WASHINGTON — After months of being outspent by Democrat James Talarico on the airwaves, Republicans launched a massive rescue mission for Ken Paxton in September, dropping over $200 million to boost their U.S. Senate candidate in Texas.

New campaign finance filings revealed that much of the advertising flurry was funded by one highly motivated donor: Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man.

Musk, who lives near the SpaceX Starbase facility in South Texas, appears to have poured nearly $190 million into the U.S. Senate race in his adopted home state. His role in financing Paxton’s air support was disclosed in reports filed Thursday to the Federal Election Commission by Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main super PAC and the biggest spender in Texas’ Senate contest.

On Sept. 9, the first day of the GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Musk gave $75 million to SLF. The next day, SLF put $75 million into a new entity called Texas PAC. By the weekend after the convention, the new super PAC was up on the air with a positive spot about Paxton’s work on sex trafficking and a negative ad attacking Talarico as being for “they/them, not you.”

Two weeks after cutting his first check, Musk gave an additional $83 million to SLF, according to the group’s filing. Sure enough, SLF deposited $83 million into Texas PAC’s coffers the following day.

Musk’s donations armed Senate Republicans to take over the airwaves in Texas. Using Texas PAC as the vessel to book airtime, SLF has thus far spent over $159 million on TV, radio and digital advertising, double the outlay from Talarico’s campaign, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.

SLF backed Sen. John Cornyn in the primary, estimating that a Paxton candidacy would require $150 million to $200 million to retain the seat — money that could come at the expense of other states. While the prediction proved prescient, Musk’s investment has changed the calculus.

“Thanks to some generous investors who have dedicated money to an affiliate, Texas PAC, we’ve been able to go in and support Ken Paxton,” SLF executive director Alex Latcham told Bloomberg TV Wednesday. “We’ll spend nearly $200 million in that race. But again, thanks to Leader John Thune and the Republican caucus and our fundraising, we haven’t had to subtract resources from other states to do so.”

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The Tesla and SpaceX founder got involved in the race after his political team reached out to Senate Leadership Fund, the Senate GOP’s main outside campaign group, to voice Musk’s concerns about Paxton’s standing in the race, according to a person familiar with the conversations. That led to an agreement between Musk’s orbit and SLF — Musk would provide $10 million to Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main outside group boosting Paxton, if SLF gave $5 million and the PAC raised an additional $5 million. The details of the conversation were first reported by Axios.

That windfall was badly needed. Lone Star Liberty PAC had only $35,000 in the bank at the end of June, having drained its coffers on Paxton’s hard-fought primary win over Cornyn. Talarico, meanwhile, was continuing his torrid fundraising pace and was poised to keep dominating the political ad spending battle if help did not arrive for Paxton.

Talarico posted another record quarter amid Paxton’s SLF-powered ad surge, hauling in $64 million between July and September — a third-quarter record among all U.S. Senate candidates. The Austin Democrat has maintained a polling lead for months in averages of nonpartisan public surveys, an alarming sight for a Republican Party whose unbeaten streak in Texas statewide races spans more than three decades.

With Musk’s donation and the matching funds, Lone Star Liberty PAC spent $17.5 million on broadcast TV advertising in early September, by far the most significant pro-Paxton ad buy of the general election. By the end of the month, a handful of outside groups led by SLF had dropped over $217 million on ads in the Texas Senate race.

X not a part of Paxton’s Big Tech crusade

Paxton has not commented publicly about Musk’s support.

In the past, the attorney general has praised Musk for backing Republicans in 2024. He spent hours at Musk’s home two days before that year’s election hearing Musk recount all his efforts to boost GOP candidates, Paxton said at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in 2024.

“Aren’t you all glad he’s on our side?” Paxton said to cheers. “I am convinced that whatever he did, whatever rocket science thing he did, made a huge difference in this election.”

Paxton has also aligned himself with Musk through his role as Texas attorney general — and largely skirted scrutinizing Musk’s companies as his office has increasingly taken on Big Tech.

In 2022, as Musk sought to buy Twitter, Paxton opened an investigation into the social media company for how it reported the number of accounts on the platform that were fake or bots — inspecting whether the service was inflating the number of its actual users to boost its value for revenue. At the time, Musk was raising similar questions. He ultimately bought Twitter and renamed it X.

In 2024, Paxton opened an investigation into World Federation of Advertisers, an organization that represents marketers, to assess whether its members were conspiring to boycott specific social media services. TechCrunch reported Musk’s X, which had filed an antitrust suit against the group, was likely among the social media platforms.

Meanwhile, Paxton has taken on tech giants including Netflix, WhatsApp, Discord, and Meta — probes he has touted on the campaign trail.

“As attorney general, I’ve sued some of the largest companies in the world … for taking advantage of our kids by exposing them to dangerous, addictive material,” Paxton said after defeating Cornyn in May. “In Washington, I will not stop fighting to protect Texas children from Big Tech.”

But Paxton has taken arrows from critics who’ve accused him of turning a blind eye to X and Musk. In January, a group of Democratic state representatives demanded the attorney general investigate the platform’s artificial intelligence agent, Grok, and its creation of exploitative content about children and women. Paxton did not respond to the letter publicly.

The same month, a group of attorneys general from across the country sent Musk’s company a letter demanding that it address its AI agent’s creation of child sex abuse content. Paxton was not among the signatories.

Funding the GOP ground game

Musk’s political operation is also deeply involved in the Republican ground game in Texas, from canvassing to mailers, across several key races. America PAC, which he seeded with nearly $90 million last quarter, had pumped $18.8 million into the Senate race through Tuesday, per FEC filings, which capture efforts like text messaging, mailers and ads but not in-person canvassing such as block-walking and phone-banking. Over 80% of that money has gone to anti-Talarico messaging.

The tech mogul has significant business interests in the Lone Star State. Musk has moved the state of incorporation for many of his companies to Texas in recent years. Boring Company and X are headquartered in Bastrop, SpaceX is near Brownsville and Tesla’s corporate headquarters is now in Austin.

And it’s not just the Senate race. Musk’s PAC has spent about $800,000 boosting Republican candidates in the five most competitive U.S. House races in Texas. The biggest share has gone to the 35th Congressional District, a San Antonio-area seat Republicans redrew last summer with the intention of flipping, but which has proven highly competitive.

Musk spent hundreds of millions in 2024 to boost Republicans, including Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Trump rewarded Musk by tapping him to lead the controversial Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The two had a public falling out later that year, when Musk disparaged the president’s signature legislative effort and alleged Trump was in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The dustup did not appear to sap Musk’s appetite for bankrolling Republicans’ political spending. The world’s wealthiest man has already surpassed his 2024 political spending this cycle, with Texas the largest focus of his operation.

Other GOP groups are fundraising off of Musk’s Texas spending bonanza as well.

“Elon Musk understands what it’s like to live under far left Democrats,” reads one National Republican Senatorial Committee fundraising email, which notes that Musk has spent $276 million in the midterms and directs readers to a WinRed fundraising page. “He fled an oppressive regime in California that crippled the state with a radical agenda before finding a new home in Texas. But now, the same Far Left Democrats that ran California into the ground are coming to SEIZE Elon’s new home!”

While far from reaching Musk’s investment levels, some prominent Texas GOP donors also came off the sidelines for Paxton in recent months, new filings show.

West Texas oil billionaire Farris Wilks, who has supported Paxton in his state campaigns and directed millions to hardline Republicans, donated $250,000 to one of Paxton’s joint fundraising committees in mid-August, his first federal expenditure of the cycle.

Amarillo billionaire Alex Fairly, meanwhile, had maxed out to Paxton’s direct campaign account with a $7,000 donation in the spring; in late August, he gave $274,300 to Paxton’s joint fundraising committee.

Paxton also received large sums this quarter from the Dallas Cowboys brass. Team president Stephen Jones and chief sales and marketing officer Jerry Jones Jr. gave $122,000 and $100,000, respectively. Their father, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, donated a six-figure sum in the second quarter.

Disclosure: Meta and WhatsApp have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune within the past five years. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

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For the past month, Texas state Rep. James Talarico and Attorney General Ken Paxton had been competing on roughly equal footing in public attention. The two candidates in what is perhaps the country’s marquee Senate race were being searched for at about the same clip, which is what you would expect of a competitive contest in a state that has not elected a Democrat statewide in decades. Then right-wing influencers invented a story that Talarico had secretly checked into an Ohio psychiatric facility, and the search traffic around the Democrat exploded. The lie collapsed with almost embarrassing speed, and the people who spread it now face potential legal exposure. 

But its political purpose was achieved anyway. By the time the story fell apart, the damage had already been done: A candidate’s health had become a national political spectacle, a social media feeding frenzy had swallowed the news cycle and a Republican politician facing serious questions about his own conduct had been handed a convenient distraction.

This is what Talarico calls the “rage economy.” At a CNN town hall on Wednesday, he described a system in which conspiracy theorists collect clicks, social media platform owners collect profits and the public gets angrier without becoming any better equipped to solve the country’s problems. The Talarico hoax shows exactly how MAGA media governs the information war. While we watched a fake scandal implode, a very real one centering on Paxton slipped by.

The episode began when Talarico spent nine days off the campaign trail recovering from a bout of the flu. There was never any genuine mystery about his whereabouts. He had appeared virtually at an event in early October to inform attendees that he had come down with the illness. But Paxton saw an opening and used it. The attorney general demanded “proof of life” and set up a tip line for information about his opponent’s whereabouts. He led a “Where is James Talarico?” chant at a rally. President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “James TalaFREAKo” was “MISSING IN ACTION.”

MAGA influencers filled in the innuendo with the cruelest narrative. Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt claimed to have sources who said Talarico was in a psychiatric facility. By Sunday afternoon, the rumor had acquired its supposed smoking gun. Nick Sortor, a conservative influencer known for filming scuffles outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, and Rhein Amacher, a self-described “right-wing provocateur,” claimed that an employee at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, had confirmed that Talarico was discharged that evening. Sortor posted a short audio clip, and Elon Musk amplified the claim repeatedly from his account. Within hours, the story had spread across X with millions of views. According to the reporting cited in Talarico’s own account of the episode, 50 accounts pushed the claim within 20 minutes and those posts accumulated 9.3 million views. One account posted the same text 83 times in under two hours.

The problem was that the “proof” was not proof. The full recording, obtained by The Bulwark, revealed that the person on the phone repeatedly denied that anyone named James Talarico was in the hospital system. The candidate said he had never even been to Ohio. The timeline was equally impossible: Amacher said he made the calls on Saturday evening, but Talarico had already appeared at the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert the next day. He could not have been discharged from an Ohio psychiatric facility on Saturday because he was visibly back in Texas. By Sunday evening, the hospital itself issued a flat public denial that Talarico had never been a patient.

Naturally, the self-correcting mechanism of truth did not immediately penetrate the right-wing ecosystem. Musk had already supercharged the claim. The falsehood had been viewed millions of times before the correction arrived. Right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly continued demanding answers even after the hospital issued its official rebuttal, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept conspiracy-posting long after The New York Times reviewed and reported on time-stamped security images proving Talarico was safely at his home in Austin during the disputed window of time.

The initial burst also illustrates how a relatively small number of high-profile accounts can set the agenda for a much larger audience. This is the difference between an information ecosystem that rewards accuracy and one that rewards attention. In the former, a claim becomes more credible as evidence accumulates. In the latter, a claim can become more influential simply because more people have seen it. The only people who benefit from a manufactured outrage are the people selling it and the politicians who can hide behind it.

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And hide is precisely what Paxton needed to do. On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that only days after being indicted for embezzlement, a fugitive donated $25,000 to the attorney general. The paper also reported that Paxton rang in 2025 at a New Year’s party in Dubai attended by two men federal prosecutors had indicted for allegedly embezzling millions from an Illinois hospital. One of those men was Anosh Ahmed, who according to records from the Texas Ethics Commission, gave Paxton $190,000 between 2022 and 2024. 

These are the kinds of facts that, in a normal campaign, would dominate the week. A sitting state attorney general taking money from people accused of looting a hospital is a story about who he works for — a man accused of being a criminal or the people of Texas. Instead, it was buried under a fabricated tale about his opponent’s mental health.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Paxton personally scripted the Ohio hoax. I am saying something that does not require a conspiracy at all. The right has built an incentive structure in which the people with the biggest megaphones are rewarded for flinging dirt and are never penalized when it turns out to be false. Paxton’s own conduct fits that structure like a glove. He fueled the “Talarico is missing” narrative from the stage and through his tip line. He benefited when the fog rolled in. The MAGA influencer ecosystem did the rest. Nobody had to give an order.

Consider also the broader pattern of the attacks on Talarico. A pro-Paxton super PAC ran an ad that placed the Democrat’s face on a cutout in a dress. Allies of Trump have spent months insinuating that Talarico is somehow insufficiently masculine, that he is “beta,” that he is unmarried and that questions about his sexuality are fair game. At a Wednesday rally for Paxton in Tyler, Texas, Vice President JD Vance openly suggested that Talarico is gay. Republicans have even attempted to other him through food, calling him a vegan. (He is not.) Taken together, the mental hospital hoax belongs to the same family of attacks. It is an attempt to make a candidate seem strange and unfit through innuendo because the substance of his message is hard to rebut. A candidate who talks about food and gas prices and community is difficult to caricature as a threat. So MAGA media built a caricature — Talafreako — instead.

Some of it deserves laughter. A man tricking a hospital receptionist is not exactly a criminal mastermind. But the stupidity is the tell, not the excuse. MAGA media do not need smart lies anymore. They need fast ones, repeated at volume across a captured platform and timed to drown out real reporting about real corruption. 

Earlier fiascos like Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Jack Smith flop should have taught them caution. Instead the right has learned from Trump that there is no penalty for being wrong in public — as long as you are wrong at scale and never look back.

The post A viral Talarico hoax drowned out Paxton’s corruption story appeared first on Salon.com.

In the annals of Texas political mythology is the tale of a young Lyndon B. Johnson, so worried he was going to lose an election that he decided to start a rumor that his opponent enjoyed sexual relations with pigs.

His campaign manager was outraged, telling Johnson no one would believe such a bald-faced lie.

“I know,” Johnson replied, according to legend. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

Some six decades later, Republican activists returned to Johnson’s old bag of tricks in an effort to undermine Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, by falsely telling millions of people he was being treated at a mental health facility in Ohio.

Despite a generation of Republican dominance in Texas, Talarico is running ahead of Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued attorney general who is costing the party millions to hold a once-safe seat. Polls show Talarico, a Presbyterian pastor and Austin state representative, has so far proven impervious to Paxton’s attacks on his progressive record.

So while Talarico was off the campaign trail recovering from the flu, Paxton and his allies seized an opportunity and sowed a scandal. Paxton alleged that Talarico was having a mental breakdown, and right-wing influencers piled on, linking together unrelated non-events to deduce that he was being treated out of state. The story, largely based on speculation and red string, was echoed by White House officials and shared online millions of times.

Michelle Smith, a senior adviser to Paxton, said on social media Sunday that she was told by a friend that a doctor confirmed Talarico “has definitely been admitted to a mental institution.”

Paxton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about his or Smith’s claims.

Talarico was forced to deny that he’d been in mental health treatment — or had ever been to Ohio at all. The health care center confirmed he’d never been a patient. With the story still gaining traction, Talarico provided home security footage to the New York Times to further prove his whereabouts.

Competitive elections are known to get nasty. But the speed at which this conspiracy took hold and was laundered into the mainstream shows the power of social media influencers to shape political discourse through misinformation, especially when empowered by candidates themselves.

“We’ve entered into a time in politics where truth and reality don’t really seem to matter,” said Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh professor who studies social media disinformation campaigns.

“Tala-freak-out”

The facts everyone agrees on: Talarico attended a campaign event near Dallas on Sept. 26 and fundraisers in New York City on Sept. 28 and 29. The next day, he made a virtual appearance at the U.S. Hispanic Business Council, saying he was too sick with the flu to attend in person.

“I guess I’ve been shaking too many hands on the campaign trail, and so I want to keep everybody safe,” he said at the virtual event. “If I was passing on this illness to somebody and got someone’s grandmother or someone’s baby sick, I couldn’t live with myself.”

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But the longer Talarico stayed off the campaign trail, the more those shared facts began to fray.

On Oct. 7, Paxton released an ad saying Talarico had been missing for 11 days. (It had been seven days since the Hispanic Business Council event.) At a rally put on by President Donald Trump that night, Paxton started a chant of “Where is James Talarico?”

“Where do you think they hid that little socialist?” he asked the crowd.

An extended absence from the campaign trail in the home stretch is unusual, said Kirby Goidel, a political scientist at Texas A&M.

“It opens the door to speculation, and the world we live in means you can speculate in a very public way without a lot of friction,” he said. “You can spread misinformation pretty quickly and easily, especially among people who really want to believe it.”

The story Paxton and his supporters landed on was that Talarico was having a mental breakdown from the pressure of the campaign.

Paxton released multiple ads saying Talarico was “mentally fragile,” and posted on social media that he was “having a full-blown mental Tala-freak-out on the national stage.” Paxton set up a “Tala-Freak-Out Tip Line” for people to report on his whereabouts.

Sara Gonzales, a Blaze TV host and conservative social media influencer, posted that she had “unverified information on James Talarico’s whereabouts. If true, it will END his campaign.” Another influencer, who goes by the handle TickleTexts, said Talarico was “in a mental health facility after breaking down.” Spencer Pratt, the former reality television star and former candidate for Los Angeles mayor, said “sources are telling me Talarico is in a mental health facility.”

On Oct. 9, the erstwhile candidate reappeared at the Austin City Limits music festival, seemingly of sound mind and body. That could have been the end of it, a tidy Friday afternoon bow on a week of rank speculation.

But it was not.

“Whether it’s true or not”

Saturday morning, Caroline Wren, a prominent GOP fundraiser, posted about a private plane she claimed flew from Austin to Ohio and back the same day Talarico showed up at ACL. Ohio, she noted, was where Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo sought mental health treatment for seven weeks in 2023.

“So many coincidences!” she wrote on the post which has almost two million views.

Saturday night, a right-wing influencer named Rhein Amacher said he called the Lindner Center, identifying himself as Tim and purporting to be Talarico’s cousin. Amacher has said on social media that he was initially turned away because he didn’t have a patient identification code, but when he made up four numbers, the facility began confirming patient details.

In the 46-second audio clip, the woman on the other end of the line says that someone named James Talarico was “just discharged this evening.”

How could Talarico have been discharged from a hospital in Ohio Saturday evening and also be at ACL Friday afternoon? Why would an employee at a medical facility violate state and federal privacy laws to give out patient information? Those questions were left in the rearview mirror as some conservatives rushed to amplify the story.

Former Texas GOP chair Abraham George reposted the audio, saying it was “time for Talarico to step aside and focus on his mental health.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted about this over a dozen times in four days, saying in one post that “a Senate candidate with a history of disturbing behavior who suddenly disappears for two weeks has a lot of explaining to do.” Elon Musk claimed the “Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening,” and reposted another user’s post of the audio clip.

Talarico’s campaign repeatedly denied that he had any connection to this mental health facility. Sunday evening, the Lindner Center confirmed on social media that Talarico had never been treated at their facility.

Paxton himself never shared the audio, but Smith, his campaign adviser, amplified the false reports.

Mainstream Texas Republicans didn’t engage; Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows ignored it entirely. The handful of state representatives who did jump into the conversation came from the same far-right, extremely online corner of the party. Most reposted vague commentary or made general digs at Talarico’s mental health.

“If you’re a Texas voter who’s just now learning that James Talarico is a mentally unstable liar, you need to reevaluate your trusted news sources. And read your Bible,” State Rep. Brent Money, R-Greenville, posted on Sunday. “Even if Talarico has not been hiding in an in-patient mental health institution for almost 2 weeks, his public statements over his entire political career are evidence of his depravity.”

Money told The Texas Tribune he had no information about Talarico’s whereabouts, but that his “depraved mind is on full display when he fights [to] sterilize children and when he can name his favorite drag queen without a second’s hesitation.”

Goidel said he’s not surprised to see elected officials and prominent leaders amplifying unverified claims like these. There’s “virtually no penalty” to being wrong in politics these days, he said. But the cost to the rest of us is significant.

“It’s one thing to have political disagreement, but you don’t want a campaign decided on misinformation,” he said. “Not if you care about democracy, at least.”

During a discussion on X Sunday, Grant Cardone, a popular finance influencer, congratulated Amacher for surfacing the since-debunked story.

“Whether it’s true or not, people deserve to know the potential of this,” he said.

Disclosure: The New York Times has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.

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The post How Paxton and allies fanned a false conspiracy to convince voters Talarico was mentally unfit appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump has lately been telling a story about James Talarico that comes with its own setting, action and reliable third-act catastrophe. The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, Trump says, goes to barbecues, forces down meat and then slips behind a tent to vomit. The tent is a surprisingly durable detail. The menu changes.

At an Oct. 2 rally in Mobile, Alabama, Trump described Talarico as a vegan who was now “eating meat like a pig.” After every barbecue, he claimed, the candidate retreats behind a tent and “throws up all over the place.” In Nebraska, the offending meat had become steak. By San Antonio, Trump had incorporated Talarico’s recent absence from the campaign trail into the plot: The candidate, who said he had the flu, was supposedly sick from eating meat “for political reasons.” The president seems particularly taken with this little drama. He has returned to it repeatedly, refining the details like a comedian workshopping a bit.

The premise is that Talarico is a secret vegan. 

Just for the record: He isn’t. The story ties back to 2022, when Talarico advocated reducing meat consumption and announced that his state House campaign would purchase vegan products from local businesses. He did not announce that he had become vegan himself. Since then, he has been photographed eating chicken, steak and a turkey leg. His campaign has repeatedly denied the accusation. 

Ordinarily, one might expect the turkey leg to settle things.

Instead, Trump has supplied an imaginary sequel to every public meal.

At his San Antonio rally, the president turned to Talarico’s Republican opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and offered an assessment: “I have a feeling Ken likes meat.” He then launched into praise of Texas’ exceptionally tough men and strong women, invoking Davy Crockett and the other heroes of the Alamo. It was a remarkably efficient progression from barbecue to regurgitation to virility to American legend. However, Americans have long used a man’s dinner to make assumptions about his character.

A few years ago, I wrote about the meat-and-potatoes man, that sturdy fixture of sitcoms, country music and nostalgic Americana. In an episode of “The Andy Griffith Show,” Andy confronts a French menu and simply asks for steak and a baked potato. Barney, determined to appear worldly, accidentally orders snails and brains. Andy’s plainspoken certainty is the point. He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t particularly care whether anybody else approves.

Where meat-and-potatoes masculinity once suggested a certain rugged, if slightly hayseed, self-assuredness, its latest incarnation is curiously obedient.

Consider Trump’s fondness for distributing Florsheim leather oxfords to the men in his orbit. The president has reportedly taken to guessing their shoe sizes and ordering pairs accordingly. Some recipients apparently feel obliged to wear them, lest they offend the boss. The old meat-and-potatoes man knew what he liked and ordered it without apology. His successors are walking around in matching shoes because someone else likes them.

And that’s before anyone sits down to dinner.

Several senior administration figures have embraced the “meat and ferments” diet promoted by physician Sean O’Mara: grass-fed beef, sauerkraut, kimchi and relatively little room for improvisation. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has praised its supposed effects on his visceral fat. His wife, Cheryl Hines, has described the embarrassment of bringing his pungent sauerkraut into restaurants. Picture the leather shoes pinching beneath the table, the fermented cabbage making itself known above it. These men are all, supposedly, very, very manly.

The meat-and-potatoes man has become the man with a meat protocol. What once signaled a cheerful lack of fuss now demands a highly specific menu, bodily surveillance and an almost devotional attention to what enters the digestive tract. It is not so much dinner as a program.

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There is something genuinely romantic about the self-sufficient cowboy who can build a fire and cook a well-seasoned steak beneath a blanket of stars. But the romance depends on his independence. If Trump decided tomorrow that everyone should trade their Florsheims for Stetsons, one suspects Washington would experience a sudden proliferation of cowboy hats. What ought to resemble John Wayne riding into the sunset would begin to look more like the Kens in “Barbie,” each earnestly serenading his respective date with the same Matchbox Twenty song. One man strumming a guitar by firelight can be charming. An entire beach of men performing the exact same romantic gesture becomes cringeworthy. What was supposed to be a spontaneous expression of rugged individuality has become something closer to choreography.

Which brings us back to Talarico. It is not enough for him to eat meat. He must eat Texas barbecue. More than that, he must actually enjoy it. And even that is insufficient. In Trump’s version, the evidence of fraud is waiting just beyond the camera’s view, behind the tent. 

There, in a scene of the president’s own invention, Talarico can always be caught dropping the act.

Food has embarrassed politicians before. In 1976, Gerald Ford famously bit into a tamale without removing its corn husk during a visit to San Antonio. Ford committed an observable mistake. Talarico’s supposed misstep takes place somewhere nobody can see it. Once, a candidate could be judged for eating the local specialty incorrectly. Now he can be accused of eating it correctly and not meaning it.

The trouble with masculinity as a group project is that it rarely remains confined to the group. When belonging depends on following an increasingly elaborate set of rules, there is a temptation to start enforcing them. And those expectations have a way of extending beyond men themselves, toward how women should dress, behave and exercise autonomy. The performance acquires an audience, and then the audience is expected to participate.

The idealized American man is, after all, supposed to be a self-assured loner: the pioneer charting his own course, the cowboy slipping into the night to find a lost horse, the man who simply does what needs doing. 

Instead, this version of manhood seems to require an extraordinary amount of coaching. I keep thinking of “The Birdcage,” in which Robin Williams’ Armand attempts to teach Nathan Lane’s Albert how to walk like John Wayne. The more deliberately Albert performs masculinity, the more conspicuous the performance becomes.

Of course Trump imagines Talarico disappearing behind the barbecue tent to drop the act. For a political culture increasingly invested in prescribing how a man should dress, eat and behave, the idea of someone secretly abandoning the performance must be familiar. Maintaining it looks exhausting.

The post James Talarico isn’t vegan. So why is the GOP so fixated? appeared first on Salon.com.

In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from conducting any official business for more than three months while awaiting trial in the state Senate.

So, he traveled.

Paxton, a Republican who is now running for U.S. Senate, took at least 17 trips over three months, including to resort destinations Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado. He visited the Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge and a Utah community with a golf resort, where he later bought four condominiums.

State police joined him each time, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for trips unrelated to his job as attorney general. The Texas Senate ultimately acquitted him on the impeachment charges.

But Paxton’s use of the taxpayer-funded detail did not begin or end there. In fact, it stands out compared with his predecessor, fellow elected officials in Texas and other state attorneys general, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Paxton has traveled frequently out of state while listing little on his official calendar, The Associated Press reported last week. ProPublica and the Tribune’s analysis, which included reviewing every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel, discloses for the first time how few of his trips had a listed business purpose: just 1 in 6.

It also found Paxton’s security has cost taxpayers far more than has previously been reported.

Since assuming office in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a state-funded security detail, costing $3.3 million. The newsrooms’ review of Paxton’s travel records, obtained through the state’s Public Information Act, could only connect 138 of those trips and $553,000 in security costs to state business.

Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases. These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, who has also criticized Paxton’s conduct on other issues. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Texas law allows the Department of Public Safety to provide security for key state leaders, including the attorney general, but does not require officials to use it. In fact, Paxton himself hasn’t used it in at least two dozen cases while traveling on official business.

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Paxton has dismissed opponents’ attacks that he has used the perks of office to benefit himself and has not answered questions about how he vastly increased his wealth as a public servant.

He also did not answer detailed questions for this story. ProPublica and the Tribune sent Paxton a spreadsheet detailing travel for which there was no record that he was on state business and asked him to provide additional information if the trips were not personal. Neither Paxton nor his office provided such records. Instead, his office provided a general statement.

“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” his office said in the statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”

Paxton’s office directed additional questions to DPS.

A DPS spokesperson declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions, saying the agency does not comment on its security arrangements.

An Outlier Among Peers

To analyze Paxton’s travel, ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed DPS logs for his security detail and records from the attorney general’s office, including airfare and lodging receipts, per diems and his daily calendars.

The records available for his predecessor, Greg Abbott, show a stark difference: Abbott traveled mostly within the state as attorney general, and his security cost $203,000 during his last three years in the office. Adjusted for inflation, Abbott’s security detail cost $7,400 per month. Paxton’s has averaged $24,300.

Because the state keeps records only for a limited time, Abbott’s travel expenses and his daily calendars as attorney general no longer exist, so the news organizations could not determine how many of his trips were for business.

Records are available, however, for Abbott’s security costs as governor and for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Both are also offered state police security and have been in their current roles as long as Paxton.

When compared, the records show Paxton has taken 82 more out-of-state trips with a security detail than Abbott and nearly as many as the governor and lieutenant governor combined.

Though DPS security detail records are available for state leaders’ full tenure, Abbott’s office only provided calendars that document business-related activity for his first six years in office. More than two-thirds of the governor’s international trips during those years had a listed business purpose, compared with just two of 25 for Paxton during his full tenure. The governor’s office said it planned to release the remaining five years on Tuesday but only provided five months, saying it needed more time.

The attorney general’s records do not show a business purpose for travel to Albania, Aruba, Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Poland, South Africa or Taiwan.

The share of Paxton’s travel with a documented business purpose peaked early in his tenure, in 2018 and 2019, at 30%, the newsrooms’ analysis found. That aligns with the governor’s share of business travel during that period.

Since then, Paxton has taken fewer trips that are documented as state business while increasingly traveling out of state. Last year, just five of Paxton’s 91 trips with the security detail had a listed business purpose. Forty-one were outside Texas.

In some cases, Paxton has taken business trips without a DPS detail, an analysis of records from the department and the attorney general’s office shows. They include a 2019 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, with that state’s attorney general to discuss opioid litigation and a 2021 visit with unnamed U.S. senators in North Carolina. There is also no record of Paxton taking the detail on political fundraising trips to Florida and the Bahamas.

But Paxton has traveled with security to other campaign-related activities, including one that came just two days after he was acquitted in the impeachment trial. Paxton boarded a Maine-bound private plane owned by a North Texas businessman to tape an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, according to campaign finance records. During the interview, he hinted that he’d challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2026 Republican primary.

“Everything is on the table for me,” Paxton said when Carlson suggested he should run.

In his interview with Carlson, Paxton said it was unfair that he was automatically suspended before he could clear his name. He said he was eager to get back to work and that he was “reenergized to do the things the voters sent me to do.”

Paxton should pay for his own security on trips where there is no benefit for Texans, like vacations and campaign events, said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written about government ethics.

“There’s no reason for the taxpayers to be paying for things that they would not be paying for if he had stayed home,” Briffault said. “That’s a misuse of public funds.”

State officials said there are no records of Paxton or his campaign reimbursing Texas for security costs.

Of the 10 most populous states, Texas and New York confirmed that they provide security for their attorneys general, while Florida law allows its top lawyer to receive a detail upon request. North Carolina does not. Attorneys general offices for the remaining six states did not respond to requests for comment.

Former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said she never used a security detail during her 12 years in office, which ended in 2024. The Democrat said that Paxton’s higher profile might create a greater need for protection, but his extensive out-of-state travel without a documented business purpose raises questions about his workload.

“Was he minding the store? There’s a lot of work to be done at the office,” Rosenblum said.

Travel and Real Estate

Some of Paxton’s travel to four states with a security detail has overlapped with locations where he or his family’s trust has purchased 10 properties since 2021. A recent ProPublica and Tribune analysis found he owns or co-owns 15 properties with a market value of about $11 million.

In June 2021, Paxton attended an attorneys general conference in Maui. The security detail listed the destination as Lahaina, a small community on the Hawaiian island’s west coast. Four months later, Paxton’s family trust purchased an oceanview lot in a residential neighborhood there for $410,000, land records show.

The 7,000-square-foot lot remains vacant but has proved to be a savvy investment, now assessed at $1.2 million by Maui County.

Paxton set up the trust with his estranged wife, State Sen. Angela Paxton, who declined to be interviewed but said through a spokesperson that she has not been involved in her husband’s business dealings since 2024, when she filed for divorce. The Paxtons’ friend, Chip Loper, runs the trust. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Paxton has also gone to the Salt Lake City area 19 times, twice for listed business purposes. He visited three times — once on business — in the months leading up to his family trust’s July 2021 purchase of a plot in the ski town of Eden. The trust bought a mountainside lot on about two-thirds of an acre for $315,000 in cash, the seller told the newsrooms. It also remains undeveloped.

During his suspension in August 2023, Paxton visited St. George, Utah, a small city in the state’s southwest corner. Nearby is the Black Desert Resort, which hosts an annual PGA Tour golf tournament. Paxton purchased one condo at the resort in 2025 and three more in February. Paxton took out mortgages totaling $1.9 million for them, according to legal documents filed with the local county.

Paxton has visited Florida more than any other state, 53 times. Two of those trips have a documented business purpose. Between 2021 and 2022, Paxton purchased two homes in Ocala, known for its horse breeding industry, and a townhome in Dunedin, on the Gulf of Mexico near Tampa.

Paxton also traveled with the detail twice to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where he purchased a $1.5 million vacation lodge in 2022. He visited in June 2023, during his suspension. Then again the following December. He traveled to the neighboring town of Idabel in 2023 and 2024. None of the trips had a listed business purpose.

Records that show travel with a security detail do not list the attorney general’s name but rather the position. State officials familiar with the travel records said the two temporary attorneys general appointed during Paxton’s suspension did not take the trips listed on the state police travel logs.

The attorney general’s office has said that Paxton’s work to secure large legal settlements with drugmakers and tech companies requires routine travel. Such travel is noted in calendars reviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune. Even so, more than 800 trips lack a documented business purpose.

Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political science professor who studies attorneys general, said that the role has become more expansive in recent years as states increasingly collaborate on big lawsuits. That could lead to more travel, he said. Nolette added these officials deserve occasional vacations like everyday Americans.

But given repeated accusations from Democrats and Republicans alike about Paxton’s ethics, Nolette said it is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s constantly working while leaving the state so frequently.

“It just raises more red flags about how he’s using the office to do things that may not give the best bang for the buck for Texans,” Nolette said.

Paxton has not commented publicly about his use of the taxpayer-funded detail. During a podcast interview in November, Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee, who led his impeachment defense, asked the attorney general where he liked to travel.

“I love Jackson Hole. I like Park City. I like the mountains. I also like beaches,” Paxton responded. “I like places in Florida, places in California, even though I don’t like to admit I go to California. But it’s beautiful to see them.”

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A Calculated Delay

The Trump Justice Department has mapped out its coming attack on mifepristone — much thirsted for by anti-abortion advocates, but deliberately delayed to avoid midterm backlash — in a new court filing. 

The first step to imposing new restrictions (or reimposing ones previously lifted) is to conduct a “safety review.” Experts often point out that there are few drugs that have been studied and scrutinized as much as mifepristone, making the pretense of discovering some heretofore unknown risk factor fairly absurd.  

“FDA is on track to obtain study results by mid-December 2026,” DOJ wrote of its review. “FDA will then need to review and evaluate/interpret the results and draft a report. FDA expects to complete that process not later than March 2027.” 

The agency will then use those “findings” to justify a change to mifepristone’s REMS — Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy — or restrictions meant to police the use of highly dangerous drugs. Mifepristone’s safety profile has never justified these restrictions, but the anti-abortion movement’s decades of smearing the drug as unsafe has successfully made it harder to get under Republican and Democratic FDAs alike. 

The Biden administration took the largest strides yet in removing some of these barriers. Most importantly, it lifted the in-person dispensing requirement, which has allowed patients even in red states to be prescribed the medicine over telehealth by doctors in blue ones, and receive it in the mail. So far, blue state shield laws have protected those providers from prosecution by red states, though a massive legal reckoning on these state jurisdictional issues is certainly coming. 

That Biden-era REMS change is the crux of a Louisiana lawsuit against the FDA seeking to restrict mifepristone, with the state arguing that allowing the drug to be remotely prescribed and mailed undermines its abortion ban and forces it to expend money on Medicaid patients that have mifepristone-related complications. This week’s filing is part of that lawsuit. Historically, these lawsuits have struggled to amass legitimate examples of such mifepristone-related injuries, and Louisiana’s complaint leans heavily on state sovereignty. 

The DOJ filing stated that the FDA is looking at the in-person dispensing requirement in particular. 

“Following completion of its study and review, FDA will decide whether changes to the Mifepristone REMS Program are necessary and, if applicable, initiate any such changes in accordance with established processes,” it said. “FDA anticipates that it will be able to provide an update to its estimated date of completion as more information becomes known, particularly in March 2027 when it expects to complete its report on the final study results.” 

This filing is as much a signal to the anti-abortion movement as it is an attempt to get Louisiana to cool it until the midterms are safely finished and the FDA can do the dirty work itself. Activists have been outraged at the lack of movement in President Donald Trump’s second term, though they were somewhat assuaged when he nominated Heidi Overton — who has called mifepristone “dangerous to women” and celebrated Dobbs — as the new FDA commissioner. She has not yet received a confirmation vote. 

On Thursday afternoon in Dallas, in what looked like a farewell tour, the president of the United States told his Texas followers to “Hold your nose” and vote for Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, a man he also described as a “pain in the ass.”

Donald Trump then sped off in the presidential limo known as the Beast — at nearly 100 mph, according to pool reports — and headed for an event in Oklahoma. Republicans gazed in mock wild wonder, palms outstretched, claiming they have no idea why they’re staring at potentially historic losses in the midterm elections next month. 

Afterwards a MAGA supporter told me that Trump’s performance was just “presidential humor.” And fair enough. Donald Trump has spent a lifetime being, in effect, the Wednesday night open-mic comic at a backroom bar in some college town in Missouri. 

Neither capable of growth nor understanding, he’s that guy with just one punchline. He’s a one-trick pony: “Sir, she said. Sir.” He’s the most talentless man ever caught in the bright glare of the light he demanded from the world.

But he is persistent. That’s his superpower. The grift? Oh, that part he learned from experience. But he’s naturally persistent, and out of that grew the corruption, fearmongering and boundless anger — all driven by his superpower. He learned to be transactional. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.  

The first Trump administration was an accident, largely brought about by the split I witnessed firsthand between Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sanders’ supporters at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia during the last week of July 2016. What a shock: The Democrats destroyed their chances through infighting. Who knew?

Trump never thought he’d win that election. Some Republicans, who later fled the party, never accepted him as a legitimate heir to the GOP’s legacy when he did. Now, critics and fans alike have pointed out that there’s no doubt he’s the rightful heir to the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; more corrupt than Nixon, a happy practitioner of Reagan’s economics and more of a mean-spirited-wimp than Hunter S. Thompson ever thought Bush could be. 

Trump’s refusal to bust up monopolies while cutting staff to the National Park Service and selling off public lands has removed any illusions that he might be a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. His lack of military service takes him out of the realm of being a Dwight Eisenhower Republican. As for Abraham Lincoln, Trump has tried his best to divide a nation, not unite one. 

Since Trump never thought he’d win in 2016, he never really planned anything; he let the Republican establishment run things until he got comfortable sleeping in the big chair in the Oval Office and declaring each week “infrastructure week” while doing nothing about it. 

Then came COVID, and in 2021 Trump found himself out of power after, of course, refusing to concede the election and inciting a failed insurrection. That failure fueled his persistence and led to his 2024 re-election. The failure also fueled his anger. His subsequent 34 felony convictions in New York and the federal investigations into his actions became motives for Trump to seek and destroy all who tried to bring him to justice.

His persistent greed, anger and need for revenge empowered him during his first 100 days back in office in 2025, leading to sweeping, Nazi-esque changes sold to the public by discrediting or co-opting the media. 

Meanwhile, the former East Room of the White House looks like Dresden during postwar reconstruction; the Kennedy Center is starting to resemble a Greek ruin; the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is empty and broken, and for some reason that can only be understood under the influence of hallucinogens and Red Bull, he now wants to build a triumphal arch and stuff it with weapons.

We have no idea why we’re at war with Iran and no idea how to negotiate a peace. Trump’s latest attempt at that answer came in the Oval Office on Wednesday when he said, for what must be the fifth or sixth time, that he could just blow Iran up. 

At least 58 people have died after being remanded to ICE facilities. Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin shrugs that off and says nothing ICE does is controversial and he’s not running “Holiday Inns — these people broke the law.” His superpower seems to be life-ending, militant ignorance.

Then there’s Russia, Ukraine, China and a host of other scandals. Those include but aren’t limited to spending taxpayer money on political ads, the price of diesel fuel, the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, antisemitism, misogyny and the L.A. mayor’s race. 

While covering Trump is always a challenge, covering his minions is another story. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri, who made his bones trying to kill the Affordable Care Act and challenging the results of the 2020 election, made a complete fool of himself this week in the Senate while attacking former special counsel Jack Smith. 

Schmitt’s superpower is apparently making an ass of himself in public. By misrepresenting nonsensical evidence, he accused Smith of perjury. When called out for his sophomoric display, he then went on right-wing media and lied some more.

Smith, who still reminds me of Coach Beard in “Ted Lasso,” explained that his prosecution wasn’t politically inspired. It was driven by facts. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties,” he said. “My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded,” Being driven by facts and principles is a pretty decent superpower and should describe most people, including reporters, lawyers, scientists, politicians and clerics. 

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” Smith said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

That conclusion shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone after all this time. Trump told me in the Brady Briefing Room, six weeks before the 2020 election, that “If you stop counting the votes” there wouldn’t need to be a peaceful transfer of power. He’d just stay on indefinitely.

Trump thus teaches us that persistence pays off even if the proposition is criminal and the facts aren’t in your favor. That’s why he currently commands the center ring of the circus.

Meanwhile, down in Texas, we have the aforementioned Sideshow Ken Paxton, one of the most loathsome individuals ever to climb out of the primordial ooze and declare himself a human being. This is a man so vile that even Trump hates him, and so do the Trump-happy Texas Republicans who have been known to embrace faith healers and hunt snakes in shorts and cowboy boots. They tried to rid themselves of Paxton, but he somehow slipped away.

Paxton’s superpower is his lack of spine and his greasy nature. That, combined with Trump’s (ahem) support, is the reason Paxton isn’t in prison. 

But time has its way with everyone. After more than a decade of deploying his superpower, Trump is noticeably faltering, even conceding from the Oval Office this week that his party may lose the midterms. The man who has traded on fear, corruption and grift for so long that he looks like a cartoon Tasmanian devil without the charm has now come to resemble Otis, the sleepy town drunk in “The Andy Griffith Show” (look it up, for heaven’s sake). 

Waiting in the wings is “Hillbilly Elegy” JD Vance, worming his way through the crowd. That’s his superpower: He’s a bearded human worm. If you don’t like him, you might place a bet on Marco “The Juggler” Rubio. His superpower is handling a variety of tasks without the loud explosive thud of total failure often seen from Trump, Vance and Pete Hegseth, who’s more like the the secretary of fashion than the “secretary of war.” That makes “Li’l Marco” a bright star in Trump’s dark firmament, even if it’s evident nobody likes him.  

Hegseth, on the other hand, is among the dimmest. His superpower seems to be the ability to cosplay a vain summer camp counselor in the Adirondacks from a bad Hallmark comedy.  

For the comic book fans out there, the Republicans are led by a Yellow Lantern with fading powers, delusional in his beliefs and actions, too fearful to change and faced with the overpowering realization that his time in power is quickly coming to an end. 

He even sent an email to supporters Thursday claiming “This could be my final four weeks as president.” Sure, it was another grift, as well as fatalistic and totally disingenuous. 

They may have to pry Trump out of the Oval Office with a crowbar and a handful of sedatives in 2029, if he lasts that long. But next month’s midterm elections, should they go as badly as Trump obviously fears, will mean the effective end of his presidency. What comes after that could be chaos. Don’t expect mature or professional behavior from a party that can’t tell the difference between an NBA game in Atlanta and a women’s college basketball game in Silver Spring. Just realize it’s the same party that wants to punish transgender Americans while rewarding the ultra-rich. 

The only question that matters is this; Does Trump have enough juice left in his Yellow Lantern ring for one last fearful victory? At his mini-convention in Dallas he told his followers to “cheat like hell.” At the same time Trump asked everyone to vote as if he were on the ballot; unfortunately for the Republicans, many will do just that. At this point, it’s almost as if Trump is campaigning for the Democrats. 

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Seems appropriate. Most of the Democrats are counting on winning by simply saying, “I’m not Trump.”

Folks, they’re not putting Vance out in the field for the Donald’s sake. He’s there for the same reason: Because he’s not Trump. Soon enough, JD could graduate from the sideshow to the center ring.

Should Trump and the Republicans suffer the historic midterm blowout everyone sees coming — barring armed confiscation of ballot boxes — the president will play the victim, a martyred hero who will claim the elections were rigged and blame Joe Biden, China, Canada, our NATO allies and Iran. If he somehow finds a miraculous recharge for his ring, he will use his superpower to foment further revenge and retribution. Every failure is fuel for the next fiasco.

I’ve been told that everyone has a superpower. If so, I’ll defer to what my father told me was mine: asking annoying questions. I still have a few for you, Mr. President.

The post Trump’s superpower is fading. Can he recharge before the midterms? appeared first on Salon.com.

In a recent interview, conservative political operative Karl Rove said he’s voting for a Democrat in the upcoming midterms, breaking three decades of precedent exclusively supporting Republicans, and lamented the GOP’s embrace of far-right individuals.

“My party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French,” Rove said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. Weeks earlier, Rove described French, the Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner, as a “bigot,” after he posted several xenophobic social media posts taking aim at students of color celebrating a college football game. Earlier in September, the Tribune reported that Rove planned to vote for French’s rival, state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, D-Houston, in the race that will regulate the Texas oil and gas industry.

Rove also decried the relationship between Texas Republicans and a right-wing podcaster. “Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi,” Rove said.

Rove served as a senior advisor and deputy chief of staff during George W. Bush’s presidency, in which he was described as “the architect” of Bush’s re-election campaign. Rove has also been credited for the successful campaigns of Sens. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Texas Gov. Bill Clements, among others. So he may be qualified to weigh in on the Senate race between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and former state Rep. James Talarico. 

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“If John Cornyn were the nominee, this race would be over,” Rove told the Tribune. Cornyn lost the Texas primary to Paxton after the latter received an endorsement from President Donald Trump. “But when you got a guy who’s got multiple girlfriends, $200,000 worth of improvements in his house from a corrupt business guy for whom he does favors … and now it’s in the court of public opinion. If this were not out there, this would be a normal Republican versus Democrat.”  

Rove did not say whether or not he’d vote for Paxton.

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This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

The family of a woman who died after she could not get an abortion in Texas is suing doctors and state officials including Attorney General Ken Paxton. It is the first lawsuit over a death linked to an abortion ban. 

“It’s horrible that she’s gone and she was taken from us this way. It’s horrible that she’s not here anymore,” said LaTanya Walker, Tierra Walker’s aunt and the lead plaintiff in the case, in a press conference Wednesday. She added: “I want justice for her. I want it to not happen to anyone else. It needs to stop.”

The case, filed Tuesday in state court by a malpractice firm and the abortion rights group Amplify Legal, argues that Texas’ abortion bans violate both the state and U.S. Constitution. This case is also the first to directly sue Paxton, who has taken a leading role in enforcing Texas’ ban. Paxton is locked in a tight race for the U.S. Senate.

“Tierra Walker is dead and those responsible must be held accountable,” the suit reads. “At every turn, Texas’s political and medical establishments not only failed but actively harmed Ms. Walker.”

Walker is one of the numerous women whose deaths have been linked to abortion bans. Other deaths have occurred in North Carolina and Georgia, states with bans less restrictive than Texas’. Texas’ near-total abortion ban provides exceptions only if staying pregnant puts someone “at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” In 2025 — after Walker’s death — the state passed a law meant to clarify what constitutes a risk of death. But the penalties for violating the state’s ban remain onerous, and many doctors have said it is not obvious what care they can provide or how sick a patient must be before they can intervene.

Walker, whose case was first reported on last year by ProPublica, died December 30, 2024, when she was 37 years old and 20 weeks into her pregnancy. Her medical history of chronic conditions — including diabetes, hypertension, obesity and severe asthma — made her pregnancy particularly high-risk. She was hospitalized multiple times during her pregnancy and repeatedly asked for an abortion. According to the lawsuit, doctors did not give her information on how she could get an abortion, instead dismissing her after telling her “your baby is fine.”

“They just kept saying, ‘It’s not the baby, the baby’s fine,’” LaTanya Walker said. 

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Walker died days after being discharged from the University of Texas Science Center at San Antonio, also known as the University Health System, according to the lawsuit. Her son discovered her dead on his 15th birthday.

After Walker’s death, a medical examiner ruled that she died of hypertensive cardiovascular disease with preeclampsia, the latter of which is a dangerous pregnancy-related high blood pressure condition that doctors had identified in Walker. 

Some Texans have been able to get abortions by leaving the state or ordering abortion medication online. Walker’s illness — which included seizures and frequent hospitalizations — prevented her from traveling out of state, said Molly Duane, one of the family’s attorneys. LaTanya Walker considered ordering abortion pills for her niece, she said, but she ultimately did not because she worried about whether they could exacerbate medical conditions.

“That’s the problem. You should be able to get healthcare from your doctor,” Duane said.

Medical records cited in the suit note that on her last hospital visit, her blood pressure was dangerously high and only temporarily responsive to medication. According to those records, the doctor caring for her at that point, who is a named defendant in the suit, wrote that “delivering the baby” — which would terminate the pregnancy — ”may be the best treatment for preeclampsia.” 

Doctors who reviewed the case for ProPublica all told the news outlet that, given Walker’s medical risks, she should have been offered an abortion. 

The suit names Paxton and Stephen Brint Carlton, the executive director of the Texas Medical Board, in their official and individual capacities, as well as Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales in his official capacity. It also names the University of Texas Science Center at San Antonio and three of the doctors who cared for Walker. 

The 19th reached out to Paxton’s office and Senate campaign, Carlton, the University Health System and the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office for comment, but received no immediate reply.

Paxton has been a staunch defendant of Texas’ abortion ban. In another case, he threatened legal action against anyone who gave an abortion to one woman — despite a court saying she qualified for an exception to the state’s ban. He has also sought to dismiss a case brought by women who had been denied abortions in medical emergencies, and who were pushing for greater clarity over when someone could receive an abortion in Texas.

The plaintiffs, Walker’s family, are seeking a jury trial and pursuing both damages and a judgement finding that Texas’ abortion laws violate the state constitution.

The post Tierra Walker died after she couldn’t get an abortion. Her family is suing Ken Paxton appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

The family of a woman who died after she could not get an abortion in Texas is suing doctors and state officials including Attorney General Ken Paxton. It is the first lawsuit over a death linked to an abortion ban. 

This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

As Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas for their pre-midterm convention last week, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico focused on survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. 

Talarico got a tour of the Reading Room, a traveling exhibit of the nearly 3 million files that the Department of Justice released from its investigation into the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender — the result of a hard-fought battle by survivors of Epstein’s abuse who are still seeking justice and transparency from a government they say repeatedly failed them.