Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton elbowed his way to the front of a crowded field to grab the title of “Most Wretched Republican Bootlicker” with a "painfully stupid" move, according to a columnist.
The Republican attorney general filed what Salon's Amanda Marcotte described as a "nuisance lawsuit" against drug makers Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue, falsely alleging the pharmaceutical companies had concealed an unproven link between Tylenol and autism that was hyped last month by President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"Even by MAGA standards, Paxton has high levels of radiant misogyny, but it’s confusing why he would want to touch this hot stove," Marcotte wrote. "The likeliest answer is also the most painfully stupid one: Paxton is beclowning himself in hopes of wooing Trump to endorse his primary challenge against incumbent GOP Sen. John Cornyn."
The GOP Senate primary race is a dead heat, according to polls, after Paxton built up an early lead that has evaporated due to revelations about his affairs, ongoing corruption scandals and general odiousness, Marcotte reported. Many Republicans fear the attorney general would lose to a Democrat in the general election.
"In response, Paxton has become comically thirsty for Trump’s endorsement, signaling there’s no limit to how low he will debase himself to get that tiny thumbs up," Marcotte wrote.
Paxton has been booking trips to Trump-owned golf courses in hopes of bumping into him and running ads for his Texas race in Palm Beach, Florida, where the president might see them while flipping channels at his Mar-a-Lago resort. But Marcotte wrote that his Tylenol lawsuit might be the lowest he's stooped to win the coveted endorsement.
"By filing this frivolous lawsuit, Paxton is flattering Trump’s notoriously fragile ego," Marcotte wrote. "In the weeks since Trump and Kennedy first uttered the Tylenol lie with great fanfare during a strange press conference, the president has been bitter about the pushback he has received from women and doctors. During a recent Cabinet meeting ... Kennedy made a point to grouse about how terrible women were for questioning the president’s immeasurable medical wisdom."
"Pregnant women who disbelieve Trump’s lies, he insisted, suffer from a 'pathology' he called 'Trump derangement syndrome," Marcotte added. "No such 'syndrome' exists, but the social pathology of sexist men calling outspoken women 'crazy' has long been well-documented."
Trump has tried to take control of private companies and universities since returning to the White House, and he now seemingly wants to control the medical decisions made by women about taking pain relievers during pregnancy or getting routine vaccinations for their children, she wrote.
"The legal filing has a slapped-together quality to it, including a plethora of irrelevant Wikipedia-style details, like why the drug is called 'Tylenol,' to fill out the page length and make the complaint seem more substantive than it is," Marcotte wrote. "It reads very much like something Paxton hastily assembled, perhaps even after seeing Trump’s Sunday Truth Social post, in hopes of getting the president’s attention — not out of any confidence that he will win in court."
"The whole thing is yet another reminder that Paxton is corrupt on a level that even alienates some Texas Republicans," she added.