Hey everyone. Welcome back. Hope you’re having a good week so far.
Our main story today comes out of Texas, where Republican voters just nominated the most embattled statewide official in America for the United States Senate. Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn last night in the GOP runoff. And for the first time in a generation, Democrats are looking at the Lone Star State and seeing a real opening.
We will also get into the Trump family’s deepening financial stake in the prediction markets industry that the White House is actively fighting to deregulate, the Homeland Security Secretary’s threat to shut down customs at every major international airport in blue America, the South Carolina Republicans who just defied the president and killed his redistricting push, and the White House’s new proposal that every federal employee in the country sign a non-disclosure agreement.
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1. Democrats Eye Texas Senate Seat After Paxton Primary Victory
Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, soundly defeated longtime Senator John Cornyn last night in the GOP primary runoff. He had Donald Trump’s endorsement and the MAGA base behind him. And he won despite Cornyn’s donors pouring tens of millions of dollars trying to stop him. He will now face Democratic state Representative James Talarico in November.
Paxton may be the most embattled statewide official in America. He was impeached by his own Republican-led state House in 2023 over accusations he abused his office to benefit a donor. The state Senate acquitted him, with his wife Angela, a senator at the time, recusing herself from the vote. In 2025, Angela filed for divorce on “biblical grounds”, citing recent discoveries. He has spent years under indictment on securities fraud charges.
But now Paxton is the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Texas.
Talarico is 36. He has built a massive online following, shattered fundraising records, and beat Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett in the March Democratic primary. His whole campaign is built on fighting corruption and uniting moderates with disaffected Republicans. Now he’s been handed the perfect opponent.
Democrats have not won a statewide race in Texas since 1994. Trump carried the state by 14 points in 2024. The lift here is real. But Cornyn would have walked to reelection. Paxton might not.
Even Paxton knows it. In his victory speech he told the crowd, “If Republicans lose this state, we lose the country.” He also predicted that Talarico is “going to raise more money than any Democrat in America.”
Within minutes of the race being called, Talarico went on social media and called Paxton “the most corrupt politician in America.” Then he opened the door to Cornyn’s voters, telling them they had a place in his campaign.
Republicans had a chance to nominate a senator who would have cruised to reelection. They chose a defendant instead. Now we will have to wait and see whether James Talarico and the Democrats can capitalize.
2. Trump Family Self-Dealing On Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are online platforms where people place real money bets on real-world outcomes like who wins an election or whether the Fed cuts rates. The industry has exploded over the last two years.
Donald Trump Jr. is a paid adviser to two of the more popular companies, Kalshi and Polymarket. And the Trump family’s social media company announced a deal last year to integrate prediction markets directly into Truth Social.
The federal regulator over all of this is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Trump’s hand-picked chair is the only sitting commissioner on the five-seat board. The other four seats are empty. With no one to push back, he has sued six states for trying to regulate these markets as gambling.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the previous chair sidelined agency staffers who raised concerns about approving crypto firms specifically tied to Trump’s family business interests. Those concerns were brushed aside. The approvals went through.
Then Tuesday afternoon, the president posted on Truth Social: “It is critically important that the CFTC’s exclusive authority over Prediction Markets is maintained. We cannot have SCUM like Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker setting the rules!”
Christie, James, Walz, and Pritzker are the four officials leading the legal fight against the industry the president’s family is profiting from.
Let’s call this what it is. The president of the United States is using the federal government to attack the people standing between his family and a payday. We have watched this play out so many times we are becoming numb to it, which is exactly what he is counting on.
3. DHS Considering Restricting Flights Into Sanctuary Cities
Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem at the top of DHS after she was fired, told Fox News this week that the department is drawing up plans to stop processing international travelers at airports in so-called sanctuary cities.
You can probably guess the list. It’s every major international hub in blue America. New York. Chicago. Los Angeles. San Francisco. Seattle. Denver. Philadelphia.
Keep in mind that the FIFA World Cup kicks off in June. The United States is the host country and millions of fans from around the world are about to start flying in.
Travel industry groups have warned that pulling Customs and Border Protection officers from these airports would force airlines to cancel and re-route international flights, gut international cargo, and devastate the local economies that depend on tourism.
The legal authority for any of this is also a real open question. Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. Local police are not required to do it. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said so. So the White House is proposing to retaliate against cities for exercising a right the courts have affirmed.
This was never about safety. It was never about immigration. It’s about using the federal government as a weapon against the cities, states, and voters that Donald Trump has decided don’t count as real Americans. And that is the only test this White House applies to anything it does anymore.
4. South Carolina Defies Trump, Doesn’t Change Map
The South Carolina state Senate voted Tuesday to block a Trump-backed proposal that would have eliminated the state’s only majority-Black congressional district. The bill would have given Republicans a 7-0 sweep of the state’s seven seats.
The bill had been rushed through the South Carolina House in a matter of weeks. The map itself, by the account of Republicans in the chamber, was not drawn by South Carolina lawmakers. It was drawn by an outside consultant in Washington and handed to the legislature to pass.
Here’s Republican state Senator Tom Davis:
The timing mattered too. Early voting in the June 9 primary began Tuesday morning and the state is on track to break early voting records. Even Republicans argued that you cannot move the lines after voters have already started voting.
Twelve South Carolina Republicans, in one of the reddest states in the country, looked at the pressure coming out of the White House and said no. That doesn’t happen often anymore. When it does, it deserves to be noticed.
5. White House Proposes NDAs For All Federal Workers
The Office of Personnel Management opened a public comment period this week on a draft NDA that would cover every new and existing federal worker, across every agency.
The administration says the agreement preserves whistleblower rights and only memorializes restrictions that already exist. Legal experts are not so sure.
The justification is press leaks. OPM specifically cited reporting on a U.S. military raid in Venezuela this past January. The New York Times pushed back hard, saying they did not have advanced details of the operation and that the administration’s version of events simply wasn’t accurate.
This doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In January, the FBI seized a Washington Post reporter’s phone and laptops as part of a leak investigation. Last year, dozens of Pentagon reporters turned in their press badges rather than accept the Defense Secretary’s new rules requiring approval before publishing. And yesterday we talked about the White House App being pushed onto every government-issued phone in the federal workforce.
So today’s federal employee is being told to carry the president’s propaganda in their pocket, and now to sign a contract that limits what they can say about what they see on the job.
Public servants take an oath to the Constitution. They are not the personal staff of the president. The whole point of working for the federal government is to serve the American people through whichever administration happens to be in power.
This is the Trump playbook. It always has been. He doesn’t necessarily need to prosecute anyone or to win in court. He just needs every federal employee in America to feel a little less safe telling the truth.
Okay, that’s it for May 27th.
Thanks for being with us. Please like, share, and subscribe. These stories find their audience because you share them. See you tomorrow.
