Trump mocks Ken Paxton's looks, then puts $10 million behind his Senate bid

…(cont) Before that, I go back a few pages, because that's how this works with me — I go back. August 27th, a poll: Mr. Talarico ahead of Mr. Paxton in the Senate race, Governor Abbott ahead of Ms. Hinojosa in the governor's race. Forty-seven percent for Talarico, if I copied the number right. The next day, August 28th, Mr. Paxton's own home-state senator, John Cornyn, tells the Texas Tribune that Mr. Paxton is "lazy," that he's "a poor campaigner," that he "doesn't raise money." That's on the record, from his own senator, one day after a poll that had Mr. Paxton behind. I wrote both dates down. They run pretty close together.

Then September 2nd — a super PAC tied to the President puts a million dollars into a national ad buy. Thirty seconds. Narrated by the President himself and a UFC executive. Not about Mr. Paxton, not about the Senate race in Texas. About the President. I keep that page next to the others, because I don't know where else to file it.

And then, that same week — the one where the senator called him lazy, the one where the President mocked his face on the same day Karl Rove said time was running out — the number arrives. Ten million dollars. Written one way in one paper as $10,000,000, all the zeroes spelled out, like somebody wanted you to count them. Written another way in the wire copy, from the candidate on the other side of the state, as "$10 million," like it's smaller said that way. Same number, two spellings. I've got a car in the garage that does something similar — the odometer says one figure, the paperwork from the shop says another, and my mechanic tells me not to worry, they're both right depending how you count. I still don't like it. I don't like it here either.

I want to be fair. Maybe a man can hand ten million dollars to a candidate whose looks he mocked in public, whose own senator called him lazy, and mean every word of the endorsement. Maybe that's just how a campaign runs, the check and the insult in the same drawer, filed the same week, and nobody thinks twice. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm asking whether it is.

Oh — one more thing, before I let you go. There's a third name in this I almost missed, because everybody's watching the Senate seat. Gina Hinojosa is running for governor against Mr. Abbott, and she put out a statement of her own this week. She said she welcomes the attention on Texas. I read that, and I went back to the number. Ten million dollars, the same week, the same state, the same attention. Is that the number she meant? I wrote it down twice, in two different hands, and I'm still looking at the page.