind when Trump is gone. The familiar accommodations were still required: overlook the scandals, forgive the personal failings, keep faith with the fighter standing between you and the forces of darkness. But there was none of the showmanship that made those demands easier to accept in Trump. The Paxton cocktail is the controversy without the charisma—and a test of whether a record of pure allegiance to Trump is enough for a Republican to win Texas. Defeat may well announce the bitter end of pure Trumpism, or at least prove that Trump alone is the movement. When he leaves the White House in 2029, what will remain of it?

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