For more than a week, Ken Paxton and his allies demanded to know where James Talarico had been. On Monday, the Senate race’s biggest question turned out to be where Paxton had been.
The Wall Street Journal reported Paxton, the Republican nominee for US Senate in Texas, rang in 2025 in Dubai with his girlfriend, Tracy Duhon, and two men who had been indicted on federal healthcare fraud charges and hadn’t returned to the US to face them. One had given Paxton’s campaigns $190,000. The report landed a day after a widely shared conspiracy theory claiming Talarico had secretly been treated at an Ohio mental health facility, pushed by conservative influencers and Paxton’s allies, fell apart.
The back-to-back stories capture a campaign that has spent much of its final stretch on attacks that don’t hold up, while trailing in the polls and facing a steady drip of damaging revelations about its own candidate.
Paxton in Dubai
According to the Journal, video of the gathering shows Paxton and Duhon watching the fireworks over the Burj Khalifa from a crowded balcony of a luxury high-rise on Dec. 31, 2024. Details of the party also appeared in court filings and were confirmed by people familiar with it, the Journal reported.
Also there were Anosh Ahmed and Sameer Suhail, two US citizens who had been indicted in 2024 on federal health care fraud charges. Ahmed, a healthcare executive, was also charged in a separate case involving at least $195 million in alleged government payments for fake COVID-19 tests, according to the Journal’s reporting. Campaign finance records show he gave Paxton $190,000, including $25,000 days after his first indictment. Ahmed is now in custody and has pleaded not guilty to the additional charges.
The video doesn’t show Paxton committing a crime, and the donations alone don’t establish wrongdoing. But Paxton is the Texas’ top law enforcement officer, and he was celebrating with a major donor who had skipped out on federal charges.
The Journal also reported that before endorsing Paxton, Trump was told more revelations were likely to surface, according to people familiar with the conversations.
Rumor falls apart
The Dubai story broke as Paxton’s side was still dealing with the fallout from the Talarico rumor.
Talarico stopped campaigning in late September, saying a bad case of the flu had sent him to urgent care. As his absence stretched past a week, Paxton posted on X questioning whether he’d had the flu at all. Trump wrote that “12 days is a long time to rid yourself of the so-called flu bug,” and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller demanded Talarico release his medical records.
Then conservative influencers posted what they called proof: a clip in which a woman, supposedly answering calls at the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio, says “he was just discharged this evening.” Elon Musk, who has spent heavily to help Paxton, amplified it, writing “the Talarico campaign is not being honest about what’s happening,” The New York Times reported.
It unraveled within hours. The Lindner Center said Talarico had never been a patient there. The Times reviewed time-stamped security camera images, provided by Talarico’s campaign, that showed him at his Austin home between Oct. 1 and Oct. 8. The Associated Press said images it reviewed showed the same, and that the supposed evidence didn’t match Talarico’s schedule.
“I’ve never even been to Ohio,” Talarico wrote on X.
The timeline didn’t add up, either. One of the influencers said he made the call to the Lindner Center on Oct. 10. That night, Talarico was at a Kacey Musgraves concert in Austin, KXAN reported. The night before, he was greeting voters at the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
But experts say debunking a rumor doesn’t erase it. False claims can keep spreading and shaping how voters see a candidate long after they’ve been disproven, and the people who believe them often fold the corrections into the story itself. “Once something goes viral,” University of California, Berkeley professor and folklorist Tim Tangherlini told KXAN, “it’s hard to unviral it.
Paxton’s campaign woes
The two stories fit a pattern. In less than three weeks, five outlets have published leaked audio of Paxton privately blaming Trump’s convention, the Iran war, and gas prices for his struggles, saying he doesn’t “control message” in his own campaign, and accusing Sen. John Cornyn of wanting him to lose.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told the Dallas Observer last week Paxton’s challenge was to find something to talk about besides his own leaks. “So for Paxton, the question is not just how do we respond to these leaks, but what do we want to talk about that’s not these leaks?” he said.
The Talarico rumor offered a possible answer, but it collapsed in public, and the Dubai story arrived right behind it.
A YouGov poll of likely voters released last week showed Talarico leading 50% to 44%. Paxton still hasn’t agreed to debate him.
Early voting in Texas runs Oct. 19–30. Election Day is Nov. 3.
