Monday, July 13, 2026
The $26 million favor: Miriam Adelson, Ted Cruz, and the super PAC where the money map meets the FEC
Miriam Adelson gave $132 million to elect Donald Trump in 2024 — and $1 million to a smaller cause: Truth and Courage PAC, a super PAC seeded by Ted Cruz's orbit, funded in part by his own podcast producer, and pressed by the FEC over its filings. It spent $25.8 million to sink Colin Allred and hold Cruz's Texas seat. The FEC records, mapped.
By the Dialog Tracker desk · sourced from public records
One check among many
In 2024, Miriam Adelson was the single largest donor in American politics. The widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson put a reported **$132 million** behind Donald Trump's presidential campaign, including **$100 million** to the pro-Trump Preserve America PAC and **$5 million** to the Republican Jewish Coalition. Against numbers like those, one more check stands out precisely because it was small: **$1 million** to a Texas super PAC almost no one outside the state had heard of — Truth and Courage PAC.
That check helped seed a **$25.8 million** operation to defend a single Senate seat.
Where the $25.8 million went
Truth and Courage existed for one race: re-electing Senator Ted Cruz. The FEC record shows it spending in two directions at once. It put **$3.9 million** into independent expenditures *supporting* Cruz — and **$22.0 million** into ads *opposing* his Democratic challenger, Colin Allred.
Put that in the context of the whole race. Across every super PAC now in the graph, Allred drew about **$37.2 million** in outside money spent against him. Truth and Courage alone accounted for roughly **three-fifths of it** — the largest single source of anti-Allred spending on the board. Cruz held the seat.
Who built it
What makes Truth and Courage more than a line item is who stood behind it. The committee was **backed and seeded from Cruz's own orbit**, with Cabell Hobbs listed as its treasurer. And its money did not all come from donors: as *Forbes* reported, the PAC was **funded in part by iHeartMedia** — the company that produces Cruz's own podcast — which routed podcast revenue into the super PAC boosting him. That arrangement, a sitting senator's media partner helping bankroll the outside group attacking his opponent, later drew federal scrutiny: the FEC pressed the committee to explain **"massive discrepancies"** in its filings.
What the map shows
Follow this one node and the whole thesis comes into focus. A network megadonor writes a seed check; a super PAC blessed by the candidate and banked in part by his podcast producer turns the effort into **$25.8 million** of federally-documented outside spending; and a Senate seat is defended by attack ads whose money can now be traced, dollar by dollar, back toward its sources. Every figure in this brief is a verified edge in the graph, each citing the exact FEC record or reporting behind it. The relationships were always there. Now the money is, too.