May 27, 2026
In Texas yesterday, Republican primary voters chose Trump-backed state attorney general Ken Paxton over incumbent senator John Cornyn by more than 27 points to be the Republican candidate for senator. President Donald J. Trump endorsed the scandal-ridden Paxton last week after Senate Republicans had dumped $90 million into the race to defend Cornyn. Democrats will now use their advertisements calling attention to Paxton’s many scandals against them.
As Philip Elliott of Time magazine noted, Republicans can look forward to dumping another $250 million into trying to get Paxton elected, money that they needed to flip Democratic seats elsewhere.
Trump backed Paxton because he didn’t think Cornyn was loyal enough to him, despite the fact that Cornyn voted with Trump 99.2% of the time. Trump preferred Paxton’s attacks on Democrats and his flaunting of his MAGA identity despite—or perhaps because of—Paxton’s many scandals.
As CNN’s Patrick Svitek explained, in 2015, shortly after he took office as Texas attorney general, Paxton was indicted on charges of felony securities fraud, a case ending in March 2024 with an agreement that Paxton would pay restitution and complete community service. In 2020, Paxton’s top aides reported him to the FBI for abusing his office. He fired four of them. A judge later agreed they were fired improperly and awarded them $6.6 million. In 2023 the Texas House, dominated by Republicans, impeached Paxton on a bipartisan vote; under pressure from Trump, the Texas senate acquitted him. And then, last year, his wife, state senator Angela Paxton, filed for divorce on “biblical grounds.”
Trump appears to see politics as a dominance sport, much like the mixed martial arts fighting promoted by Ultimate Fighting Championship, whose arena is currently going up on the lawn of the White House for the fights Trump will host on his birthday, June 14. Brian Wiechert of WBAL-TV explains that workers are putting up a massive 90-foot-tall structure called The Claw to loom over a temporary octagon fighting arena in a way that the White House and the Washington Monument will be framed for television during the event.
With his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving of the Rose Garden to create a patio that looks like the one at Mar-a-Lago, and now the framing of the White House through a UFC arena, Trump has asserted his dominance over the People’s House. Similarly, with his purging even of loyalists in favor of extremists, he is asserting his dominance over the Republican Party, turning it fully into the MAGA Party.
In a similar moment in the 1850s, elite enslavers who dominated the Democratic Party demanded party members line up behind their determination to spread human enslavement to the West. Although the 1820 Missouri Compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state protected the rest of the land in the Louisiana Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border from enslavement, Democrats in 1854 forced through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting slavery there.
Their purity test was a harbinger of a dramatic political realignment.
Frustrated that the existing parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were not taking a strong enough stand against the demands of elite enslavers, those opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the spread of slavery abandoned their old political allegiances and came together. Conventions across the North called upon all free men to fight together “for the first principles of Republican Government and against the schemes of aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased.”
As voters swung away from the Democrats in the 1850s, those Democrats left in office represented the most extreme districts and were themselves the most extreme members of the party. They tried to rally their base by appealing to racism, warning that Black Americans would murder white people unless they remained enslaved and insisting that anyone opposing the spread of slavery was endangering the country and that the U.S. had always been a nation of and for white men.
The echoes of that tactic today are blaring as Trump and MAGA Republicans try to cement their power through racism and culture war issues. Trump today insisted—completely falsely—that ethnic Somalis in Minnesota, almost all of whom are American citizens, are “all crooks.”
Media Matters yesterday reported that Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio said he expected those Trump supporters convicted of crimes for their actions around the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would use the money Trump has promised them from the $1.776 billion slush fund to spread “conservative culture” and to run for office to take over the system.
The “not one of us” theme is also playing out in Texas, where Republicans appear to be attacking Democratic candidate for senator James Talarico primarily with accusations that he is not manly enough for Texas, falsely saying he is a transgender vegan. Paxton has called Talarico “tofu Talarico,” “six-gender Jimmy,” “James Talafreako” and “low-T Talarico” and has said that Talarico “is a threat to our very way of life and our values. “
But Talarico seems to have gotten the memo. He welcomed Cornyn supporters to his campaign and responded to the Republican attacks by telling Ben Meiselas of Meidas Touch: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. If all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”
He has refused to take the bait and has stood firmly on the idea of a government that works for everyday Americans. To Meiselas, he made a point of suggesting that “many of my family members, my friends, my neighbors” voted for Trump because they thought he would lower costs, end forever wars, release the Epstein files, and “drain the swamp.” Instead, “he’s done the exact opposite.” Talarico said he wants to “speak directly to those Texans who feel disillusioned, who feel like the system doesn’t work for them, that it only works for billionaires and puppet politicians like Paxton and Cornyn.” If “we can bring those Texans together across all these divisions in our politics, if we can see past the distractions and the culture war tactics, I think we can do something extraordinary,” Talarico said. “We can end thirty years of one-party rule in Texas, and we can transform American politics in the process.”
Today his campaign announced a tour called “THE PEOPLE vs. KEN PAXTON.”
Unlike anti-Nebraska candidates in 1854, Talarico and other Democratic candidates this year have the advantage of running against a party whose leader is openly corrupt. In addition to the $1.776 billion slush fund, the fortune in cryptocurrency deals, and so on, David A. Fahrenthold of the New York Times reported today that “the contractor given a no-bid contract to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being paid an inflated and excessive profit margin.” The government is paying $13.1 million for the pool work, seven times what Trump initially said it would cost.
Maxine Joselow and Andrea Fuller of the New York Times also reported today that Trump is using $7 million worth of the entrance fees visitors have paid to national parks across the country to pay for the work on the reflecting pool. He is also using nearly $60 million in those national park fees to repair nine ornamental fountains in the capital.
And the administration appears determined to hide what it’s doing. It proposed today in sweeping language that it will require federal employees to sign a nondisclosure agreement, a tool Trump has relied heavily on to protect him from potential exposure for wrongdoing. As Don Moynihan explained in Can We Still Govern, the new role would make it impossible for the American people to know what government officials are doing.
That secrecy is hurting the American people in obvious ways. Sarah Owermohle of CNN reports that the administration has barred key U.S. officials from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from talking to officials at the World Health Organization, from which Trump withdrew the U.S. This limitation has been relaxed slightly since the outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship with U.S. passengers and a breaking Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now U.S. officials can attend small virtual meetings “in a listening capacity.”
After a trip yesterday to Walter Reed Military Medical Center, after which Trump posted that “Everything checked out PERFECTLY” and the official White House social media account went further, posting, “PERFECT BILL OF HEALTH!” and, in even bigger letters, “PERFECT PHYSICAL.” Trump once again appeared to fall asleep today at a Cabinet meeting.
He did, though, threaten to “blow up” U.S. ally Oman if it doesn’t “behave” over Trump’s demands to open the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”
Yesterday the U.S. military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific, bringing the number of boats struck in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean to fifty-eight. At least 194 individuals have been killed. The administration insists the boats are trafficking drugs but has produced no evidence for that accusation, and as Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today, “military experts say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings.”
Taking these patterns, along with others, into consideration, G. Elliott Morris at Strength in Numbers assesses that although Texas voters haven’t elected a Democrat statewide in thirty-two years, the Texas Senate election is a toss-up.
In the midterm election of 1854, northerners tore through the ranks of congressmen who had voted for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. There were 142 northern seats in the House of Representatives; voters put “anti-Nebraska” congressmen in 120 of them. Anti-Nebraska coalitions elected eleven senators and swept Democrats out of state legislatures across the North. Still disorganized in 1854, by 1856, those in the new coalition opposed to the Slave Power had turned to a new political party, the Republican Party.
By 1859, that new party found a champion, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who articulated a new vision of government that worked not for a wealthy cabal, but for the American people.
—
Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/politics/reflecting-pool-contractor-trump.html
https://time.com/article/2026/05/26/paxton-defeats-cornyn-trump-texas-talarico/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/26/politics/ken-paxton-controversies-james-talarico-texas-senate
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/ufc-fight-white-house-video/71411665
https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/most-somali-people-in-america-and-minnesota-are-citizens/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/climate/park-service-fees-washington-trump.html
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/25/politics/global-virus-response-trump-administration
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/27/donald-trump-oman-threat-strait-hormuz
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/us/politics/two-survivors-boat-strike.html
Francis Curtis, The Republican Party; A History of Its Fifty Years’ Existence and a Record of Its Measures and Leaders, 1854–1904 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), p. 190, at https://archive.org/details/republicanpartyh01curtuoft/
Bluesky:
kylegriffin1.bsky.social/post/3mmuav27dac2a
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3mmub4mc4p22d
adamparkhomenko.bsky.social/post/3mmu4av6hpk2s
johnbrooks.bsky.social/post/3mmu3nbsurc2y
atrupar.com/post/3mmtxxcmlyc2r
teamtalaricohq.bsky.social/post/3mms3bacqwi2m
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mmtogygyf22x
Our best chance to end all this is a blue wave too big to rig. Thank you Professor for reminding us we’ve been here done that before.
Zounds. The research that went into tonight’s newsletter, the 1850s parallels, the degradation of our country, the unchecked corruption…
As Heather referenced, the Times reports that at least $67 million (not $7 million, as Heather first said) in National Park entrance fees from all over the country are now being used to fund Trump’s Lysol-Toilet Bowl-Blue Reflecting Pool project and the restoration of 8 historic fountains in Washington DC. Am I shocked? No, more like full of rage that an out-of-control monster adrift in 2-year-old anal fixations about feces, dirt, cleanliness, Obama, God knows what, gets away with shit like this with nobody stopping him.
No one in Washington wanted this. Given the choice between restoring water fountains and keeping our residents’ healthcare, guess which choice 95% of us here would make?
What does need to be said, however, is that Park entrance fees were always intended to be used for the upkeep, maintenance and preservation of nature, native cultural artifacts and the like — of that park. They were NEVER meant to become a transferable slush fund supporting the personal vanity projects of an asshole. And all our national parks, seashores, recreation areas, battlefields and monuments remain massively underfunded, burdened with years-long maintenance backlogs. Why? Because Republicans refuse to pay to maintain public goods and the salaries of those who keep them public, claiming we”re “burdened”by too-high taxes. Clearly, we’re not burdened enough…
Grand corruption breeds utter degradation in the society that tolerates it. Woe to us if we’re too stupid and cheap to figure out a way to both maintain our wonderful natural and cultural legacies, while stopping the grotesque malfeasance of power by a deranged, greedy bastard lost in obsessive-compulsive, Hillbilly-Louis XIV-style, Freudian building disorders.