Post from Truth Social

A Texas down-ballot endorsement, two days before the election

This is one of at least six Texas endorsements posted on 1 November 2026, the Sunday before the 3 November general election. Daylight saving time ended that morning, so 19:27 UTC was 2:27 pm Eastern and 1:27 pm Central. The post follows the endorsement template seen across the same afternoon's batch: an opening honor formula, a résumé paragraph, a list of policy commitments, and a closing "Complete and Total Endorsement." The line "a place I love and WON BIG three times, including with 6.4 Million Votes in 2024 (The most Votes in History, BY FAR)" appears almost word for word in the Dawn Buckingham post from the same day, and the phrase "a career 'loaded up' with accolades and wins" is lifted from that post too.

Who wrote it

Most of the text is staff-assembled. The structure is modular, the biographical details are precise ("7th Generation Texan," "President of Middleton Oil Company," "his wife, Martha Ann, and four beautiful children"), and the policy list ("Ensure LAW AND ORDER, Champion our Brave Law Enforcement and First Responders, Support our Incredible Military/Veterans, Safeguard our Elections...") is the stock inventory that recurs in the Moran, Self and Toth posts. It went out in mid-afternoon as part of a batch, which also points to staff.

Two features read as Trump's own voice or as staff copying it closely. The first is the self-referential aside about his Texas vote total, inserted ahead of any mention of the candidate. The second is the attack paragraph, with the coinage "Dumocrats" and the alliterative close "Reckless, Radical, and Dangerous!" Both have long since become template material, so they do not establish that he typed this post. The most likely process is a staff draft built from his phrasing and approved by him.

What the post is doing psychologically

The trigger is campaign maintenance. Nothing in the text responds to a slight or a news item. Even so, the self-reference comes before the candidate: Texas is introduced first as "a place I love and WON BIG," and the 6.4 million figure is framed with "(The most Votes in History, BY FAR)." The endorsement becomes a vehicle for his own record. This is grandiosity in its routine form. It is low-arousal and serves as connective tissue, and there is no wound behind it.

The defense structure is splitting. Middleton is all virtue ("dedicated Rancher, highly respected State Senator, and very successful President"; "HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!"). Johnson is all threat: he "wants massive Tax Increases, Open Borders, Men playing in Women's Sports, and Transgender Mutilization of your Children." Johnson gets no quoted position or record. His opposition is inferred from his party label ("a Radical Left Democrat"), which is idealization and devaluation applied by category. The "if he and the Dumocrats ever got in, all of these things will be terminated" construction is an appeal to fear about loss, with the speaker's own signature policies as the thing at stake.

The candidate is valued for loyalty in the "MAGA" sense. His nickname is literally "'MAGA' Mayes," and the sibling posts repeat "has been with me from the very beginning." This fits the long-running pattern in which endorsement tracks personal allegiance, an agency and status motive more than a communion one. The family line ("a great wife, Martha Ann, and four beautiful children") is the template's one gesture toward warmth.

Rhetoric and its limits

The devices are standard campaign copy. They include superlatives ("most Votes in History, BY FAR"), capitalized brand slogans ("NO TAX ON TIPS, NO TAX ON OVERTIME, and NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY"), guilt by party, and the culture-war pairing of borders with transgender issues. "Transgender Mutilization of your Children" is the most inflammatory phrase. It frames a policy dispute as violence against children, but the only action it asks of readers is "GET OUT AND VOTE FOR MAYES." The derogation of Johnson stays at the level of partisan labels ("Reckless, Radical, and Dangerous"), with no dehumanizing terms and nothing that points readers at him personally.

Language

"Mutilization" is a nonstandard blend of "mutilation" and "utilization/-ization." It has appeared in prior endorsement boilerplate, so here it is more likely a frozen template error than a fresh production slip. It is logged as a mild marker only. The rest of the text is syntactically intact and on topic throughout.

Claims

The 6.4 million figure holds: Trump received about 6.39 million votes in Texas in 2024, the highest raw total any candidate has recorded in the state. He carried Texas in 2016, 2020 and 2024, though the 2020 margin (about 5.6 points) was the narrowest for a Republican there in decades, so "BIG" stretches the middle win. The slogan "NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY" describes a policy that does not exist. The 2025 reconciliation law added a temporary senior deduction of up to $6,000, and Social Security benefits remain federally taxable for many recipients. The attributed positions of Nathan Johnson, a Texas state senator with no vote on federal tax law, are partisan inference that the post does not source.

Fact Verification

No tax on tips, overtime and Social Security: these are federal income-tax provisions. The tips and overtime deductions and a $6,000 senior deduction were enacted in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (July 2025) and run through 2028. The law did not eliminate tax on Social Security benefits, which is the federal piece of the claim the first pass already rated mostly false. Johnson is a Dallas state senator, and Texas has no state income tax, so he has never had a vote on any of these provisions. Searches of his campaign site, Senate press materials and 2026 race coverage (Texas Tribune, KSAT, CBS Texas, TPR, Wikipedia, Ballotpedia) found no statement from him on any of them. The only link is his party: congressional Democrats voted against the OBBBA as a whole. Johnson's campaign page on taxes mentions only "the looting of our tax dollars," with no tax proposal.

"Massive tax increases": his record points the other way. The Texas Senate Journal for 13 February 2025 shows Johnson voting yes on SB 4, which raised the homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000 and passed 30-0. In his printed reason for vote he wrote, "I cast my vote in favor of Senate Bill 4 today, but I do so with some reservation. It is bold. It helps people, and for that reason I support it." His concerns were the bill's permanent $2.7 billion cost and that it gave renters nothing. In 2023 the Senate passed the $18 billion property-tax relief bill unanimously. WFAA reported that Johnson backed the package in principle while calling it "too much frosting on the cupcake." The closest thing to support for the charge: Middleton has pointed out that Johnson opposed a Republican bill capping how much property-tax revenue local governments can raise (Texas Tribune, KSAT). Opposing a cap on local revenue growth is not the same as wanting massive tax increases.

"Open borders": his own platform says, "The Texas border is 1,254 miles long. We need it to be secure, and safe from drug smuggling, human trafficking, and all forms of cross-border criminal enterprise." It also says the attorney general should assist "with federal enforcement as appropriate" and block federal actions "when they go too far." In October 2023 he voted for SB 4 of the third special session, which raised human-smuggling and stash-house penalties and passed 29-2 (NBC DFW). His 2024 primary challenger, Victoria Neave Criado, attacked him from the left as too moderate on immigration. There is a kernel for the Republican framing. The Senate Journal for 12 October 2023 shows him voting no on SB 11, the bill creating a state crime of illegal entry, which passed 19-12 on party lines. He has also said he would challenge federal immigration enforcement he considers unconstitutional and would likely sue the Trump administration. He was absent (excused) for the 9 November 2023 final votes on the illegal-entry SB 4 and the $1.5 billion border-barrier bill, SB 3. Opposing Republican enforcement tactics is not advocating open borders, and his stated position explicitly rejects that.

Verdict: the tips, overtime and Social Security charge has no evidence behind it and appears to be assigned by party. The tax-increase charge is contradicted by his votes for large property-tax cuts. The open-borders charge is contradicted by his platform and his vote on the smuggling bill, though he did vote against the state illegal-entry crime. A few real points of disagreement (the SB 11 vote, the local revenue cap, plans to sue the administration) keep this at mostly false rather than false. | | "Mayes Middleton is a State Senator and President of Middleton Oil Company" | True | Middleton has represented Texas Senate District 11 since 2023 after serving in the Texas House, and his official biography lists him as president of Middleton Oil Company. |

Overall Veracity: 64%