Deep in My Heart: Texas
Life During Trumptime - 5/25/26 - 5/31/26
As Texas goes, so goes the nation.
I can’t help but keep up with the politics in my home state. It’s a sickness. When I lived there, the long concrete highways, vast miles of open sky and thick liquid summers felt stifling. Now that I’m gone I miss it all desperately. I keep this homesickness at bay by visiting family or checking in on the Texas political scene.
Scandalous scoundrel Ken Paxton, a North Dakotan by birth, won a GOP primary bid to run for Senate in Texas. He ousted native son John Cornyn who, it seems, was not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
Texas politics have always been wild and cruel and I’m watching Paxton’s political campaign with interest to see if he’ll stretch the limits of southern propriety. Paxton was famous before this senate bid as a corrupt serial adulterer. This is a man who was impeached by his own party on a vote of 121–23., a man who former staffers say stole cakes. Literally.
Paxton’s opponent in the general is James Talarcio, a Democrat, a member of the Texas state legislature, and a graduate of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Talarico has made faith a core part of his campaign. How are Paxton and his crew reacting to this? Mostly, from what I’ve seen, by calling Talarico gay.
Appearing on Fox News above the chevron “Tala-Freako,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called Talarico transgender. “It’s very bold, one could even say brave, courageous, that the Democratic party would choose Texas, of all places, to nominate their first transgender Senate candidate who’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said while host Jesse Watters laughed. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out, instead soy milk comes out.”
There’s a lot of this.
When the GOP talks Talarico, they’re always sure to add a little 4chan spice to the conversation. I am a recovered cynic. I do not think that Texans, nor the voting public at large, are stupid. But both have proved they can be very cruel. And so I watch Texas to see if attacking a candidate with gross online memes will work. They have for Trump, of course, but he always felt like a special case and a lot of Trump imitators have failed to win political office. No matter how the midterms go, if Talarico loses to Paxton then I won’t be feeling hopeful about the short term future of the country and its politics.
5/25/26
The week began with Iran accusing the US of violating the ceasefire agreement.
Tehran and DC were still attempting to cut some kind of deal to open the Strait of Hormuz and end the conflict and Trump attempted to sweeten the pot for America and Israel on Monday. He called on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan to join the Abraham Accords and normalize relations with Israel as part of any deal with Iran. The countries rejected this plea.
Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president, told officials to end the internet blackout that’s kept the Iranian people offline for the past three months. With the traditional internet offline in Iran, sign-ups for a state-monitored intranet have surged.
5/26/26
Health and Human Services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. shared a video of himself handling two black racer snakes on the beachside patio of Dr. Mehmet Oz. In the video, the snakes repeatedly bite the Secretary’s hand. You can hear his wife, actress Cheryl Hines just off camera begging him to stop.
Construction began on the arena that will host a UFC fight on the White House’s South Lawn. A chain-link fence will surround an octagon where fighters will batter each other for the amusement of 4,000 spectators, including the President of the United States. The fight will take place on June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday, and is part of a series of events celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.
The US Government wants all its employees to sign non-disclosure agreements. A draft notice from the Office of Personal Management (OPM) hit the federal registrar and outlined the details of the plan. The notice explained that this is happening because Federal employees keep leaking information to the press. “OPM believes that a standard NDA form will promote consistency across Government, better protect confidential information, and better inform Federal employees of their rights and obligations regarding confidential information,” it said.
The Trump administration announced it’s going to give weapons grade plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons to power companies for use in reactors.
Scandal-ridden Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Senator John Cornyn in the Texas Republican primary for Senate.
5/27/26
California Governor Gavie Newsom announced his state would levy a 100% tax on any payouts from Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization” fund. “Anyone from California that receives any of those funds, we want to tax 100 percent of those proceeds,” Newsom said during a press conference.
Oman is an official US ally with ties to Iran. The US has long suspected Oman of being a little too close to Iran. During a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump off-handedly threatened to blow them up. “The Strait is going to be open to everybody. It’s international waters. We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it,” Trump said. “Oman will behave like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that.”
The State Department posted a video of the threat on X.
The FBI arrested a senior CIA official who had $40 million in gold bars stashed at his home. The official is being charged with falsifying military and academic credentials. When the FBI searched his home on May 18, agents found 303 gold bars weighing 1 kilogram each, according to The New York Times.
5/28/26
Officials from the White House floated the idea of cancelling international fights to sanctuary cities several times this week. Homeland Security head Markwayne Mullin first suggested the idea during a Fox News appearance on Tuesday the 26th. He explained the policy more during another interview on Thursday, saying that he’d have to pull CBP employees out of airports to protect DHS assets across the country because they’re facing waves of protests.
“So we’re not gonna halt the flights, what we’re saying is we won’t be able to process them because we don’t have officers there,” Mullin said. “If CBP isn’t there processing international flights, then those individuals when the airlines land won’t be permitted into the United States. If things don’t change, we’re gonna have to make this step pretty quick.”
The World Cup is set to begin on June 11 in the US.
The White House launched a new website that uses open-source information to show users immigration arrests near them. The site uses the aesthetics of alien and UFO conspiracy theories to cast immigrants as a monstrous “other.” The Trump administration has cast immigrants as extraterrestrials before. Last October, various Trump-linked social media accounts released images that compared humans from other countries to the ravenous and monstrous Flood from the Halo video game franchise.
Aliens.gov is more of the same. “If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed,” the site said. The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it…and return it safely to its place of origin,” the site said.
Susan Benesch and Rebecca Hamilton at Just Security had a good write up of Aliens.gov and what makes it uniquely unsettling. “The Aliens website makes two other moves familiar to scholars of mass atrocities: dehumanizing members of a group (here, conflating them with extraterrestrials and referring to them as “it”) and quashing public compassion for them,” Hamilton and Benesch wrote.
5/29/26
General Francis Donovan, the commander of US Southern Command, met with Cuban military leaders at the perimeter of Guantanamo Bay. Southcom shared an image from the meeting across social media.
“Commander Gen. Francis L. Donovan met with Army Corps General, Gen. Roberto Legrá Sotolongo, First Deputy Minister of the Chief of the General Staff, and other senior leaders from the Cuban military today at the perimeter of Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for a brief exchange on operational security matters. Gen. Donovan also led a perimeter security assessment of the naval base and discussed force protection, safety of service members and their families, and operational readiness with base officials,” it said in the post.
5/30/26
An Iranian missile strike destroyed a MQ-9 Reaper and injured several Americans at an air base in Kuwait. According to Bloomberg, a Fateh-110 ballistic missile struck Ali Al Salem air base and injured five Americans, including civilian contractors, and caused $30 million in damage.
5/31/26
The New York Times published a report on how American forces have begun to act as guides for hundreds of commercial vessels navigating the Strait of Hormuz.
“Vessels taking the U.S. route still risk being attacked by Iran, which has claimed that it controls the waterway. American officials say that the Iranian risk is exaggerated and have sought to talk willing vessels through a safe passage to the other side of the strait. While the assistance is known within shipping circles, U.S. officials acknowledge that they have not widely publicized it to avoid Iran targeting vessels venturing through under American guidance.
“A container ship was attacked in early May even though it was making the passage during Project Freedom. The ship’s owner, France’s CMA CGM, said it was coordinating with the U.S. military but Central Command said the French ship had not followed certain guidelines.
Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Central Command’s total of 70 U.S.-coordinated crossings was higher than she had expected. Because the crossings were done with transponders turned off, Ms. Raydan said it would take time to confirm how many vessels had coordinated with the United States.”