MAGA Inc. Cut Ken Paxton a $10 Million Check. It Is Trump's First Real Spending of the Midterms.

President Trump's super PAC has finally started spending, and the first big check went to Texas. MAGA Inc. put $10 million behind Ken Paxton's Senate campaign, according to Federal Election Commission filings — the largest contribution the committee has made this election cycle and the clearest signal yet of where Trump thinks his money is most needed.

The filings show the money split down the middle. Five million dollars is going to advertising attacking Democratic nominee James Talarico, and $5 million to advertising promoting Paxton. Both halves were routed to Del Ray Media Inc. for television and digital placement. Before this, MAGA Inc.'s midterm giving had been close to nominal: a $827,000 contribution supporting Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina.

The size of the intervention says something about the state of the race. Texas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in 33 years, and a Republican nominee there should not need eight figures from a national super PAC in early September. Paxton, the state's attorney general, won the Republican nomination by knocking off John Cornyn in a runoff, and he holds a 61% approval rating among Texas Republicans. He also carries a 2023 impeachment trial and a steady drip of personal controversy into a general election against a 37-year-old former teacher who has proven unusually good at raising money and going viral.

Trump has been personally engaged in the race, mostly as an insult generator. "The name happens to be Tala-freako because he is one of the worst candidates I have ever seen," the president said of the Democrat. Talarico responded by putting the nickname on t-shirts and selling them.

MAGA Inc. is not short of ammunition. The committee is sitting on roughly $400 million, and Trump has said he has raised about $850 million across this cycle — a war chest without precedent for a president in a midterm year, and one that has so far mostly sat still while Republican candidates in tighter races have asked publicly when it would start moving.

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the Senate, and Texas has been on their target list all year largely because of Paxton's vulnerabilities rather than any statewide shift. Three consecutive public polls in August showed Talarico ahead. Ten million dollars from Trump's PAC does not resolve that, but it does mark the point at which the president stopped treating Texas as safe.