Texas AG Paxton’s campaign spent $50,000 at Mar-a-Lago: report

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has not been the type of Republican who is known for reaching out to the center. From his anti-Obamacare activities to a lawsuit that tried to throw out the election results in four states that President Joe Biden won in 2020, Paxton has consistently pandered to the worst extremes of the MAGA movement — and in 2021, according to Forbes, Paxton did some of his pandering at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Forbes’ Zach Everson reports, “A prominent backer of Donald Trump’s Big Lie is also a big supporter of the former president’s private business. The reelection campaign for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton made three expenditures at Mar-a-Lago, totaling $50,000, in the last two months of 2021, according to a state filing released (on January 19).”

According to Everson, the 59-year-old Paxton “posted a photo on Instagram in December, thanking the former president for hosting a fundraiser. Trump endorsed Paxton in July 2021, while his wife Angela, a candidate for state senate in Texas, picked up the former president’s backing a couple of weeks after the fundraiser.”

Everson notes that two other Republicans “whose campaigns have spent at least $50,000” at Mar-a-Lago are Kari Lake and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Both of them are gubernatorial candidates. Sanders, a former White House press secretary in the Trump Administration and the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, is running for governor in Arkansas — while anti-vaxxer Lake, a far-right conspiracy theorist and former television reporter in Phoenix, is seeking the nomination in Arizona’s 2022 GOP primary.