Texas House Republicans impeach Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in a major blow to Donald Trump

| 7:10 pm EDT May 27, 2023
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There’s long been a simplistic yet popular narrative out there that “Republicans will never abandon Donald Trump no matter what.” The thing is, it’s just not true. In reality, Republican office holders will always each simply do whatever they selfishly think is best for themselves and their reelection prospects.

These days Trump has long been out of power, and in spite of the media hype, he has no real prospects of ever being back in power. He has a criminal trial in New York in March of 2024, and he’ll also have a federal criminal trial on much more serious charges, along with a criminal trial in Fulton County. The notion of him being viable by 2024 is laughable. For all the lip service that Republicans are still giving Trump, they know he’s toast – and their actions are starting to make that clear.

For instance, Texas House Republicans overwhelmingly voted today to impeach and remove Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Why? Paxton is a loon who’s under federal criminal investigation, and he’s spiraling dangerously out of control. Since he’s going down anyway, Texas Republicans selfishly decided to cut their losses and move on from him. It’s what Republicans do.

The kicker is that Trump and Paxton are close allies, and Trump spent today publicly trying to bully Texas Republicans into keeping Paxton around. As usual, Trump tried singling out one individual for harassment – in this case Texas Speaker of the House – in the hope that the others would cower. But it didn’t work. Trump has a long history of successfully bullying individual Republicans who go against him. But when the majority of Texas House Republicans decide to go against Trump, his simplistic bully tactics always fail.

The real story here is that Republican legislators in a red state made the calculation today that it was in their best interest to jettison a troublesome Trump ally, even knowing that Trump would publicly attack them over it. Texas Republicans have clearly decided that Trump is too far gone for his attacks against them to have much of an impact. And since Trump is going to prison anyway, why keep Trump’s pain in the ass friend Paxton around just to please Trump?

We’ll see a lot of nonsense narratives today about how Texas Republicans have “grown a conscience” or “grown a spine” by voting to jettison Ken Paxton. But those are naive childlike concepts that do not exist in Republican politics. When Republican politicians decide what to do, right vs wrong never comes into play. They’re the kind of sociopaths who don’t know or care what those words even mean.

Republican politicians always simply decide to do the selfish thing that they think will benefit them and their careers the most. Most of the time, the selfish thing happens to be the morally wrong thing. On occasion, such as today, the selfish thing just happens to coincidentally be the right thing.

Unfortunately, very little if anything changed for Texas today. Texas Republicans are objectively awful from top to bottom, so Paxton’s Republican replacement won’t be much of an improvement. The real story here, in fact the only story, is that Texas Republican legislators have now selfishly decided that they’re better off moving on from Trump than by continuing to try to keep him happy. In other words, it’s the latest sign that Trump is simply toast.