Leaked audio shows Ken Paxton blaming high gas prices and Iran war for uphill battle in midterms – report
Ken Paxton, aware of just how competitive his race for Senate is, acknowledged that high gas prices as a result of the ongoing Iran war appear to be hampering his campaign, according to an audio recording obtained by Axios.
At a fundraiser in Washington DC, Paxton can be heard responding to questions about the main issues affecting his competition. “It’s not tariffs,” he said. “It’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel.”
The embattled attorney general is currently trailing his opponent, Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico, in most polls leading up to the November election.
At the meeting, Paxton acknowledged that affordability is “by far our biggest problem”, according to the recording Axios obtained, and why his campaign is “having a hard time with numbers”.
A reminder that another recording from this event was leaked to the New York Times last week, where Paxton said that Donald Trump’s midterms GOP convention “dropped our numbers” and many of the campaign’s directives were coming from Washington.
Paxton noted that the ability to end the conflict with Iran, and ease prices is beyond his control, according to the audio from Axios. “So many factors in this federal race are uncontrollable,” the Republican nominee said. “I don’t make the decisions.”
Updated at 09.09 EDT
Key events
As we continue to report and talk about the midterm elections here, you’d be forgiven for wanting to take a step back and understand the mechanics of how they work, and how consequential they are.
Well, look no further, because my colleagues have put together an incredibly useful video explainer to break it all down.
US Midterms: What are they and why do presidents dread them? – explainerShareLeaked audio shows Ken Paxton blaming high gas prices and Iran war for uphill battle in midterms – report
Ken Paxton, aware of just how competitive his race for Senate is, acknowledged that high gas prices as a result of the ongoing Iran war appear to be hampering his campaign, according to an audio recording obtained by Axios.
At a fundraiser in Washington DC, Paxton can be heard responding to questions about the main issues affecting his competition. “It’s not tariffs,” he said. “It’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel.”
The embattled attorney general is currently trailing his opponent, Democratic state lawmaker James Talarico, in most polls leading up to the November election.
At the meeting, Paxton acknowledged that affordability is “by far our biggest problem”, according to the recording Axios obtained, and why his campaign is “having a hard time with numbers”.
A reminder that another recording from this event was leaked to the New York Times last week, where Paxton said that Donald Trump’s midterms GOP convention “dropped our numbers” and many of the campaign’s directives were coming from Washington.
Paxton noted that the ability to end the conflict with Iran, and ease prices is beyond his control, according to the audio from Axios. “So many factors in this federal race are uncontrollable,” the Republican nominee said. “I don’t make the decisions.”
Updated at 09.09 EDT
Donald Trump will begin his day in Washington. We’re due to hear from the president at 1pm ET, when he’ll make an announcement in the Oval Office.
Trump will then travel to San Antonio, Texas, where he’s set to hold another campaign rally to drum up support for Republican candidates on the ballot. Trump won Texas in the last three elections. However, some of state’s marquee midterm races – particularly the US Senate competition – now look increasingly competitive.
A number of polls show the Democrat, James Talarico, leading the Trump-endorsed Republican nominee, Ken Paxton – the scandal-plagued state attorney general.
This is Trump’s second visit to Texas in the past week. He’s set to speak at 7pm ET.
Two-thirds of Republican candidates in competitive US House and Senate races have broken with president Donald Trump on policy or played down ties to him, a Reuters review found, revealing a widespread effort to distance themselves from the president as his unpopularity threatens the party’s hold on Congress.
The review of voting records, public statements and campaign materials found candidates in 41 of 62 competitive congressional races seeking some distance from Trump ahead of the 3 November midterm elections.
The candidates have largely criticized or diverged from Trump on individual issues rather than repudiated his broader agenda. The findings suggest an effort to attract independent voters while avoiding a direct break with their party leader.
Policy differences were the most common point of divergence, appearing in 23 of the 62 races.
In 12 contests, the split centered on the Iran conflict, with vulnerable Republicans either voting to curb Trump’s war powers or calling publicly for an end to the fighting that has raised gas prices and squeezed household budgets.
Michael Sainato
Donald Trump has long sought to portray himself as a man of steel, from the White House photoshopping Trump to look like Superman, to enacting tariffs on steel and approving the sale of US Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel with a “golden” share given to the US government.
Most recently, the Trump administration announced plans to construct the largest steel plant in the US, a $15bn plant in Lee county, Iowa to be built by India-based Mesabi Metallics.
But the project and claims surrounding it have incited skepticism over whether the plant will be built and delivered as promised, given Trump’s record and the financial history of Mesabi Metallics’ parent company, Essar Global.
The plant had originally been scheduled to be built in Minnesota, a state that usually votes for Democrats. The shift to Iowa – where Republicans are struggling in the midterms – has also attracted attention.
Doug May, who worked for 43 years as a steelworker at a mill in Granite City, Illinois, characterized the announcement as “political pandering” given the timing and how tariffs are hurting Iowa farmers.
“He pulled the same thing in 2018, just before an election, when he announced that $10bn Foxconn project,” May said.
That project, in swing state Wisconsin, failed to produce the jobs Trump and Foxconn had promised.
Updated at 07.53 EDT
Most US voters think Donald Trump’s administration and Congress are not taking the risks of AI seriously enough and want the government to write new regulations for the technology, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The six-day survey, which ended on Monday, showed that wide swaths of the electorate see AI as a major threat to American jobs, underscoring growing skepticism of the technology from voters across the political spectrum.
The fast-advancing technology has become a matter of keen national interest amid reports of AI agents running amok and hacking into corporate computer networks, and warnings from prominent researchers that it could one day pose an existential threat to humanity.
Noisy, power-hungry data centers that power AI also increasingly pose a nuisance when they pop up near neighborhoods while jacking up utility bills.
Some 57% of registered voters in the poll – including a third of self-identified Republicans – said the Trump administration has not taken AI risks seriously enough or at all. Some 54% said the same about Congress.
ShareRubio to call for west to restore founding democratic principles and values
Secretary of state Marco Rubio is set to call for the nations of the west to return to their civilizational roots and restore the values that drove the rise of Europe and North America to global dominance for centuries, AP reports.
In Athens to discuss deepening economic, energy and security cooperation with Greece, Rubio will deliver a speech later today overlooking the ruins of the Acropolis, a widely recognizable symbol of the city’s ancient civilization associated with the creation of popular participatory government and the social contract.
Rubio intends to remind listeners of qualities he says were born in Greece and later defined the West, such as curiosity, courage, ambition and a restless spirit of exploration and discovery of the unknown.
“It has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the ‘global community’ over one’s own people. Here, too, we have much more to learn from the men of Ancient Greece. They knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor in fighting to defend its interests above all else,” Rubio plans to say in the speech, excerpts of which were distributed by the state department.
“Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads,” he will say, according to the excerpts. “The next decade will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world, or resigns itself to a future of atrophy, servitude, and decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.”
ShareSusan Collins distances herself from Trump in Maine debate
Robert Tait
Susan Collins, the Republican senator for Maine, pointedly distanced herself from Donald Trump in a televised debate with Democratic challenger Troy Jackson on Tuesday, as she sought to present an image of independence in a state that has voted against Trump three times.
Proclaiming herself as not the US president’s “favorite senator”, Collins made the highly unusual boast for a Republican that she had voted with Joe Biden, a Democrat, more than 90% of the time when he was president. She also emphasized her differences with her fellow Republicans, saying she voted against her own party more than any other senator.
Collins’ defensiveness came amid a determined onslaught from Jackson, 58, a veteran former state legislator who was getting his first chance to present himself to a broad audience since replacing Graham Platner as the Democratic candidate in a contest that could be vital to the party’s hopes of winning the Senate.
Platner, a former harbor master, was forced to withdraw from the race in July after facing sexual assault allegations, which he denied, leaving Democrats racing against the clock to replace a candidate who had built up momentum campaigning on a populist progressive platform.
Jackson painted Collins as a Trump loyalist, saying she voted with the president 96% of the time. He also doggedly focused on her 2018 vote for the conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, tying it to the court’s subsequent overturning of Roe v Wade, which had for half a century guaranteed the national right to abortion.
“Tonight is about who you stand with when it matters,” Jackson said in a pithy opening statement. “Eight years ago today, Maine women went to DC and begged Senator Collins not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, but she did it anyways.
“He helped overturn Roe v Wade, and today she says she has no regrets. Would you trust her to pick the next supreme court justice?”
ShareTrump’s LA and San Diego comments ‘dangerous, if not treasonous’, say critics
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Donald Trump was accused of “dangerous, if not treasonous” behaviour after his comments suggesting he could “let [Iran] take out” Los Angeles or San Diego.
California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has since directed the state’s emergency preparedness center to “actively monitor” possible threats to the state.
“Donald Trump’s remarks were dangerous – if not treasonous – putting a target on two of our biggest cities and one of America’s largest naval hubs,” Newsom said in a post on X, adding that the state’s threat-assessment center would be on heightened alert “in the event that foreign actors interpret the president’s remarks as an invitation to target California”.
The president has faced a chorus of condemnation from Democratic leaders in California after his comments at a rally in Nebraska on Monday night, which the White House has suggested were being taken out of context.
At the president’s rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, Trump claimed that high prices due to the war with Iran are a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe – keeping our country safe”.
He went on:
double quotation markThey can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.
Trump suggests Iran could ‘take out’ American cities at rally – video
Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for governor vying to succeed Newsom, said he wasn’t surprised by the president’s comments.
“Donald Trump is a known commodity – you know how he acts, you know how he behaves,” Becerra told reporters at a campaign event in Los Angeles on Tuesday. But he took a jab at Republicans who “profess that they should be the leaders of our state” but aren’t willing to “stand up to Donald Trump”.
Meanwhile, San Diego mayor Todd Gloria said in a statement that “the most fundamental responsibility of a president is to protect the American people – all of them.”
He added:
double quotation markNo American city, regardless of its politics or geography, should ever be described as expendable or an acceptable price to pay.
But the White House insisted that Trump was being willfully misinterpreted.
Steven Cheung, its director of communications, posted on X:
double quotation markThe media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.
But one Republican House candidate, Jim Desmond, who is running in a competitive San Diego-based seat, pushed back.
“America must stand up to Iran and defend our interests, but the first responsibility of our commander in chief is to protect the American people and our homeland,” Desmond, a former mayor of San Marcos, said in a statement.
In other developments:
The Cook Political Report has revised its predictions for the November midterm elections, saying “A Senate Majority is Squarely in Democrats’ Sights”. Cook amended its prediction for the Kansas Senate race from “Lean Republican” to “Toss Up” – a shocker for a state where no Democrat has won a Senate election since 1932.
Donald Trump announced a massive new shipyard, which will be funded by a combination of federal and private dollars, at Tradepoint Atlantic in Sparrows Point. Anduril Industries, which is owned by Trump’s friend and donor Palmer Luckey, plans to invest $3.7bn in the shipyard and the US Navy will contribute an additional $2.9bn.
The USS Lincoln will dock in San Diego tomorrow, completing a nearly year-long deployment that sparked controversy over living conditions aboard the aircraft carrier as it supported military operations in Iran. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to greet the crew when they arrive.
Trump ordered the FBI to investigate protesters in Los Angeles who were demonstrating against the president’s immigration crackdown, according to a whistleblower complaint that was submitted to the Senate judiciary committee. Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, made the complaint following the federal response to anti-ICE demonstrations around the city’s federal buildings, and in residential area, early last year.
Updated at 06.01 EDT