As a villain Paxton has always been a little disappointing. He’s that rare combination of lazy and greedy—his misdeeds lack the ambition and drama of those committed by a true mastermind. This is the man, after all, who boosted a $1,000 Montblanc pen from a courthouse security bin and returned it only after the local sheriff spotted the act on security footage. Longtime Paxton observers will also remember the time he hired as an adviser a former ice cream company owner whose dad had given $50,000 to Paxton’s legal-defense fund, only to fire the man two months later after he aired sexually explicit videos of children during a staff meeting (the man was attempting to demonstrate how disturbing it was to investigate sex trafficking). Even Paxton’s signature alleged trespass—the state securities fraud case—seems to have resulted less from cunning than from corner cutting and sloppiness.

Many of Paxton’s crusades as AG have been little more than performative acts of vengeance, inscrutable to all but the most committed MAGA warriors. Case in point: In October, his office put out a press release with the subject line “Attorney General Paxton Calls for Jeff Leach’s Resignation; Announces Criminal Referral After Leach Confessed to Unlawful Attempt to Influence Judge in Capital Punishment Proceedings On Behalf Of Man Sentenced to Death In Murder of 2-Year-Old Daughter.” Leach, if you’re not a dedicated follower of legislative infighting, is a Republican state representative who voted to impeach Paxton. (The man Leach has been trying to get off death row is widely believed to be innocent.)

Paxton’s narrow focus on score settling sometimes gets in the way of his broader ambitions. In 2023, after his impeachment trial, he landed a plum interview with the right-wing media star Tucker Carlson. That appearance could have boosted Paxton’s national profile. But the AG proceeded to regale his bemused host with dull complaints about obscure foes. Texans for Lawsuit Reform? Eva Guzman? It was like being stuck next to a stranger on an airplane recounting battles against his homeowners association.

Paxton’s performance as a lawyer has been similarly unimpressive. Over the past couple of years, he has trumpeted investigations into the liberal group Media Matters, an El Paso nonprofit that runs migrant shelters, and an Austin voter-registration nonprofit—and seen all of them paused or derailed in court. During his decade as AG, he has filed hundreds of lawsuits—more than a hundred against the Biden administration alone. Many have been dropped, dismissed, or lost, costing millions of dollars to the state and to those who’ve had to defend themselves.

Even on his signature issue, specious claims of election fraud, there’s a lot less than meets the eye. He has worked tirelessly to promote the lie that Democrats are engaged in widespread efforts to steal elections and has seen the majority of his cases fizzle. But Paxton isn’t all that interested in being an effective lawyer; he just wants to whip up fear of straw men and portray himself as the champion who will slay them—all the better if Trump notices