Donald Trump’s MAGA Inc. super-PAC just dropped $10 million into Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign. Ten million. For a man who, according to the Texas Tribune, appears to have violated federal ethics law by omitting rental income and mortgages from his financial disclosures. This is the candidate the Republican money machine has chosen to elevate. This is who they want making laws for the rest of us.
Let us be clear about what is happening here. It is not campaigning. It is a purchase. MAGA Inc. is not betting on Paxton because he is a brilliant legislator or a principled public servant. He is a twice-impeached former attorney general who spent years under a securities fraud indictment, and now he cannot even manage the basic paperwork required of every Senate candidate. The Tribune reports that experts say his omissions violate federal ethics law. That is not a technicality. That is the kind of conduct that disqualifies people from positions of public trust in any functioning democracy.
And yet the money flows. Elon Musk’s super PAC has also started spending to boost Paxton, the Tribune confirms, part of what they describe as a “recent surge in outside support.” Billionaires are lining up to install a man in the U.S. Senate who has demonstrated, repeatedly and publicly, that he does not believe the rules apply to him. This is the system working exactly as designed for the people who built it. Dark money super-PACs, no disclosure requirements, no accountability, no consequences. Just a firehose of cash aimed at a Texas Senate seat.
Here is the structural reality. Paxton lags in fundraising. Most polls show his opponent, James Talarico, with a slight advantage. The Republican establishment knows their candidate is weak, compromised, and trailing. So they are doing what they always do when the candidate cannot win on merit: they are buying airtime, flooding the zone, and hoping that enough negative advertising and enough manufactured outrage will suppress turnout among the people most harmed by the policies Paxton would champion in Washington.
Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThis is not a Texas problem. It is a democracy problem. The Supreme Court opened the floodgates with Citizens United, and now every election cycle brings a new high-water mark for outside spending. MAGA Inc. does not have to disclose its donors in real time. The people of Texas will not know who funded the ads bombarding their televisions and phones until long after the votes are counted. That is not transparency. That is organized erasure of accountability.
Paxton’s record is not a secret. He was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives on 20 articles including bribery and abuse of office. He was acquitted in the Texas Senate only because enough Republican senators refused to convict one of their own. He settled with whistleblowers from his own agency who reported him to the FBI. This is the man Trump wants in the U.S. Senate, and Trump is willing to spend $10 million of other people’s money to put him there.
The response cannot be hand-wringing. It has to be organizing. Talarico is running a real campaign in a state where demographics are shifting and turnout is everything. Every door knocked, every voter registered, every neighbor talked to is a direct counter to the $10 million that MAGA Inc. just poured into this race. The people who fund these super-PACs are terrified of one thing: an electorate that shows up informed and in numbers they cannot outspend.
Ten million dollars is a lot of money. It is not more powerful than a mobilized community that refuses to be bought.