Following the withdrawal of Congressman Matt Gaetz as President Trump’s nominee for attorney general, conservatives are rallying around the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton — a fiercely conservative, combative executive who has gone to war with the Biden administration in the past — to be nominated for the post. He has some enemies in the Senate who could make that difficult, however. 

One source with close ties to the Trump team tells The New York Sun in a message that Mr. Paxton would be the ideal choice for the America First movement. He has served as Texas’s attorney general since 2015, and been on the front lines of states suing the Biden administration and liberal cities and counties in his state to enact a hardline conservative agenda. 

Mr. Paxton was the architect of the Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit at the Supreme Court in 2020 which challenged the results of the presidential election results that year in the Keystone State. He also took a hard line on the state’s abortion laws, defending the statute against a woman who was seeking an abortion out of medical necessity. 

Mr. Paxton’s biggest opposition in the Senate may not come from Democrats, however, given his past troubles with Senator Cornyn. 

When Mr. Cornyn announced earlier this year that he would run to replace Senator McConnell as Republican leader in the upper chamber, Mr. Paxton shot off a post on X, highlighting the Texas senator’s authorship of a gun control bill in the wake of the 2022 Uvalde shooting that left more than a dozen schoolchildren dead.

“It will be difficult for @JohnCornyn to be an effective leader since he is anti-Trump, anti-gun, and will be focused on his highly competitive primary campaign in 2026. Republicans deserve better in their next leader and Texans deserve another conservative Senator,” Mr. Paxton wrote, implying that he would challenge Mr. Cornyn from the right in the 2026 Texas Senate race.

“Hard to run from prison, Ken,” Mr. Cornyn wrote back, referring to corruption charges Mr. Paxton was facing at the time. 

Trump does have numerous choices for the attorney general slot beyond Mr. Paxton, however. Missouri’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, was seen as a leading contender before Mr. Gaetz was surprisingly announced as the nominee eight days ago. Mr. Bailey has, like Mr. Paxton, been a strident defender of Trump in the press, including by decrying the president-elect’s criminal conviction, filing an amicus brief in support of lifting Trump’s gag order, and supporting another amicus brief from Alabama at the Supreme Court while urging the justices to throw out the charges brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the classified documents case. 

Other potential candidates have already been nominated for other roles, or declined to be considered. Notably, the GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee have ruled themselves out for the job. Senator Cruz said Thursday that he would stay in the Senate, to which he was just re-elected for another six-year term. Senator Lee will also stay in the upper chamber. Senator Schmitt, who is Mr. Bailey’s predecessor as Missouri attorney general, also took himself out of the running, saying that he was “ready to roll up my sleeves and be a champion for President Trump in the Senate.” Senator Hawley also said he did not want to serve in the executive branch.