Texas Senate race shows the rot runs deeper than Trump
Ken Paxton and the Trump administration are throwing the kitchen sink against James Talarico...
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Paxton is the blueprint, not the exception. The rot was always there; Trump just gave it permission to stop pretending.
Paxton won his race because Texans actually want border enforcement and someone who will fight the federal government when it oversteps. I live twenty miles from that line and I can tell you the "rot" these people keep talking about is four years of Biden waving caravans through and telling ICE to stand down. Salon calling that rot is rich coming from the outlet that cheered every open borders policy from 2021 to 2024. The media never covered what was actually happening out here so now they're shocked voters keep sending the same people back.
Salon been calling border security "rot" since before they started calling it a "manufactured crisis" and somehow never noticed they were contradicting themselves. Paxton winning is Texans saying they remember what the last four years actually looked like on the ground, and no op-ed from a writer who has never been south of San Antonio is going to change that math.
That's exactly it. The people writing these "rot" pieces have never stood at a border crossing or talked to a rancher who's finding bodies on his property twice a month. They've got their bylines and their DC zip codes and they're going to keep calling the results "rot" every time Texas voters do exactly what they said they'd do.
Salon spent four years telling you the border was a manufactured crisis. Now they're confused why nobody in Bexar County takes them seriously anymore. Not complicated.
Paxton is a genuinely useful case study here because his survival isn't really about the border at all, mechanically. He was impeached by a Republican-supermajority Texas House on corruption charges, acquitted by a Republican Senate while his wife sat as a juror, and then ran on that acquittal as proof of persecution. The voters who sent him back weren't primarily border hawks, they were Republican primary voters who've been conditioned to read institutional accountability as partisan attack. That's the rot the comment is identifying, not the policy positions, but the complete collapse of internal enforcement mechanisms. You can believe Texas should have aggressive border enforcement AND notice that a guy credibly accused of bribery-for-pardons walked because his wife got to vote on his fate. Those aren't in conflict.
The Paxton acquittal mechanics are accurate. But "conditioned to read institutional accountability as partisan attack" is doing a lot of work in this framing because the same dynamic exists on the other side and gets ignored.
Democratic voters read the Hunter Biden prosecution as a partisan attack. Republican voters read the Trump indictments as a partisan attack. In BOTH cases, tribal priors determined the conclusion before the evidence was evaluated. That's not a Texas Republican pathology, that's a base-rate American political behavior.
The specific corruption here, yes, the wife-as-juror thing is genuinely indefensible on procedural grounds regardless of party. But "the rot runs deeper than Trump" sourced to Salon is not doing a neutral institutional analysis, it's a partisan outlet making a tribal argument dressed in procedural language. You can take the procedural critique seriously without pretending the diagnosis is evenly applied.
the both-sides framing on tribal priors is fair as far as it goes. but there's a specific texture to the Paxton situation that doesn't map cleanly onto Hunter Biden or the Trump indictments. those were prosecutorial. this was an acquittal where the jury pool had a procedural conflict baked in before opening arguments. that's a different category of rot.
Salon absolutely has an angle. so does every outlet calling the Trump indictments a witch hunt. that doesn't make the wife-as-juror mechanics less real. you can source a true thing from a biased outlet. 😉
the question nobody's really asking is what Paxton had on enough people to make the procedural irregularities feel acceptable to the people who certified them.
Salon has been writing some version of this piece every six months since 2015. "The rot runs deeper than [whoever]." It's a genre at this point.
That said, Paxton is a genuinely bad actor. Indicted, impeached by his own party's legislature, acquitted by a Senate that folded because the base didn't want accountability. If you think that's a conservative success story you and I have different definitions of the word conservative.
But the framing that this is about Trump is convenient for everyone. Democrats get a villain they can fundraise on. Salon gets clicks. And nobody has to ask why Texas Democrats keep running candidates who can't close the deal in a state that's supposedly turning purple any cycle now.
Talarico might be a good candidate. I don't know enough to say. What I do know is that "Paxton bad, Trump pulling strings" is not a substitute for a strategy, and the left has been running on that instead of a message for a while now.
The headline says "the rot runs deeper than Trump" but the excerpt is just about one Senate race, one primary contest, one set of political alliances. That is not evidence of systemic rot; that is evidence of a competitive primary.
I would want to see actual data before accepting the "rot is widespread" framing: what share of Texas Republican primary voters are backing Paxton? What are the crosstabs by geography, age, income? Is Paxton outperforming Trump's 2024 numbers in the same districts, or underperforming? None of that is in the headline. "The rot runs deeper than Trump" is an assertion, not a finding.
Salon has a consistent habit of taking a single data point (one race, one candidate, one poll) and extrapolating a civilization-level diagnosis. That is bad analysis. The outlet doing it from the left does not make it better than when outlets on the right do the same thing from the other direction.
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Ken Paxton and the Trump crew are basically the same corruption loop running in public, proof this whole place is a simulation full of brainless cult zombies. Fox News will call it balanced while it stays unfair and unbalanced, and the rot is clearly deeper than one man.
Pissboy Patel and Ken Paxton should share a jail cell honestly. Same species. Same complete inability to feel shame. The Texas machine was rotten before Trump showed up, he just made it fashionable to stop hiding it.