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Last night, Donald Trump’s rally for Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton in San Antonio was repeatedly interrupted by protesters more than half a dozen times as the president once again doubled down on his remarks about letting Iran attack Los Angeles and San Diego. Paxton was also heard in a newly leaked audio recording privately telling Washington lobbyists that if he was elected, he’d support cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare. The New York Federal Reserve has found that Trump’s tariffs are the sole reason prices on everyday goods went up, and that if it weren’t for the tariffs, prices would have dropped. And infighting among Senate Republicans completely derailed the GOP’s efforts to lower gas prices before Election Day. Let’s get into it.
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On Wednesday, Donald Trump went to San Antonio to rally with Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton in an effort to rescue his floundering campaign. But the event quickly went off the rails.
According to the Guardian, at least half a dozen hecklers interrupted the president’s remarks. Some were escorted out of the venue by local police. One protester was attacked by an older Trump supporter as he was leaving.
At one point, Trump actually had to step away from the mic when a protester approached the stage. After the man was carried out of the event, a clearly rattled Trump told the crowd, “He’s going back home to mom. But what he doesn’t know is his mom voted for Trump.” He also shouted at protesters to “get the hell out of here,” made fun of their appearance, and baselessly declared they were “paid by enemies of our nation.”
The president also tried to reframe his recent comments that he would allow Iran to destroy Los Angeles or San Diego, which led to widespread condemnation. His second attempt wasn’t much better. Trump said: “let them hit San Diego, let them hit Los Angeles and you want to see some bad things happen.” He then said the country would be “in freefall” and assured the crowd “we’re not going to let that happen.”
This was the third time in a month Trump traveled to Texas, which Republican presidents don’t normally do for a state seen as a Republican stronghold. The Lone Star State hasn’t sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988, and Trump won Texas by almost 14 points in the 2024 election. But the latest New York Times/Siena College poll released over the weekend shows Democratic state representative James Talarico leading Paxton by a 51-45 margin among likely voters.
Trump isn’t faring much better nationally, with a Monday Reuters/Ipsos poll showing his Trump’s approval rating at a paltry 32 percent. Registered voters prefer Democrats over Republicans on the generic ballot by an impressive 44-37 margin.
Trump said Ken Paxton was “perhaps the greatest attorney general in the United States of America,” even though just last week he called Paxton “a pain in the ass.” He also notably made no mention the leaked recording in which Paxton was heard blaming Trump’s war in Iran for high gas prices and that his campaign was being run entirely by D.C. consultants.
Instead, Trump spent most of the rally attacking Talarico, repeatedly calling him “Tala-freako” and falsely claiming that Talarico is a vegan. But maybe the most telling sign of trouble was the absence of other major candidates, like Republican Governor Greg Abbott. The incumbent governor is a longtime Trump ally facing his own tight race against Democratic state Representative Gina Hinojosa. He chose to attend a hospital dedication roughly 330 miles away. Democrats didn’t waste time pointing out his absence.
According to the Associated Press, Republicans have now poured more than $300 million into Texas elections just this cycle alone. And they may still come up short despite the money advantage.
When the First Amendment was first ratified back in 1791, the right of the people to assemble and petition their government came right alongside free speech, because that generation had lived under a king who viewed dissent as disloyalty. A president who declares protesters to be paid agents of America’s adversaries is reaching for the very same kind of power the First Amendment was written to deny.
Speaking of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general continues to be plagued by leaked audio clips from a September 24 fundraiser with Washington lobbyists. And this one may be the most damaging.
The Texas Tribune obtained a recording of that event, which was hosted by lobbyists from the firm Williams & Jensen and attended by roughly a dozen people.
When asked about his plan to tackle the federal deficit, Paxton told the room that he supported “reasonable cuts to mandatory spending,” meaning Social Security and Medicare. He told the group “you’re gonna have to do it, or there is no solution,” and that “we have to suck it up.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that roughly three-quarters of mandatory spending is allocated toward Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Most of the rest covers programs helping low-income Americans buy food, along with other basic safety nets like unemployment insurance, along with retirement and disability benefits for veterans and federal employees. These are the exact programs working-class Americans spend their entire lives paying into.
Paxton didn’t elaborate on which programs he wants to cut or exact dollar amounts, and his campaign is naturally dodging questions about it. He has yet to talk about any of this on the campaign trail, likely because he knows it’s political kryptonite.
After expressing his support for cutting those programs, Paxton then talked about tax cuts. At that point, lobbyist Jeanne Haggerty first joked that she’d like Paxton to personally vote for her to have a personal tax cut, prompting laughter. According to the recording, Haggerty added she’d “really like to pay my fair share of taxes, which is less than I’m paying right now.” To which Paxton said, “I’m with you on that.”
We’ve heard this before. It’s the same Reaganite playbook Republicans have been running for decades, in which retirees and everyday families have to make do with less while D.C. lobbyists and wealthy donors get yet another big tax break.
Paxton also heaped praise on Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act which was signed into law last summer, declaring it to be “HISTORIC legislation” on his social media account. The CBO estimates that legislation will take health insurance away from 10 million Americans by 2034 and add roughly $3.4 trillion to the deficit. It’s hard to take someone’s deficit hawkery seriously when they say they support that law.
So far, recordings of that meeting have been leaked to the New York Times, Politico and Axios, just before early voting in Texas begins on October 19. Meanwhile, super PACs affiliated with both Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have spent more than $150 million on pro-Paxton ads for Paxton since September.
FDR insisted that Social Security’s funding come from workers’ own payroll contributions for exactly this reason. He rightly said those contributions gave all of us a legal, moral, and political right to their benefits, so that no politician could ever take them away. That’s why the only ones who want to cut it never have the guts to say it to all of us in public.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has confirmed what most economists have been warning of for over a year. According to a newly released study from New York Fed researchers, prices on 67 different categories of consumer goods were 2.9 percentage points higher as of February specifically due to Trump’s tariffs.
The New York Fed also made it clear if Trump’s tariffs weren’t in effect, prices on those same goods would have actually come down by almost 1 percent. That’s a significant finding, as it confirms American families needlessly paid more for things that otherwise would have gotten cheaper, all because of Trump.
Researchers discovered that for every percentage point increase in the average tariff, consumer goods prices then proceeded to rise by roughly a quarter of a percent one year after the fact. Approximately two-thirds of the price impact came directly from the tariffs, while the rest came from ripple effects like U.S. companies that rely on imported parts and materials having to raise their own prices to cover the extra cost.
Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise and David Weinstein, who authored the study, wrote that Trump’s tariffs “have a larger and more drawn-out impact on consumer prices than the direct effect alone would suggest.” Price growth on the goods they tracked peaked at the beginning of 2026, but the researchers say consumers can expect to keep paying higher than average prices well into 2027.
Trump has spent the last several months insisting that companies would simply eat the cost of his tariffs to keep prices low for consumers. But the New York Fed found that around 26 percent of last year’s tariff hikes translated directly into higher prices once goods hit the shelves
The Supreme Court reversed most of Trump’s tariffs in February, leading to billions of dollars in refunds that went to billion-dollar corporations instead of the people who actually bore the brunt of the higher prices. But the White House has promised to plowing ahead with tariffs through outher legal means. Now, goods imported from many of the United States’ trade partners now face new duties of around 10 percent.
Americans have dealt with the blow of tariff-relatec costs before. When Congress passed the McKinley Tariff in October 1890, prices soared in a matter of weeks. A month later, voters handed Republicans one of the worst midterm defeats in American history, with McKinley himself losing his seat. Tariff are just taxes on the people at the cash register, and sooner or later they’ll blame who sent them the bill.
Lastly, Senate Republicans efforts over the past several weeks to bring down gas prices before the midterms just came to a screeching halt after they couldn’t agree on a single thing. The Hill is reporting that the GOP’s effort fell apart mostly because of petty spats inside the GOP conference.
Senators from farm states wanted to ban diesel exports and loosen restrictions on E15, a gasoline blend with 15 percent ethanol. Senators from oil-refining states shot both ideas down. Former Senate leadership aide Ron Bonjean summed it up by saying the effort “gets bogged down in the politics of energy, and the fiefdoms around it.”
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa pushed hardest for a 90-day ban on diesel exports, pointing to diesel prices hovering around six dollars a gallon. Trump expressed support for that idea, but senators from oil-producing states as well as oil companies poured cold water on that proposal. Republican Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota warned that a ban “most likely would” make diesel prices climb even higher in places like California and the Northeast. Republican John Cornyn of Texas dismissed the idea as a “gimmick,” while Energy Secretary Chris Wright agreed. Trump eventually abandoned the diesel export proposal last week.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri suggested a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, which is currently 18.4 cents a gallon for unleaded gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel fuel. However, that was later blocked by fiscal hawks like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who pointed out that would drain the highway trust fund.
Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, who’s up for reelection this November, claimed that allowing E15 fuel to be sold nationwide could reduce gas prices by around 30 cents a gallon. But Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming wasn’t a fan of what he called a “year-round E15 mandate,” taking the side of smaller oil refiners. To make matters worse, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has already been largely drained by significant usage during Trump’s war with Iran.
Senare Majority Leader John Thune now says he expects E15 to be included in the currently stalled farm bill during the upcoming lame-duck session after the November midterms. But that’s not very comforting for drivers filling up their tanks right now. Even GOP strategists believe gas prices will stay high unless Trump succeeds in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has so far successfully used to choke off a significant chunk of the world’s oil supply.
In the fall of 1973, the Saudi oil embargo put Americans in gas lines, and Richard Nixon promised the country would be energy independent by 1980. Five decades later, a narrow strait on the other side of the world still sets the price at our pumps, because every time we’ve had a chance to break our dependence on oil, the industry’s friends in Congress have protected their own turf instead.
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