President Donald Trump’s super PAC is shelling out $10 million for Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign, its first general election contribution ahead of the November midterms, according to a filing made public Saturday.<\/p>\n
It’s a welcome sign for Republicans, who have implored the president to mobilize his massive campaign war chest<\/a> and groused that he must be the one to pull Paxton<\/a> \u2014 whom he helped to defeat popular incumbent John Cornyn in the GOP primary \u2014 over the line in Texas.<\/p>\n “We’re going to spend a lot of money because we don’t want to lose our country,” Trump said. “I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try to help us, and this is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control.”<\/p>\n In an Oval Office press conference Friday, Trump pledged to pour “probably $400, 500 million” into the midterms, telling reporters the super PAC had amassed “close to a billion dollars.” The $10 million unveiled Saturday is the only amount known to have been spent by MAGA Inc. so far this general election cycle.<\/p>\n But with Republicans locked in hyper-competitive Senate races in a series of battleground states, and the GOP poised to perhaps lose control of the House for the first time since January 2023, the super PAC had previously refrained from spending to defeat Democrats this fall.<\/p>\n Money from MAGA Inc. had only recently started to trickle out<\/a> to boost GOP candidates, most of whom faced competitive primaries. It spent more than $827,000 to boost Sen. Darline Graham in the primary runoff in August. The super PAC raised $3 million in July<\/a> and $18 million in June<\/a>. Before the spend to boost Graham, MAGA Inc. hadn’t spent on a candidate since May, when it doled out $560,000 to MAGA KY<\/a>, which supported Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) challenger in that month’s primary.<\/p>\n “High Tax Talarico wants to take money out of Texans’ pockets, MAGA Inc. spokesperson Alex Pfeiffer said in a statement. “MAGA Inc. is going to ensure Texas knows about Talarico’s radical policies and elects Ken Paxton to the U.S. Senate.”<\/p>\n The super PAC isn’t directly controlled by the president or the White House, and super PACs are supposed to operate independently, but candidates, including Trump, often have significant sway over the organizations.<\/p>\n Paxton is in the middle of a closer-than-expected race against state Rep. James Talarico in Texas, where Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris<\/a> by about 14 points in 2024. He faces a major funding disparity<\/a> and has been dogged by a wide variety of scandals that have traditional donors looking the other way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump’s super PAC is shelling out $10 million for Ken Paxton’s Senate campaign, its first general…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[145,8236,103471,1967,148615,148616,68778,30910,2424,13164,27,29,28,2558],"class_list":["post-427401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-donald-trump","tag-gop","tag-graham","tag-ken-paxton","tag-maga-inc","tag-maga-ky","tag-pac","tag-paxton","tag-republicans","tag-senate","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}