Raw Story

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) is firing back after his 2026 primary opponent slammed his record in a new TV ad that aired not in the Lone Star State, but in President Donald Trump’s backyard.

The ad, funded by Preserving Texas, a group supporting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton attacks Cornyn over his role in crafting a bipartisan safety bill in 2022, Axios reported Thursday. The group spent $60,000 to air the TV spot over the weekend on the Trump-approved Fox News, Newsmax and the Golf Channel in Palm Beach, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago golf resort, the publication added.

“As usual, President Trump was right,” the narrator says in the ad, which also references Trump’s past criticism of Cornyn as a “RINO,” another name for Republican in Name Only.

But Cornyn isn’t taking the hit lying down in an early preview of what is expected to be one of the nation’s most expensive and hotly contested Senate races of the 2026 midterms.

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“Corrupt Ken Paxton ordered up another mediocre campaign video that predictably lies about Senator Cornyn's long career of strongly supporting Second Amendment Rights," a Cornyn spokesperson, according to Axios. "As an avid hunter himself, Senator Cornyn supports the constitutional right to carry and always has."

The ad strategy highlights that the aggressive jockeying for Trump’s coveted MAGA endorsement has already begun, Axios pointed out Thursday. The approach has been tested before.

“Trump is a cable news junkie, and Republican candidates and interest groups are known to run ads in South Florida with an eye toward influencing him,” Axios reported. “In 2020, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie aired a commercial in Palm Beach in which he called his primary opponent a "Trump hater."

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke out Thursday against what she saw as President Donald Trump's efforts to bully and threaten the federal judiciary into submission, Politico reported.

The remarks from Jackson, the most junior member of the Supreme Court, came as she addressed a judge's conference in Puerto Rico.

“The attacks are not random. They seem designed to intimidate,” she said. “The threats and harassment are attacks on our democracy, on our system of government. And they ultimately risk undermining our Constitution and the rule of law.”

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President Donald Trump has escalated his verbal abuse of judges amid a series of rulings that block him from carrying out mass deportations and implementing various executive orders to reshape the civil service. Some of the judges to rule against him are judges Trump himself appointed. In other cases, like the dispute over returning wrongly deported Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a Salvadoran megaprison, observers have accused Trump of ignoring court orders outright.

As this standoff has continued, some of Trump's allies have advocated for stripping judges of power to prevent Trump from being challenged.

Jackson and the liberal wing of the Supreme Court do not stand alone in these criticisms. Chief Justice John Roberts has also spoken out, expressing worry that politicians on all sides are losing confidence in the judiciary, and particularly condemned Trump's call to impeach judges who rule against him.

Self-described moderate Republican Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) had his hands full during a Sunday night town hall in his suburban Hudson Valley swing district, according to reporting inThe New York Times and a variety of videos posted to social media.

Local police expected more than 1,200 constituents to jam the high school auditorium where Lawler was speaking in Rockland County, but first they had to follow Lawler's rules as posted outside the venue: participants were required to provide proof of residency for New York's 17th district; were warned against shouting, screaming, or yelling; and were forbidden from making "audio or video recordings."

But the rowdy constituents ignored those last two directives, as evidenced by cell phone video posted to X.

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In one video, a constituent asked, "What are you doing to stand in opposition to this administration, and what specifically are you doing that warrants the label 'moderate'"?

The question drew whoops and applause from the audience. When Lawler began to answer, saying, "Again, my record speaks for itself. I've been rated the fourth most bipartisan for a reason," the audience laughed and groaned.

In another clip, constituents chanted, "blah, blah, blah" as Lawler tried to justify President Donald Trump's tariffs that have caused the upending of the stock markets.

The article described "shouts, groans and mockery."

Times reporter Nicholas Fandos wrote that, "The congressman got a rare round of applause when he defended the use of vaccines and criticized Mr. Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has cast doubt on the efficacy of vaccination."

But overall, the town hall was both "combative and catty" and looked less like "the kind of respectful town-hall conversation Americans venerate than a shouting match where both sides accuse the other of acting in bad faith," Fandos wrote.

He added that, "For much of the night, acrimony carried the room. Attendees provoked confrontations with fellow attendees, with Mr. Lawler’s staff members and with the police. No one was satisfied, including supporters of the congressman who mostly watched in silence."

Read The New York Times article here,

President Donald Trump's escalating threats have produced chaos and fear across American political and economic life, but that dynamic could ultimately undo his presidency as many of those ultimatums ring hollow.

The president has been threatening to fire Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell over his response to global tariffs, but Trump seemingly backed down after advisers warned the move was legally and financially risky — and political scientist David Faris published a piece for Slate explaining how this "depressingly familiar loop" keeps playing out.

"This loop is now standard operating procedure from the most chaotic White House in American history," wrote Faris, an associate professor at Roosevelt University. "In fact, it seems to be more or less the only move that this iteration of Trump has, one that he is deploying against everyone from Canada to Harvard University. And it is eerily similar to the nuclear strategy concept of 'escalate to de-escalate' — using a shocking act of aggression to convince an adversary to negotiate on your terms."

However, that strategy isn't quite working for Trump because his opponents have taken note of his weakness and his administration's incompetence, so they've essentially rerouted their long-range plans around the United States.

"Trump is fundamentally a weak, lame-duck president, whose paper-thin margins in Congress and embarrassing ineptitude at staffing his administration and carrying out his policies are not kinks that will be ironed out with time but rather inescapable features of his already unbearable and disastrous presidency," Faris wrote.

"That weakness, and the servile paralysis of Congress, is leading him to try the same blunt maneuver over and over again, with predictably diminishing returns."

"Rather than doing the painstaking work of enacting his lunatic agenda through that narrowly divided Congress, Trump has been acting, since Day 1, like a leader who has to resort immediately to vindictive threats and massively escalatory decisions to get what he wants," the political scientist added.

Any parent who's tried escalating threats to coerce good behavior out of a child understands how quickly they learn to call your bluff, but Trump doesn't seem to understand how ineffective that tactic is, Faris wrote.

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"If it was a useful tactic, Russia would already have deployed it against Ukraine, Faris wrote, "and China would have come scurrying to the negotiating table to plead with Trump to reduce tariffs."

Voters are already understanding that Trump's tactics aren't working, but he still has nearly four more years left of his term.

"Issuing a never-ending stream of escalatory and often nonsensical threats is also no way to run a country, and voters are fast coming around to the understanding that they made a terrible mistake putting this senescent maniac back in power in November," Faris wrote.

"It is not clear how the United States will even survive another 44 months of this circus with anything resembling the status quo, or our battered psyches, intact," he added. "But if Trump’s incipient authoritarians ever allow another Democrat to be elected president, that person is likely to discover that some of the damage to America’s reputation and interests is irreversible."

Three months into Donald Trump's second presidency, journalists Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer covered a lot of ground with him during a late April interview for The Atlantic — from foreign policy to immigration.

The reporters also addressed embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose critics are calling for him to resign over a series of controversies — which include firings at the Pentagon and a security breach in which Hegseth discussed a military operation in Yemen on the messaging app Signal.

Trump not only defended Hegseth during the interview — he also made it sound like Democrats, not members of his administration, are the ones surrounded by chaos.

Trump said of Hegseth, "I think he's gonna get it together. I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him."

Trump said he told his staff, "Maybe don't use Signal, OK?"

According to Parker and Michael Scherer, Trump "spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity."

Trump told the reporters, "I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense. I don't think they know what they're doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can't tell you who their leader is. I can't tell you that I see anybody on the horizon."

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In 2025, the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) is celebrating its 114th anniversary. The organization, founded during Democrat Woodrow Wilson's presidency, was designed to be an alliance of journalists who covered the White House but were independent of it.

The United States has had some controversial presidents since then, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. But before Trump, all U.S. presidents attended the WHCA's dinner — an event that goes back to Republican Calvin Coolidge's presidency in 1924.

In an article published Saturday, The Guardian's David Smith describes some of the anxiety surrounding the WHCA's forthcoming 2025 dinner.

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"It is no laughing matter," Smith reports. "The annual dinner for journalists who cover the White House is best known for American presidents trying to be funny and comedians trying to be political. But this year's edition will feature neither. Instead, the event in a Downtown Washington hotel on Saturday night will, critics say, resemble something closer to a wake for legacy media still trying to find an effective response to Donald Trump's divide-and-rule tactics and the rise of the MAGA media ecosystem."

Smith adds, "Joe Biden's effort to restore norms included the former president giving humorous speeches at the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) annual dinner. But just as in his first term, Trump will not be joining the group he has long branded 'the enemy of the people,' and most of his staff are expected to boycott."

The WHCA invited comedian Amber Ruffin to speak at their 2025 dinner but withdrew the invitation — a move that, Smith notes, is being criticized as an "exercise in capitulation and cowardice" and "a metaphor for the failure of the media to unite around a strategy to push back against Trump's all-out assault."

"Since returning to office," Smith observes, "(Trump) has seized control of the pool of journalists that follows the president, barred the Associated Press news agency from the Oval Office and handed access READ MORE: 'Everybody is on edge': Trump cuts threaten to dismantle 'godsend' program

Author Sally Quinn, widow of the late Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, isn't planning to attend this year's WHCA dinner —which, she laments, is taking place during a very dark time in U.S. history.

Smith quotes Quinn as saying, "Everyone's scared. You're scared you're going to get thrown in jail if you write something (Trump) doesn't like, and that's going to happen very soon. Then you have the owners of these news organizations who keep keeling over and bending the knee. So you've got all these people in the media who are quitting in protest. It's a horrible time to be covering Trump."

Quinn added, "If you're a journalist and you want to be on the story, this is the story to cover. But people are not having fun covering it. It's very intense and very upsetting."