“Trump heads to Texas as GOP worries mount over Paxton, Talarico”, 7 October 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
Begin, as always, with the number. On September 15th the Congressional Budget Office closed its books on the war and set the price at thirty-eight billion dollars, calling that figure conservative. Conservative is supposed to mean careful. Here it also means the number has room to climb.
The timeline behind that number runs back further than the invoice. In late August the war marked six months with, the record says, no end in sight. By September 9th the president himself was conceding it would not be over before the midterms. The next day the Pentagon's language turned to "devastation," the word it chose for what had been done to Iran's capabilities, a word that describes an outcome, not a budget.…
…(cont) The budget came a week later, the thirty-eight billion the Budget Office called conservative, and the Senate's own Democrats went looking for a full accounting of it; across the Capitol a Pentagon briefing on the same costs left senators frustrated rather than answered, which is its own kind of itemization.
Back home, the war's defenders found a different ledger. On September 16th the Texas Farm Bureau endorsed Ken Paxton for Senate, crediting him with defending Texas farmers in court. Two weeks later, in leaked audio, Paxton told donors that the president's own Texas convention had instead dropped his numbers — his word for it was "dropped," his number for it he did not give.
Today the ledger comes due twice. NPR reports farmers making their own fertilizer by hand, a traditional Asian recipe pressed into service because the war has driven the price of the bought kind out of reach — they call it, not bitterly, a labor of love. In today's leaked audio, Paxton tells a fundraiser that affordability, not any Democrat's attack, is what is sinking his campaign. The price he is describing is the one the Budget Office already itemized, and he is now paying it twice, once at the pump and once in his own polling.
This is not malarkey dressed as economics; it is a spreadsheet with a fertilizer bag taped to the bottom of it, and somewhere in the middle of that spreadsheet the number stops being conservative and starts being owed, plain as shit, by people who did not get a vote on it.
In lieu of flowers, ask to see the itemized thirty-eight billion, not the conservative guess of it.
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“They sell you a war at a "conservative" price, and the next thing you know some guy's boiling his own fertilizer in a bucket because the bought kind costs what the Budget Office warned you it would. Paxton voted for that war, and now he's telling donors it's "affordability" sinking him — not a word about who wrote the check. Thirty-eight billion didn't disappear, it just showed up at the feed store with his name still on the bill.”
“Look, affordability is a global issue, it's not like the war caused the price of — okay, he did say the war caused the price of gas, I'm reading his own quote here. The convention numbers dropping, that's a messaging problem, not a policy problem. Did I just call a thirty-eight-billion-dollar line item a messaging problem? That doesn't sound like me.”
President Trump is headed back to Texas on Wednesday for his third visit in a month as Republican Ken Paxton trails Democrat James Talarico in a battleground Senate race. It’s the latest in Trump’s blitz through red states to rev up Republican voters as many key midterm forecasts shift in Democrats’ favor, and it’s his...
It's hard enough being a small-scale farmer. Then the Iran war drove up fertilizer prices. So farmers are using a traditional Asian recipe to make their own.
Leaked audio shows state’s attorney general tell fundraiser affordability is his campaign’s biggest problem; Trump due to speak in Texas on Wednesday California to ‘actively monitor’ possible threats after Trump said Iran could ‘take out’ LA and San Diego Sign up for the Breaking News US email Tonight, we’ll have another set of midterm…
President Trump is in Texas to support Ken Paxton while other Republican candidates weigh his impact ahead of the midterms. Plus, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine defended herself on the debate stage as scrutiny of her past political decisions mounted.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
