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Wednesday, October 7, 2026
President Donald Trump is scheduled to fly to San Antonio today to stand next to GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton, to support a candidate he not only endorsed, but according to multiple polls, is losing to James Talarico in the deep red state of Texas. This morning Axios published Paxton on tape telling donors what’s dragging his campaign: “It’s not tariffs. It’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel,” and “I don’t make the decisions.” Governor Greg Abbott, who is in his own election dogfight, is opting not to attend the rally. Republican candidates are increasingly freaked out by Trump’s involvement in their campaigns. Senator Susan Collins told a debate audience Tuesday Night, “I’m not exactly his favorite senator.” Cook moved Kansas to a toss-up and said Trump “is a drag across the board even in deep red states.” On Fox & Friends this morning, Marc Thiessen called Kansas “remarkable” and said the fact that Trump has to campaign in Nebraska is “pretty stunning.” Meanwhile, Morning Joe aired a story nobody else had reported on documents that show ICE collected 48 million voter records through an adviser who is an election denier and weighed sending undercover agents after voter-registration groups.
01. GOP Blame Game Starts Early After Paxton Is Caught on Tape Blaming Sinking Numbers on Trump’s War
[Gaining Traction]. A Senate nominee he’s flying to Texas to campaign for is on tape blaming the president’s war for his poor polling numbers.
Ken Paxton told a room of donors in Washington last month what he can’t say on a stage with Trump. When asked what was dragging his Senate race, Paxton skipped past tariffs. “It’s the war, it’s gas prices, it’s diesel,” according to Axios. Diesel is “over $6 per gallon” and “people are feeling the pinch.” When a donor pointed out that he can’t stop the war, Paxton agreed and kept going. “So many factors in this federal race are uncontrollable. I don’t make the decisions.” This new leak comes from the same event that led to last week’s New York Times report. Trump is set to campaign with Paxton in San Antonio just hours after this new leak dropped.
This is just the latest and loudest of a group of dissenters that grew all week. Senator Mike Rogers told Martha MacCallum his argument on Iran is to “start wrapping it up,” which Detroit News‘s Chad Livengood called Rogers “trying to break some distance right now between him and the president,” on Special Report. Senator Susan Collins insisted she’s “not exactly his favorite senator,” after getting asked at her debate whether she’d stand with Trump. A White House ally told CNN’s Kristen Holmes he fears “a bloodbath.”
Cook Political Report recently moved deep red Kansas to “toss-up.” It also pushed New Hampshire and North Carolina toward the Democrats, and reported that Trump "is a drag across the board even in deep red states due to rising fuel prices." Marc Thiessen called Kansas “remarkable,” and added that Nebraska farmers are angry about “the price of fertilizer, the price of diesel fuel, the tariffs,” on Fox & Friends, then called it “pretty stunning” that Trump has to campaign there at all.
TAKEAWAY: Want to know how bad things look for the GOP in the coming midterm elections? Notice how the finger-pointing is starting a month early, and the blame is directed at the party's leader, Donald Trump.
02. Trump Off the Rails Deepens as He Refuses to Say Whether He Was Joking About Los Angeles
[Losing Support]. Yesterday the story was what Trump said about Los Angeles and San Diego. Today it’s that he won’t explain it, and the people defending him can’t agree on whether he was joking.
Trump was asked three times on Tuesday what he meant when he said Iran could take out Los Angeles and San Diego, twice by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, and didn’t answer any of them. Trump waved the question off and kept walking outside the White House. His communications director, Steven Cheung, insisted Trump “was clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped,” which the White House dismissed the rest as a “media freak out.” California Governor Gavin Newsom called the remarks “dangerous, if not treasonous” and directed the state’s threat assessment center to watch for anyone who takes them “as an invitation.”
Fox News spent hours defending the line yet never settled on a single defense. Will Cain called the coverage “the very fine people hoax again.” Emily Compagno opened The Five by asking “why can’t the left take a joke,” which Greg Gutfeld, on the same panel, rejected, saying “I don’t take it as a joke... it’s obviously not a joke.” On Special Report, Axios’s Hans Nichols said “if you need to explain it, it’s a problem,” while Mary Katharine Ham accused the press of “being deliberately obtuse.” Hannity and Watters never mentioned it.
TAKEAWAY: A debate about whether or not the president talking about Iran “taking out” US cities was a joke or not is the purest expression of the degraded political discourse we find ourselves in, and to be clear, the debaters aren’t at fault, its the source material that is.
03. Fears of Trump Election Interference Ramp Up After He Teases “Big Surprises” From the Project 2025 Author
[Gaining Traction]. Yesterday the worry was the Justice Department sending its own monitors to the polls. Today Trump is promising “big surprises” from Russ Vought, and ICE turns out to have a file on 48 million voters.
Trump posted “Midterm Surprise!” on Truth Social Tuesday morning, and that afternoon in Maryland, in a speech Fox News carried live, he promised one. “We have some big surprises coming up in another few weeks,” he said of Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, the author of Project 2025. “Right, Russ?” He never said what the surprises are, and by evening Fox News’s own Jessica Tarlov had posted that “the time to prepare for him to try to steal an election is now.”
On Wednesday morning Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward came on Morning Joe with records her group won from ICE in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which she says show DHS and ICE compiling records on individual Americans. More than 48 million came through Heather Honey, a senior adviser to the ICE director whom Perryman called “a known election denier,” from what she called “unknown sources,” and another 50 million came from the Justice Department. The documents also show the department weighing undercover agents against voter-rights groups in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and, in Perryman’s words, “plans to send ICE to the polls in certain circumstances.”
Morning Joe paired that with the OSCE, which has observed every American federal election since 2002 and wasn’t invited to this one. Gallup reported Wednesday that 49 percent of Americans are confident in the honesty of the country’s elections. Neither CNN nor Fox & Friends mentioned any of it in either morning hour.
TAKEAWAY: Two months before the state visit of Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping, Trump addressed the nation in a prime-time speech alleging Chinese electoral interference in 2020. I called that manufacturing a crisis as a pretext for his own interference, and fortunately it led nowhere (apart from Maria Bartiromo’s ouster), but it was a tell. And there's still an opportunity for some election shenanigans. Trump has long sowed doubt in these institutions, and it might be coming back to haunt him.
“I don’t take it as a joke. I think he was talking about gas prices... he says it casually, but it’s obviously not a joke.”
That’s Greg Gutfeld on The Five Tuesday, just a few minutes after his co-host Emily Compagno asked: “Why can’t the left take a joke?” The topic being discussed was Trump’s line made Monday night in which he suggested Iran “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego and “media freak out” that followed, as the White House described it.
Gutfeld, a co-host of the highest-rated show in cable news, said the panel was “saying two different things at once,” that the president meant what he said about the price of the war, and then spent the rest of his time on what he called the media’s “fine people hoax.” Gutfeld is an avid supporter of Trump, once shamelessly comparing him to punk rock pioneers The Ramones.
Scott Bessent Gets His WSJ Close-Up, And It Reveals He Spat in His Food: The Treasury secretary got a deep dive from the Journal, and it's less than flattering. He screamed at his own undersecretary, had to be separated from Elon Musk, threatened Bill Pulte at a dinner, threw a briefing binder at a wall and, per a restaurant owner, spat in his food after Code Pink hecklers interrupted him. (WSJ)
JD Vance: Iran Must Cut Enrichment to End the War: The vice president told Reuters any deal with Iran needs a “meaningful” cut in enrichment, admitted it’s “not totally clear how their country makes decisions,” and said of any 2028 plans to run for president, “I’m inherently a procrastinator.” (Reuters)
Mikel Arteta Signs With Arsenal Through 2030: Mikel “Super Mik” Arteta, who won Arsenal’s first league title in 22 years last season and created a global community of loyal, smart and wonderful fans, signed a new deal that takes him to a decade at the club. This wonderful news comes in stark contrast to the 114 charges the Premier League found Man City guilty of. (Arseblog News)
Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.
Professional political prognosticators are not what they used to be. Or, put another way, polling methods have had to evolve with the media and technological advances that came with them. As a result, if we’ve learned anything over the last decade, it's this: do not trust polls. A better indication of how candidates or parties feel about their election is two things: where they are spending money and where they are going in support. And on those two fronts, the much-reported GOP freak-out over the five-alarm midterm fire appears to be very real. So real, in fact, that if the “blue tsunami” does not materialize, it will launch a legion of conspiracy theorists insisting that something rotten is in Denmark. What’s worse? Trump and his minions are saying and acting like they might have a trick or two up their sleeve, the net effect of which is further undermining of electoral institutions. Which ultimately is reprehensible and deserves bipartisan condemnation.
The Morning Frame tracks which political stories are spreading, which are stalling, and how you can tell the difference. Powered by Narrative Prism.