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Here’s what’s on deck: Texas Republican Attorney General and Senate candidate Ken Paxton was caught admitting in a leaked audio recording that Donald Trump’s war with Iran is the single biggest problem for his campaign’s flagging numbers. Republican-aligned groups are pulling money out of swing districts and states to defend GOP strongholds in danger of flipping that they’ve long since taken for granted. Companies with ties to Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have officially accumulated more than $6 billion in either active or promised government contracts. And newly obtained internal documents show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been sweeping up tens of millions of voter records ahead of next month’s midterms despite voter registration not having anything to do with immigration enforcement. Let’s get into it.
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Ken Paxton has been one of Donald Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers in Texas for years. But when he thought he was speaking to only donors and lobbyists, he painted a very different picture.
Axios obtained an audio recording from a September closed-door fundraising event in Washington. At one point, a donor asked Paxton why his campaign was having such a hard time getting an edge over Democrat James Talarico. Paxton laid blame at the feet of the Trump White House.
According to Paxton, his floundering campaign is due to “the war,” along with “gas prices” and “diesel [costing] over $6 per gallon,” saying “people are feeling the pinch.” He added that the war and higher gas prices led to higher grocery costs and called it “by far our biggest problem.”
That’s a damning indictment from a candidate Trump endorsed in the primary against a sitting Republican senator. This stings especially hard given that the Trump administration has been trying to blame high gas prices on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Paxton himself doesn’t appear to be buying that, at least when he believes he’s speaking off the cuff to GOP donors.
Paxton agreed with one attendee at that meeting observed that nobody could stop Trump’s war. He maintained he has no control over gas prices, that almost every facet of his campaign was out of his hands and that he doesn’t have a say in many of the decisions being made about his own campaign.
The Paxton campaign responded by dismissing the secret recording a “non-story,” and a spokesperson argued that the president is doing everything he can to bring prices down. Trump is expected to host a rally alongside Paxton in San Antonio today.
This marks the second time a recording from that same fundraiser has leaked to the public in a handful of days. On Monday, Politico published leaked audio in which Paxton can be heard complained that his campaign was being almost entirely led by Washington D.C. and that he had “no ability to change anything.” He added that he’d never been in an election where he felt he had less control.
Paxton is currently in a tight race with Talarico, who is threatening to give Democrats their first Senate seat from Texas in decades. A Texas Republican blaming a Republican president for his own flagging campaign is a signal that the midterms could be far more brutal for the incumbent party than previously imagined.
Back in 1798, James Madison warned Thomas Jefferson that the presidency is the branch most prone to wars, which is why the Framers made sure those decisions are in the hands of Congress. When a president drags the country into a war and even his own party’s candidates can’t defend it, the ones paying for all of it are working people breaking the bank to fill their tanks. November is the only vote on this war Americans are going to get.
Paxton is far from the only Republican candidate feeling the pressure of November 3. According to Politico, GOP-affiliated groups have started to pull money our from states they no longer believe they can win and are now conducting a strategic retreat to bolster longtime Republican strongholds now in danger of flipping to Democratic control. Republicans still have a massive money advantage, but even hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign ads only goes so far.
This is happening in North Carolina, which Trump won in all three of his elections. But the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) — which is tied to Senate Majority Leader John Thune — has cancelled its ad buys there along with other GOP groups. Roy Cooper, the former two-term Democratic governor, is likely to flip that seat. That’s one of the four Republican-held seats Democrats need in order to win back the Senate majority.
The ad money previously reserved in the Tar Heel State is now being diverted to South Carolina, where no Democrat has won a U.S. Senate election in almost 30 years. The SLF is aiming to spend $5 million to help Republican Senator Darline Graham — who Trump appointed to fill the seat vacated by her late brother, Lindsey Graham. She’s currentl in a tight race with Democrat Annie Andrews, who Trump attacked on his Truth Social platform this week. This means the president is also nervous about the polls in the Palmetto State.
The SLF is also pouring $10 million into Kansas. Democrats haven’t won a U.S. Senate race there since 1932. But Republican Senator Roger Marshall is now in danger of losing his reelection bid to Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton, who is polling within the margin of error. And Kansas recently elected a Democratic governor, meaning the Sunflower State is certainly winnable for Democrats next month.
Over in the House, the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is tied to House Speaker Mike Johnson, has all but conceded the Omaha-area seat being vacated by outgoing GOP Congressman Don Bacon. Trump’s team is even spending significant sums of cash to hold onto a central Kentucky House district the president won by a 15-point margin in 2024.
One anonymous Republican strategist confided to Politico that if things keep falling apart for the GOP, November could be “worse than 2006.” That was the midterm election during George W. Bush’s second presidency when fed-up voters handed Democrats both chambers of Congress over their frustration with an endless war in the Middle East. Another Republican operative lamented that there were “fires everywhere” for the party to extinguish over the next few weeks.
Sen. Thune still insists Republicans will hold onto their majority in the upper chamber of Congress. But that’s harder to square when seeing the news that the Senate Majority PAC has withdrawn roughly $1.1 million from North Carolina ato spend in Texas. Spokesperson Lauren French said the GOP is working hard to protect Republicans who “shouldn’t be as vulnerable as they are.”
In 1974, just a few months after Nixon resigned from the White House, Democrats netted 49 House seats, many of which were in districts Republicans took for granted. There’s no such thing as a safe GOP seat when Republicans make it clear their loyalty belongs to one man instead of the people they were elected to represent.
Republicans running for reelection may be scrambling for cash, but the First Family seems to be thriving. This week, Trump announced a new $6.6 billion government investment into the AI-powered defense company Anduril Industries, with the Navy covering $2.9 billion of it. That money will go toward building a facility at Sparrows Point in Baltimore County, Maryland, to build submarine parts.
But Trump left something significant out of that announcement: In June of last year, 1789 Capital — the venture capital firm partially led by Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. — bought a major stake in Anduril. Since then, Anduril has been awarded 135 new government contracts worth close to $1.8 billion.
Anduril is far from the only Trump-connected company that’s faring exceptionally well in contract bids. ABC News found that defense contractors backed by Trump’s sons have pulled in more than $6 billion in either active or promised federal contracts since they made those respective investments.
It’s happening often enough that a pattern has started to emerge. Prior to naming Donald Jr. as an advisor, drone manufacturer Unusual Machines had never won a government contract. But after doing so, the company won a Pentagon contract for thousands of motors. Drone company Powerus, which counts both Don Jr. and Eric Trump ad investors, was also awarded its first-ever Air Force contract a month after cementing its business relationship with the president’s eldest sons. In July, Powerus was awarded as much as $90 million in Pentagon contracts.
There’s also rare earth mining company Vulcan Elements, which was awarded a $620 million Pentagon loan the very same month 1789 Capital became an investor. And automation company Hadrian — which got a $391 million investment from 1789 Capital — proceeded to score a $900 million Navy deal a few months later. In a Fox News interview, Eric Trump boasted about a humanoid robot startup that employs him as chief strategy officer winning a federal contract worth $24 million.
A spokesperson for the Trump brothers insisted nothing about those contracts broke any laws, and that neither one seeks to influence government decisions. But Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois have demanded the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General to conduct an investigation into the deals. House Oversight Committee ranking member Robert Garcia of California has done the same, and warned that refusing to do so would raise major questions about the Defense Department’s internal watchdog.
Congress passed the False Claims Act in 1863 because federal contractors kept enriching themselves by selling the Union Army low-quality goods while soldiers were dying. Americans understood even back then that it’s a betrayal to profit off of war. When the president’s own children are investors in the companies winning contracts, it’s not difficult to wonder if the weapons we’re buying are meant to defend the country or fatten the wallets of the people running it.
New evidence reveals that the Trump administration is deputizing ICE to help Republicans in the midterms. Internal documents obtained by the group Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show that the agency has been collecting tens of millions of voter records across multiple states, contemplated undercover investigations into voter registration groups and considered feeding state voter rolls into a system aimed at locating people to round up for deportation.
The central figure behind this effort is Heather Honey, who is a longtime 2020 election conspiracy theorist. She’s now a senior adviser to both the director of ICE and to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
ICE’s investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), collected an estimated 48.4 million individual voter records, along with another 50.6 million from the Department of Justice. It focused its efforts on swing states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas. HSI also reportedly pondered the idea of sending undercover agents to hound nonprofit organizations that register new voters, and aimed to comb through those groups’ databases to find what it called “derogatory information.”
These internal records also suggest state voter roll data may have found its way to Palantir’s ELITE system, which is the same tool ICE uses to target people to be rounded up and deported. HSI also wanted to conduct investigations that involved voting machines and “counties with 2020 results,” while coordinating with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service on voter fraud cases.
Election officials in several states have spent months asking the federal government where their voter files go once federal agencies get them. These internal documents suggests they may have their answer, and that should alarm every registered voter in America.
In 1958, the State of Alabama demanded the NAACP hand its membership lists to the government. But the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the state in the NAACP v. Alabama case because justices knew what governments do with lists of people who organize and vote. A federal law enforcement agency quietly building files on American voters and the groups that register them has nothing to do with immigration enforcement or protecting elections, but about frightening people away from casting their ballots.
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