Ken Paxton Admits Team Trump Controls His Campaign in Leaked Audio

In a leaked audio recording, Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton lamented that he isn’t in control of his own campaign. At a fundraiser in September, Paxton spoke candidly about his flailing campaign, according to the recording shared with Politico and published Monday. “I’ve never been in a race where I felt less control over the campaign and, like, what issues are going to matter because it’s all coming—you know—from D.C.,” he said. “I don’t control the message or what we’re doing.”“I don’t have ability to change anything,” Paxton continued. “So I have to live with whatever I’ve got. So it is a challenge.”The audio was leaked by someone who does not support Paxton, and confirmed by another attendee. One attendee said that Paxton never specifically referred to Donald Trump’s team. Nick Maddux, Paxton’s campaign adviser, said that the candidate was “obviously” referring to the fact that campaigns don’t coordinate with super PACs. Trump has repeatedly pledged his desire to see Paxton elected but hesitated to commit any part of his $400 million MAGA Inc. war chest to help him win. Instead, Trump has focused on making the midterm elections a referendum on his own presidency. Last month, Trump held a fundraiser in Houston that was touted as a lifeline to Paxton’s campaign—but the money actually went to the Republican National Convention, according to The Wall Street Journal. Paxton has long struggled to match Democratic candidate James Talarico’s funding. According to their latest quarterly filings with the Federal Election Commission, Talarico’s campaign had raked in $31.6 million, while Paxton only raised $9.3 million. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll found that Paxton was six points behind Talarico. This is the second piece of audio leaked about Paxton. Last month, the attorney general was caught trashing Trump’s disastrous midterm convention.The Trump administration is watching Brazil’s presidential election results closely.Over the weekend, right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and President Trump’s preferred candidate, advanced to a runoff with incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist.The White House has done all it can to boost Bolsonaro and cement Trump’s influence over Latin America. Trump has backed conservative allies in Colombia as well as Argentina and kidnapped Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. The day after Maduro was brought to the U.S., in January, the State Department posted a picture on social media with Trump and the slogan, “This is OUR hemisphere.”In total, seven right-wing candidates have won presidential elections across Latin America in the last 18 months, with Trump publicly backing most of them.“We’re doing very well in South America,” Trump said in September. “Lots of people that I got elected.”Trump was a strong supporter of the elder Bolsonaro, and they share some odious similarities. Bolsonaro refused to accept losing Brazil’s 2022 elections to Lula, and his supporters stormed government buildings in response. Unlike in the U.S., Bolsonaro and his allies were arrested and put on trial for the coup attempt, with investigators uncovering a plot to kill Lula and his running mate.Trump’s response was to threaten the country with exorbitant tariffs over the “witch hunt,” as he put it, in July 2025. Undeterred, Lula went ahead with Bolsonaro’s trial and the former president was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison. In May this year, Lula and Trump had a frosty meeting with no cameras at the White House. Then, as elections neared, Trump dispatched two State Department officials to investigate “electoral integrity,” only for Brazil to deny their visas and accuse them of interfering in the country’s elections.Lula used Trump’s efforts in his reelection campaign, accusing Flávio Bolsonaro of being “Trump’s candidate,” and called out Trump at the United Nations General Assembly last month. It remains to be seen whether those efforts will help Lula to win the October 29 runoff.Two recent polls show that the majority of Latino voters have all but abandoned President Trump—reaffirming a development that’s been brewing since he returned to office and began his draconian immigration crackdown. The new NBC News/Telemundo poll has Latinos going for Democrats by a margin of 59 percent in the upcoming midterm elections, almost doubling their support from 2024. The new CBS News/YouGov poll tells a similar story, with 60 percent of Latino voters preferring Democratic House candidates. Overall, 69 percent of Latino voters disapprove of President Trump’s performance ahead of the midterms.This comes two years after Trump won a groundbreaking 42 percent of them, sparking discourse about a new multicultural Republican coalition. That dream seems to be all but dead, as those same voters have responded extremely negatively to Trump’s handling of the economy, his lack of action on the affordability crisis, and his mass deportation campaign. This doesn’t necessarily mean that these voters will automatically turn out for Democrats now—more Latinos (42 percent) still have a negative view of the party, as it has not fully taken advantage of two years of violent arrests, kidnappings, shootings, pepper balls, and killings. Right-wing commentator Benny Johnson branded a group of brutalized Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters as “left-wing terrorists.” Now they’re suing him for defamation.On October 3, 2025, Johnson accompanied top Homeland Security officials to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, where a crowd had gathered in a designated “free speech” zone. Johnson filmed as ICE agents broke up the peaceful protest, shoving and striking attendees until they fell to the ground.He then posted the videos to his various social media channels on X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Rumble. The content featured clips of the protesters being lined up against a concrete wall, while Johnson narrated the scene, framing the civilians as “left-wing terrorists” who were “arrested for attacking police officers and ICE officers.”But that was far from the truth and, almost a year later, two of those protesters—Harvard University data scientist Kyle Frankovich and contracted court reporter Maureen Foody—are ready to recoup damages from the reported inaccuracy. On Friday, Frankovich and Foody filed a joint lawsuit against Johnson, claiming that Johnson knew his portrayals were false, but that he “did not care.”The duo “sang songs, participated in prayers, held signs, and recorded official activity,” according to the complaint. Neither was charged with a crime, though they were detained for roughly eight hours and eventually released a half-mile from the jail.Meanwhile, Johnson’s content from that day has collectively accumulated millions of views and interactions, granting the former BuzzFeed writer another pathway to rake in cash on a false narrative. (Johnson was fired from the digital outlet in 2014 for plagiarizing multiple blog posts.) In one post, Johnson claimed he saw “dozens of Democrat domestic terrorists arrested today for VIOLENT ASSAULT on federal law enforcement” and further purported that “every activist” attending “attacked ICE agents in broad daylight” was viewed 1.7 million times.Frankovich told MS NOW that he was “shaken” when he saw Johnson’s posts and the comments made by his followers that likened him to an antifa leader and attempted to dox his identity. Some comments included calls to torture, shoot, and kill the arrested protesters, according to the network.The data scientist also scorned a DHS post that turned an image of his tattooed arms and zip-tied hands into a recruitment poster, framing Frankovich as a criminal.“You shouldn’t get to lie about me,” Frankovich told MS NOW.The Trump administration has ratcheted up its election interference efforts in Brazil, using sanctions, tariffs, and narratives to give Flávio Bolsonaro—son of right-wing hard-liner and convicted traitor Jair Bolsonaro—any possible edge over incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It may very well backfire. This has been brewing for some time. The Trump administration has threatened military action against Brazil, started classifying criminal groups there as terrorist organizations, and even sent State Department officials to Brazil to delegitimize its election system. The U.S. Consulate in São Paulo hosted pro-Bolsonaro social media influencers for a private roundtable. Bolsonaro’s other son, Eduardo, even floated the idea that the Trump administration might reject the outcome of the election if Lula wins. Yet all these things and more have potentially turned Brazilian voters away. “Brazil did not want the U.S. imposition of this category on these criminal organizations because it opened the door for many ways in which the Trump administration could interfere in Brazilian internal politics,” Brown University professor of Portuguese and Brazilian studies James Green told Responsible Statecraft. “Even though they haven’t overtly said, ‘Oh, Flávio is my candidate,’ they sent all these signals to indicate that that’s who the United States wants to see elected.” While Lula’s approval rating hovers around 50 percent—much higher than Trump’s has been at any point in his second term—the election margin is expected to be close regardless. Voting begins on Sunday.