Ken Paxton sold his Senate oath to Donald Trump. He sold it in the final days of the Republican runoff, when the endorsement arrived and the undecided voters broke his way. He sold it for the strongman’s backing, for the rally crowd’s roar, for the permission to govern Texas as a satellite of a man who has never governed anything he did not own. The transaction is complete. The receipt is public. And the man who knew the inside of Paxton’s legal life for nearly a decade has now walked away to support his opponent.
Dan Cogdell is a self-described moderate who has contributed more campaign cash to Republicans than Democrats. He spent nine years defending Ken Paxton against charges of securities fraud and through the state House impeachment trial that ended in acquittal. He worked his “ass off for the man,” as he told the Associated Press. He does not think Paxton is a bad person, and he believes the Texas Senate was right to acquit. Yet on Monday, Cogdell endorsed Democratic challenger James Talarico. His reason was not the past legal troubles that shadowed the attorney general. It was the political captivity. Paxton, Cogdell said, is too busy “bootlick[ing] or rubber stamp[ing] Trump” to do the work Texas requires on education and healthcare.
When a lawyer who has defended a politician against the state walks away to support that politician’s opponent, the break is not personal. It is structural. The man who kept his client out of prison sees a new kind of confinement. And the light coming through that crack ought to make the people who still fill the pews squint.
I spent thirty years inside the Evangelical apparatus, and I can tell you: the calculus here is not complicated. A leader who faces credible accusations of corruption—bribery, abuse of office, a securities-fraud indictment that shadowed him for nearly a decade before a quiet resolution in 2024—would, under any ordinary reading of Scripture, be disqualified. Proverbs 29:2 is plain: “When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan.” The apostle Paul’s list in 1 Timothy includes being “above reproach,” “not a lover of money,” “respectable” (1 Tim. 3:2–3). Jesus himself, when asked who will be greatest, says that the one who rules must be the servant of all (Mark 10:43–44). None of these texts requires a flawless man. They do require a man who does not make a mockery of the virtues he claims to represent.
And yet for much of Texas’s Evangelical establishment, Ken Paxton is their champion. He is their defender on religious-liberty lawsuits, the guardian of their interpretation of the Constitution, the man who filed the Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in four other states. He is, in other words, their instrument. And because he is their instrument, they have persuaded themselves that his character does not matter. They have constructed an elaborate legalism—a theology of the temporal—that says, “God uses imperfect vessels,” and “we aren’t electing a pastor,” and “the alternative is a Democrat who will destroy the country.” In this frame, the biblical witness on righteousness and justice becomes a footnote, secondary, a text to be allegorized away while the real work of holding power gets done.
This is not a new story. It is the story of 1 Samuel 8. The people of Israel come to Samuel and demand a king, “such as all the other nations have” (1 Sam. 8:5). God tells Samuel that in demanding a king they have rejected God himself from being their king. Samuel warns that a human king will seize their sons for his armies, their daughters for his court, their land and harvests for his officials—and that when they cry out under the burden of the king they chose, God will be silent. The people’s answer? “No. We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam. 8:19–20). They wanted a king who would defeat their enemies, and they were willing to pay the cost of their own liberty for it.
That is the bargain Texas Evangelicals have made. They have chosen Ken Paxton because he will fight their battles—culture-war battles, judicial battles, battles over which bathrooms children use and what America “really” is. They have accepted that he will take their loyalty and give them strong rhetoric, that he will stand beside Donald Trump and advance their agenda, and in exchange they will look past the indictments, the impeachment, the open contempt for the virtues they claim to love. They are willing to cry out later, when the king they chose has taken what he wants and left their institutions hollow, but they will not hear that warning now, because the warning is from a God they have already functionally dethroned.
The Christian-Right apparatus in Texas—forged through decades of Southern Baptist Convention mobilization and conservative institutional alignment—has trained its candidates to read a strongman’s endorsement as a theological mandate. Forty years of institutional capture have taught the Evangelical electorate to mistake political survival for divine sanction. But the text that anchors this tradition sets a sharper boundary. Matthew 4:8–10 records the third temptation of Jesus: “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’ Jesus said, ‘Away from me, Satan! For it is written: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.”’” The Evangelical legalist reading that drives the Religious Right treats the acquisition of political power as the ultimate proof of faithfulness. The plain language of the passage reads differently. The offer of the kingdoms of the earth comes with a single condition: bow down. The text does not treat the kingdoms as a prize to be won. It treats the offer as a test of who receives the worship.
Ken Paxton’s primary victory over John Cornyn was engineered through the very mechanics of this transaction. When the Trump endorsement arrived in the final days of the runoff, it functioned not as a political coalition but as a litmus test of fealty. Cogdell’s diagnosis is clinical: bootlicking and rubber-stamping are not governing strategies. They are the mechanics of appeasement. The apparatus calls it orthodoxy; the text calls it the condition Satan offered in the wilderness. The chasm between those two readings is the space where Christian Nationalism operates. The movement teaches its candidates that securing the strongman’s backing is the path to saving the nation. The Scripture says that bowing to secure the nations is the path to apostasy.
The irony—and it is the bitter irony of the Bible-versus-Evangelical-legalism beat I have worked in this space for the past year—is that the Bible these voters claim to revere has already told them how the story ends. Every king Israel chose for the wrong reasons eventually failed them, and the failure was precisely what the prophets said it would be: a failure of character that became a failure of justice that became a disaster visited on the very people who had demanded the king in the first place. “They set up kings without my consent; they choose princes without my approval,” God says through Hosea. “From their silver and gold they make idols for themselves—for their own destruction” (Hosea 8:4). The king becomes an idol, and the idol destroys.
The lead defense attorney, Tony Buzbee, reiterated a deflection on social media while pledging his support for Paxton: Cogdell is a Democrat, his endorsement is unsurprising. The response treats the transaction as normal politics. But the difference between the two defense attorneys is the difference between a man who still needs the client’s favor and a man who no longer does. The voter asking which candidate will fight for the clinic, the school board, and the rural hospital is asking a question the transaction cannot answer—because the kingdoms of the world, once accepted on the tempter’s terms, come with a different set of priorities.
Dan Cogdell’s endorsement is the quiet confirmation that the people around Ken Paxton know exactly who he is. The people in the pews have known it too, if they were being honest. The difference is that Cogdell, after nine years of defending the man, is willing to say it out loud. The Evangelical voters who will pull the lever for Paxton in November are not. They have made their bargain, and they will keep it, because the king they have chosen is the king they wanted. Whether they will still want him when he asks for their daughters’ freedom and their sons’ future is a question the Bible answers, but that they have decided not to read.
James Talarico now carries the endorsement of the man who knew the inside of Paxton’s legal life for nearly a decade. As the general election brings Talarico squarely into the national spotlight, the contrast will sharpen. The Democratic challenger is offering the work of education and healthcare. The Republican incumbent is offering the receipt for an appeasement he cannot govern without. The Texas voter who still reads her Bible on Sunday morning needs only to open it. The kingdoms of the world are always available for a price. The question is not whether the candidate can pay it. The question is not even what the candidate gets. The question is what happens to the people when the payment is made—and who they have bowed down to worship in the making of it.