Trump finally turns on the faucet: MAGA PAC drops $10M to save Ken Paxton
Just one week after a Republican senator pleaded with him publicly to turn on the faucet and save Republicans in key races, Donald Trump appears to be listening.
FEC filings from the president’s MAGA Inc. PAC over the weekend detailed a $10m spending surge in favor of controversial Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as he battles in a surprisingly tough race to hold on to a GOP Senate seat currently occupied by Sen. John Cornyn. Paxton defeated Cornyn earlier this year in a primary, with Trump’s backing.
However, he is now facing a fierce battle for the crucial U.S. Senate seat from his Democratic Party rival, Texas state representative James Talarico. The close polling in the traditionally red state has spooked Republican leaders and prompted them to press the president to start spending from the giant warchest he has been accumulating – money that Trump traditionally considers his own.
Talarico himself has already raised more than $50m since his primary concluded weeks before Paxton’s.
The expenditure is the first of its size and kind for the 2026 cycle coming from MAGA Inc., the president’s primary vehicle for political spending. It came almost exactly a week after a Republican senator from Louisiana, John Kennedy, begged Trump to get involved in the Texas race.
“We in the Senate don’t have the money budgeted for Texas. We need help from the president,” Kennedy told Fox’s The Sunday Briefing.
Kennedy wasn’t the only one ringing the alarm bells about Texas. As Paxton continues to run neck-and-neck with Talarico, the Republican’s onetime rival is also painting a frank picture about the state of the race.
“Paxton’s a poor campaigner,” Cornyn told The Texas Tribune last week. “He’s lazy and doesn’t raise money. And he basically is not offering a very compelling case for his election.”
Paxton’s reputation may not be helping: His vulnerabilities, highlighted by Cornyn and his allies during their bitter primary, stem from an ugly divorce from his wife, Angela, as well as an impeachment effort in the Texas state legislature headed up by his fellow Republicans.
He’s accused of misusing state resources and corruption, and even using his office to conduct affairs. He has denied the allegations as politically-motivated attacks.
Now, the strategy seems clear: Make up for issues of candidate quality with a massive surge of national money, the same strategy that saw Republicans make gains but ultimately fall short of taking a Senate majority during the 2022 midterm cycle. But how much can money buy in Texas?
For Paxton, a $10m gift may seem like quite a lot. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the total size of Trump’s war chest, which according to FEC data is sitting north of $400m. And it’s also relatively small compared to the amount that Republicans have already spent against Paxton, back during a divisive primary and runoff that concluded in May that topped more than $130m in spending — the vast majority of it in favor of Cornyn, not Paxton, and a sizable amount spent on negative ads against the man now running with the GOP’s flag.
Paxton, it should be noted, won that runoff handily, leading Cornyn by nearly 30 points in the final voting. He spent less than that $10m sum throughout the entire primary season, focusing on an expansive ground game across the vast stretches of Texas while being bombarded on the airwaves. His victory spoke to both Cornyn’s unpopularity and the ineffectiveness of that media-focused strategy practiced by Cornyn and his D.C. allies.
Polling of the GOP primary showed large numbers of undecideds leading up to election day with Paxton carrying a comfortable lead in every poll, only dropping to the single digits in some Cornyn internals.
