Ken Paxton stands accused of bribery, infidelity, abuse of office, and federal investigation. His rebuttal? James Talarico eats tofu. Republicans find this perfectly satisfactory.
There is a venerable tradition in courtrooms the world over, when the evidence against a defendant is so comprehensive, so richly documented, and so thoroughly embarrassing, that counsel abandons the defence of the charge entirely and pivots instead to the character of the prosecution witness. It is a technique of last resort, deployed when the facts have become ungovernable. In American conservative politics, however, it has become the opening argument.
Ken Paxton – Texas Attorney General, Republican primary winner, and man whose biography reads less like a political résumé than a criminal justice case study – is running for the United States Senate. He has just dispatched John Cornyn, a sitting senator with two decades of experience, in a primary whose bitterness could strip paint. And his central charge against his Democratic opponent, James Talarico, a former schoolteacher from Austin, is this: the man may be a vegan.
Not a fraudster. Not a man under investigation. Not a man who fired his own staff for having the temerity to report him to the FBI. A vegan. Possibly. Allegedly. As it happens, falsely.
Act IThe Accused Reads His Charge Sheet
Let us, in the spirit of fairness that Paxton himself has never shown much appetite for, set out what the record contains.
- 2015: Indicted by a state grand jury on felony securities fraud charges relating to conduct before he took office as Attorney General. He pleaded not guilty. The case wound through the courts for nearly a decade before a 2024 settlement in which he admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution. Nearly a decade.
- 2018: Began an extramarital affair with a Senate aide, a fact he reportedly confided to senior members of his own staff. The affair restarted in 2020. His wife – state Senator Angela Paxton, a woman of evident patience – was kept in the dark.
- 2020: Eight of his most senior officials, including his first assistant attorney general and multiple deputy attorneys general, reported him to the FBI. Their allegation: that he had abused his office to benefit Nate Paul, a real estate investor under federal investigation, and that Paul had arranged employment for the woman Paxton was sleeping with in exchange for official favours. Shortly thereafter, the officials were fired, placed on leave, or forced out.
- 2023: Impeached by the Republican-controlled Texas House of Representatives on sixteen articles, including bribery and abuse of office. Acquitted by the Republican-controlled Texas Senate, with only two members of his own party voting to convict. His lawyer, memorably, told the Senate: “Imagine if we impeached everybody here in Austin that had had an affair. We’d be impeaching for the next 100 years, wouldn’t we?” The defence was, essentially, that adultery is sufficiently widespread in Texas politics to render it disqualifying for no one.
- 2025: Angela Paxton, having apparently concluded that three dozen years of marriage were enough, filed for divorce on what she described as “biblical grounds.” A court later unseal divorce records that confirmed what the trial had already disclosed.
- 2025: A Travis County district court judge found that the fired whistleblowers had been improperly dismissed and awarded them $6.6 million – paid, with customary Republican fiscal responsibility, by Texas taxpayers.
That is the record. The man holding it is now the Republican nominee for the United States Senate. And his campaign’s foremost grievance against James Talarico is dietary.
Act IIThe Vegan Menace
On the night of his primary runoff victory – having just defeated an incumbent senator of his own party in a race transformed by a late Trump endorsement – Paxton stood before his supporters and delivered what he evidently considered a devastating broadside. “He’s a vegan who thinks God is nonbinary,” Paxton announced. He had also, in the days prior, coined a nickname for his opponent: Tofu Talarico. This is the man who wants to represent the cattle-heavy state of Texas in the United States Senate, and he has deployed his finest creative energies to produce “Tofu Talarico.”
“I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.” – James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate, May 2026
There is a further complication. The claim is false. James Talarico is not, in any documented sense, a vegan. His press secretary responded to the accusation in March 2026 with what she described as an “official statement on vegan accusations” – a photograph of Talarico biting into a turkey leg at the Texas State Fair. In May, he appeared at a taqueria in Austin alongside Barack Obama and ordered potato, egg and cheese tacos, a meal that would occasion some bewilderment at any vegan restaurant. He has eaten bacon and egg tacos on the campaign trail, has discussed his love of pulled pork and brisket, and told the MeidasTouch podcast, with the precision of a man who had given the matter forensic thought: “I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.”
PolitiFact reviewed the evidence and rated Paxton’s claim straightforwardly False. This has not slowed the claim’s circulation. Donald Trump, who endorsed Paxton and whose endorsement was decisive in the primary, repeated it on Truth Social, adding that Talarico was “insulting to Jesus Christ” and comparing him to Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon mascot of Mad magazine. The accusation of veganism now circulates through Republican circles with the casual authority of settled fact.
Talarico, for his part, surveyed the situation and concluded correctly that he was winning: “If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”
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Act IIIThe Long Art of Republican Deflection
One might dismiss this as an isolated absurdity, the desperate flailing of a scandal-soaked candidate who has run out of respectable ground. But that would be to underestimate the sophistication of what is on display. The vegan line is not a gaffe. It is a strategy, and it is one with a long and successful pedigree on the American right.
The strategy works as follows. When your candidate’s record is indefensible on its merits, when he has been indicted, impeached, investigated, and divorced on biblical grounds, all before the general election even begins, you do not defend the record. You do not attempt, as a serious political party in a serious democracy might, to acknowledge the gravity of the accusations and explain why voters should nonetheless have confidence in your man. You instead locate a cultural marker in your opponent, something that signals alien values, something that can be made to feel threatening to the identity of your base and you repeat it until it becomes the dominant frame of the race.
Veganism serves this purpose admirably. In Texas, cattle country, a man who will not eat beef is a man who does not understand Texas, does not share Texas values, does not deserve to represent Texas. That the man in question does, in fact, eat beef is a secondary matter. The point is not the truth of the allegation. The point is the allegation’s function: to place Talarico on the wrong side of a cultural boundary, to make the race a referendum on identity rather than on the Attorney General’s conduct.
The vegan line is not a gaffe. It is not an accident. It is the Republican party’s settled answer to the question of what you do when your candidate’s record cannot be defended.
This is not new. The Republican Party has been running this play, in various forms, for decades. When a Democratic candidate for Senate in Georgia was accused of elitism in 2020, the cultural weapon was out-of-state wine. When John Kerry ran for president in 2004 on a record of military service his opponent could not match, the response was to impugn the service itself and to deploy the image of a man ordering a cheesesteak with Swiss rather than Whiz as evidence of fundamental foreignness. When Barack Obama ran for president, the cultural weapons were a middle name and an alleged cosmopolitanism the man who orders Dijon mustard, who plays basketball instead of bowling, who went to the wrong universities and doesn’t quite smell right. What shifts is the specific marker. What never shifts is the structure: find the thing that makes the base feel culturally threatened, name it loudly, and repeat.
The technique is particularly well-suited to candidates like Paxton, because it operates on a principle of displacement. The question is he fit for office? is replaced, through sheer repetition, with the question is he one of us? And on the second question, the candidate with the most convincing cultural credentials wins regardless of what his staff reported to the FBI. The indictment recedes. The affair recedes. The $6.6 million whistleblower payout recedes. What remains, filling the available airspace, is tofu.
Act IVThe Base That Believes It
What is most remarkable about this technique is not that Paxton deploys it, or that Trump amplifies it, but that it works. Republican voters in Texas a significant number of them, enough to win a primary against a 20-year incumbent senator have processed the Paxton record and arrived at the conclusion that the man deserves not only vindication but promotion. That the Texas House of Representatives, itself controlled by Republicans, impeached him on sixteen articles appears to register as evidence of establishment betrayal rather than bipartisan accountability. That his own wife divorced him on biblical grounds is either unremarked upon or forgiven. That the most conspicuous thing about his opponent is allegedly a dietary preference is accepted as a more meaningful political datum than any of the above.
To understand this is to understand something important about what the Republican Party has become under the gravitational pull of Trumpism. It is no longer principally a party organised around policy commitments to low taxes, strong defence, constitutional originalism though it retains these as rhetorical furniture. It is a party organised around the proposition that its enemies are dangerous and that its own must be defended. The enemies are the vegans, the gender theorists, the people who eat egg tacos in Austin with Barack Obama and think this is normal. The own, regardless of their actual record, are the people who stand against them.
In such a party, “he’s a vegan” is not a non-sequitur to the charge of bribery. It is a perfectly adequate reply. It says: whatever he did, his enemies are worse. Whatever he is, they are more alien. And in a politics organised around tribal loyalty rather than institutional accountability, that is quite enough.
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CodaA Final Word on Tofu
Talarico’s observation that he had been eating barbecue since before Paxton’s first indictment is, considered properly, a rather extraordinary statement of political conditions. It is not a sentence that ought to make sense in any democratic polity operating with a functioning sense of proportion. It is the kind of sentence that should feel too surreal to utter aloud. And yet it was greeted not as the damning absurdity it is but as a reasonable campaign line which it is, because the alternative allowing the vegan charge to stand unanswered is apparently worse, which tells you something about where the needle now sits.
Paxton’s defence lawyers told the Texas Senate during his impeachment trial that everyone in Austin has had an affair and therefore none of them can throw the first stone. The Senate took the point and acquitted. Trump told the country the man is God’s warrior against tofu. The base took the point and voted. At some stage the question becomes not whether Ken Paxton is fit for the United States Senate but whether any of the available standards of fitness still mean what they used to mean.
The tofu is, in every meaningful sense, beside the point. Which is precisely why they keep bringing it up.
Ken Paxton won the Texas Republican primary runoff on 27 May 2026, defeating incumbent Senator John Cornyn. He faces Democratic nominee James Talarico in the November general election. Talarico is not a vegan. Paxton’s securities fraud case was settled in 2024 for $300,000. His former staff whistleblowers were awarded $6.6 million in 2025. His wife filed for divorce the same year. These are the facts. The campaign will continue to be about tofu.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 