President Donald Trump will face a reckoning over his ties to billionaire megadonors, a Democratic state representative in Texas has warned.
James Talarico, 36, who is facing off against firebrand Jasmine Crockett in the deep red state’s Senate Democratic primary, said many in the Republican base feel duped by incumbent Senator John Cornyn voting in support of Trump’s “big, beautiful” megabill.
“I think they feel conned,” he told The Daily Beast Podcast host Joanna Coles. “You know, same with a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump in the last election: they feel like they were voting for a party that promised to bring down costs, that promised to drain the swamp. And now, just a year later, they see that everything has gotten more expensive. Corruption is the worst it’s ever been. And they are not focused on the problems we face as ordinary Americans every day.”
Polls show a resounding disappointment with the Trump administration’s economic policies, particularly in tackling the rapidly rising cost of living. A survey by The Economist/YouGov, conducted Jan. 16 to 19, found that 61 percent of Americans disapproved of the president’s handling of inflation and prices. In a New York Times/Siena poll conducted from Jan. 12 to 17, nearly 60 percent of voters said they were worried about affording basic necessities like rent, gas, and groceries.
Democrats secured big wins in high-profile races last year after they doubled down on affordability messaging. Trump initially branded the issue a “hoax,” but is now on a domestic traveling blitz aimed at addressing voters’ cost-of-living concerns ahead of the midterm elections.
“And so that’s why I said from the very first day of this campaign that the real fight in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom,” Talarico said. “It is all of us, whether you’re more conservative or more progressive, it’s all of us versus the people at the very top who have corrupted our political system and who are trying to steal as much power and money for themselves as possible.”
The state representative said his crusade against “the people at the very top” was aimed at “billionaires and their puppet politicians, because the billionaire megadonors can’t do anything on their own.”
Talarico cited Trump’s appeal to oil CEOs in 2024 that pumping $1 billion into his presidential campaign would be a “deal” because of the taxation and regulation they could avoid under his administration.
“Those executives flooded the president’s campaign coffers with cash,” he said. “And then just a few weeks ago, the president returned the favor by gifting them the nation of Venezuela, home to the largest oil reserves in the country.”
Trump kicked off 2026 by seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and promptly announcing that the U.S. would obtain up to 50 million barrels of oil from the oil-rich South American nation.
Two weeks ago, the administration completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil in a deal with Vitol. A senior executive at the world’s largest independent oil trader is John Addison, who poured millions into political action committees backing Trump’s reelection and met with the president just days before the agreement was finalized.
“We can get on shows like this and talk about how reckless and how unconstitutional that intervention was,” Talarico said of Trump’s Venezuela raid. “But unless we identify how corrupt it is, how big money is at the root of this, we’re really missing the big picture. And so that’s why I’m trying to call out this broken, corrupt political system, this broken, corrupt economic system, so that we can understand where the true problem lies. That’s the disease. The politicians, the extremism that we’re seeing, that’s all the symptoms. And I think we’re not going to get out of this mess until we focus on the system itself.”
The White House responded to a request for comment by blaming the “economic disaster” on former President Joe Biden.
“Perhaps no group of Americans are feeling the positive impact of President Trump’s policies more than the people of Texas, who now have a secure border, massive tax refunds on the way, new factories creating good-paying jobs, and gasoline below $2.50 per gallon,” spokesperson Kush Desai told the Daily Beast.
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