It was a Texas-size blowout. In the Texas Republican runoff on May 26, scandal-plagued, Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton crushed longtime Republican incumbent John Cornyn, 63.8 to 36.2. Thank you, Donald Trump.

For anybody who doesn't worship Donald Trump - meaning the vast majority of Americans - it's been a long time since we've had any good political news. So, how sweet it is to see a Democrat's dream come true. As every poll showed, Democratic candidate James Talarico had a better shot at beating Paxton than Cornyn. Paxton's victory in the runoff increases Talarico's odds of winning in November from a possibility to a likelihood.

Talarico himself could not have picked a better opponent. He's young, articulate, a highly-respected state legislator with nary a scandal in his life, and a Presbyterian seminarian who knows Scripture and can talk Jesus better than any phony MAGA preacher.

Paxton's just the opposite. He was indicted for massive financial fraud and faced 99 years in prison until he agreed to a plea deal. He was caught on camera stealing a $1,000 Montblanc pen at the county courthouse. He was impeached by members of his own party. And his wife sued for divorce because of serial adultery or, as she colorfully put it, "on biblical grounds."

Financial fraud? Theft? Lying? Impeachment? Adultery? Sound familiar? Now you know why Trump endorsed him. Because Paxton's just like him. Paxton is Texas Trump!

Indeed, Talarico won't have to spend money making his own ads against Paxton. He can just borrow earlier ads posted by the National Republican Senate Campaign Committee, like this one: "A lot of people who trust Ken Paxton get lied to, so it isn't shocking to learn he is also cheating on his taxes and personal finances. Ken Paxton's betrayals of the public trust just keep coming." Or this one: "What Ken Paxton has put his family through is truly repulsive and disgusting."

Talarico could also replay a Cornyn TV commercial mocking Paxton's use of the alias "Dave P" to arrange trysts with his mistresses. An AI-generated video shows Paxton driving by a highway sign reading "15 miles to Ken's Love Shack," as the announcer says: "On May 26th, Texans will order 'Dave P' a one-way ride to his 'Love Shack' - far away from the nation's capital."

At the same time, no matter how badly Trump treated him, don't shed any tears for John Cornyn. For 10 years, even though he knew better, Cornyn was one of Trump's most fawning supporters. Lacking the guts to oppose him publicly, Cornyn just played along, believing he could trust Trump to reward his puppy-dog loyalty.

The worst was on Jan. 6, 2021, when - after Trump-inspired rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacked police officers and sent members of Congress, including Cornyn, running for their lives, the cowardly Cornyn voted with Mitch McConnell not to convict Trump and thereby get rid of him once and for all.

In the end, Cornyn became so desperate to get Trump's endorsement he released a video of himself reading Trump's book "Art of the Deal" and introduced legislation to rename several Texas highways after Trump. How pathetic. So how did Trump reward Cornyn for sucking up to him for 10 years? He stabbed him in the back. Cornyn got just what he deserved.

Now here's the good news. Thanks again to Donald Trump, Texas is in play. The outcome of this race could well determine control of the U.S. Senate. Though let's not kid ourselves. It's an uphill battle. Texas is still a red state. Texas hasn't elected a Democratic senator since Lloyd Bentsen won in 1988. And Paxton can count on Trump's MAGA base.

But MAGA alone won't elect Paxton. Only 1.3 million voted in the Republican primary, of whom Paxton won 887,435 votes. But there are 18.6 million total Texas voters, and now in November, they've been offered a clear choice: between the old and the young, the corrupt and the clean, the crook and the seminarian. That gives Talarico a great opportunity. This is now a winnable race. This could bring Texas back into Democratic ranks, where it belongs.

And it's about time. Texas is not about George Bush, Ted Cruz or John Cornyn. Texas is home to some of this country's greatest Democrats: Sam Rayburn, LBJ, Lloyd Bentsen, Ann Richards, Molly Ivers, Barbara Jordan, Jim Hightower, Kinky Friedman and Beto O'Rourke. James Talarico could be the one to turn Texas blue again.

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(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: "From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire." His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod and on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.)

(C)2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

They don't hate us, they feel sorry for us

In one of the most famous, and funniest, lines of English poetry, Robert Burns draws a powerful lesson about a woman sporting a fancy hat in church one morning, ignoring the laughter prompted among those behind her by the sight of a louse crawling around among its flowers.

"O, wad some Power the giftie gie us," Burns wrote, "To see oursels as others see us." Ah, yes. If only we could "see ourselves as others see us."

I was given that gift last month: one week in France and three weeks in Italy. Not a long time, but long enough to get a good glimpse of how Europeans view the United States these days under Donald Trump. Believe me, it ain't pretty.

Before I left for Europe, several friends warned me: Be prepared to take a lot of personal abuse. Because, after Trump destroyed the mutually beneficial relationships built up over the last 70 years, people hate Americans now.

That was not my experience at all. What I discovered was even worse. On one hand, they're confused. They don't understand how we could let this happen. On the other hand, they're sad. They realize how hard it is for most Americans under Trump. So, they don't hate us. They feel sorry for us.

And they know what's going on. Trump's latest outrages get front-page coverage in most newspapers and cable TV: from the war on Iran, to building a new ballroom, to comparing himself to Jesus, to plastering his face on new passports. I never heard one commentator defend Trump. Most just make fun of him. One day, after Trump had again flip-flopped on the Strait of Hormuz, il Domani featured a front-page political cartoon showing an embarrassed Trump, pants around his ankles, with the caption: "Caught with his pants down."

Of course, nothing stirred up the Italian press and politicians more than Trump's gratuitous attacks on Pope Leo. Conservative and liberals agreed that Leo was not elected, as Trump claims, only because he was an American and therefore close to Trump. He was elected because he'd spent more time in Peru than in the United States, and therefore had no ties to Trump. Elly Schlein, the new leader of Italy's Democratic Party, often called "Italy's AOC," got a standing ovation in Parliament after a fiery speech condemning Trump for his attacks on the pope. It was the only issue, she said, on which she and Prime Minister Georgia Meloni had ever agreed.

In a poll released by Italy's Channel 7, only 11 percent of Italians said they trusted Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin did better, at 16 percent. Meloni, who'd been suffering in the polls since her initial support of Trump, bounced up to 43 percent approval after joining other European leaders in opposition.

Not even tragic events at the White House Correspondents' Dinner brought Trump any sympathy. When I expressed dismay at yet another attempted assassination, Italians I talked to dismissed it as "fake" - just another effort, like the Iran War, to take attention off the Epstein files. Which is a disturbing but not surprising reaction, I guess. After Trump has spread so many lies and conspiracy theories for years, what is the truth? Nobody believes anything anymore.

Of many conversations about Trump, two really struck home. The first, with a university professor who very sincerely wanted to know: We understand how you might have elected this guy the first time, but how could you make the mistake of electing him again? The second, with an education expert who documented schools shut down for millions of impoverished children, especially in Africa, due to Trump's killing of USAID. Why would we destroy the one government program that generated the most goodwill for America around the world? I wish I had a ready answer for both.

The sad fact is that, for good reason, our once longtime friends and allies don't trust the United States anymore and may never trust us again unless we act soon to prove them wrong. Which brings us back to the lady in the hat. In his seldom quoted next line, Robert Burns wisely added that if we did see ourselves as others see us, "It wad frae monie a blunder free us."

"It would from many a blunder free us." How true. We have an opportunity to correct our big blunder and clip Donald Trump's wings in the November midterms. This time, we'd better get it right.

(C)2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
 

 The best and the worst of times - in one day!

No wonder we feel dizzy. We live in a roller-coaster world, up one day, down the next. Or often up and down several times in the same day. Like this week, April 1 - no April Fools' joke! - where we experienced both the best of America and the worst.

The best of America was Artemis II, the most powerful rocket ever launched, blasting four astronauts on an historic mission around the far side of the moon and back to earth: a distance of 248,000 miles at a speed of 25,000 mph.

The first lunar mission in 53 years, Artemis II is not only a triumph of American engineering, it also reflects who we are as Americans. The Artemis crew includes the first woman, the first person of color and the first non-American citizen to soar beyond earth's low orbit. It is, in other words, a "DEI" event we can all be proud of - but which somehow escaped Donald Trump's attention. Otherwise, he would have canceled the whole mission.

That same day, the worst of America was on display when Donald Trump showed up at the Supreme Court to support his plan to end birthright citizenship. He's the first president to do so because no other president would do something so blatant or stupid.

Trump decided to attend the court's oral arguments on birthright citizenship for one reason only: to intimidate members of the court, especially the three justices he'd appointed to the bench. What a gigantic, delusional ego! He actually believed that if he showed up in person, conservative justices wouldn't dare vote against him. In fact, his presence may have the exact opposite effect: justices voting to uphold birthright citizenship if only to prove their independence from Trump.

Although one must always be careful about reading too much into oral arguments, from questions raised by even the most conservative justices, it doesn't look like the court will uphold Trump's Executive Order to eliminate birthright citizenship. Nor should they.

Some legal arguments are so complex you need a constitutional scholar to decipher them. But, as CNN's Jeff Tobin told my podcast, you don't need a degree from Harvard Law to understand the issue of birthright citizenship. You just need to know how to read.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was adopted in 1868 to ratify the results of the Civil War by affirming that children born of slaves were legal residents of the United States. It only takes one sentence: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." And no sentence could be more clear: If you were born on American soil, you're an American citizen. Period.

On the first day of his second term, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order ending birthright citizenship because, he said, it was designed for slave children only - and not for sons and daughters of immigrants today. Now it's up to the Supreme Court to decide whether a president can single-handedly rewrite or negate parts of the Constitution. For Trump, prospects don't look good. When Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that we couldn't still follow the wording of the 14th Amendment because the world had changed, Chief Justice John Roberts fired back: "It's a new world. It's the same Constitution."

It's unlikely, but were the court to side with Trump, the results could be disastrous. According to the Pew Research Center, there are 1.2 million U.S. citizens who were born to unauthorized immigrant parents. Without the 14th Amendment, all of them could be rounded up and deported, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose Cuban parents were not American citizens when he was born in Miami.

Unfortunately, we saw more of the worst of America that evening when Trump addressed the nation from the White House, speaking as usual from both sides of his mouth. His war against Iran is over, but we're going to bomb them for another two to three weeks. They must open the Strait of Hormuz, but we don't care because we don't need their oil. We don't want regime change, but we killed all their leaders, anyway and we're going to kill even more.

It makes you jealous of the Artemis II astronauts. For the next 10 days, we'll still be stuck on this ridiculous Donald Trump roller coaster, but lucky them. They'll be 248,000 miles away!

(C)2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.