IT WAS HARDLY the keynote slot—before Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, before Eric and Lara Trump, before Rudy Giuliani calling for “trial by combat,” before John Eastman, dressed for some reason like Indiana Jones, and long before President Donald Trump, who would speak for more than an hour and incite an insurrection against Congress. But Ken Paxton didn’t mind being an afterthought when he took the stage at the “Save America” rally in Washington on the morning of January 6. The Republican attorney general of Texas was happy just to be there at all.
The 58-year-old Paxton wore a thick tartan scarf with a long black coat and no gloves, and his gray hair, stubbornly parted for decades, drifted haphazardly across his forehead in the stiff January wind. When he was 12, Paxton nearly lost his right eye in a freak accident during a game of hide-and-seek. It left permanent damage—it’s a different color from his left one, and the lid above it is half-closed. The effect is that whether he is posing for a mugshot or addressing a large group of people preparing to hang Mike Pence, Paxton’s face appears fixed in a mischievous half-smirk.
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