The Headlines - A MAGA Victory in Texas, and the Trump Administration’s New Ebola Plan

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Plus, Iran begins lifting an internet blackout.  Here’s what we’re covering: Paxton’s Texas Victory Opens a New Front in the Battle for the Senate, by Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein Trump Administration to Send Americans Exposed to Ebola to Kenya, by Apoorva Mandavilli and Zolan Kanno-Youngs How a Funding Pause Derailed an Artificial Heart for Babies, by Simar Bajaj Iran Begins Lifting Monthslong Internet Blackout, Officials Say, by Yeganeh Torbati and Sanam Mahoozi Go Ask Alice Why Tech Start-Ups Are Spending Big on Hype Videos, by Natallie Rocha Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Wednesday, May 27th. Here's what we're covering. Tonight, we just sent a Texas-sized message to Washington. I said it in March, and I'll say it again now. Today, change was on the ballot and change one. In Texas, Ken Paxton, the state's far-right Attorney General with a long history of scandal and controversy,

took down longtime Senator John Cornyn. It was essentially a decisive. victory for the MAGA movement over the state's old guard of conservatives. President Trump is the leader of our party and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics. And I'm honored to have his support. The runoff election was the most expensive primary in American history and Paxton pulled out a win despite being outspent on ads by roughly $80 million. The endorsement of President Trump helped carry him to what is as of right now a nearly 30-point win over Cornyn. And it has proved once again that when Trump backs a candidate,

he brings voters with him. That's been the case in Louisiana, Kentucky, in Indiana, where just in the last few weeks, the president's preferred candidates have all taken down GOP incumbents that Trump turned on. Now, looking ahead to November, Democrats actually see Paxton's primary victory as an opportunity for them. They see an opening to run against Paxton for his own scandals, but also tie Paxton to the president, who is becoming more and more unpopular and losing support among the very voters

who boosted him to victory in 2024. Lisa Lear is a national political correspondent for the Times. She says Democrats are feeling confident about Paxton facing off against their candidate for Senate, James Tala Rico. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas for decades. But Tala Ricos quickly become a national name, gaining a huge amount of momentum, a lot of fundraising, and giving the party what they hope is their best chance in a generation.

He's a seminary student. He's trying to really imbive his message with sort of Christian faith, which is important in a state like Texas, where evangelical voters hold quite a large amount of political sway. But of course, Tala RICO also carries what Republicans believe are a fair amount of liabilities. Republicans believe that they can cast Talrico is out of step with Texas voters and really far to the left. They've spent weeks bringing back up

his history of comments as a Texas state legislature where he's talking about his support for abortion rights, offering support for transgender rights, saying things like God is non-binary. And they're bringing those comments up to try to paint a picture

of someone who, as they say, is, quote, a woke weirdo. Look, no matter how strong Akanzi, the Democratic nominee is, this is still Texas, which is one of the red estates in the country, and it's going to be an uphill battle for any Democrat. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Ebola outbreak has now become the third largest on record. And the Times has learned that the Trump administration

is planning to send U.S. citizens who've been exposed to the virus to Kenya. It is a starkly different approach than how past administrations have responded to outbreaks. In those cases, health care workers and other Americans who were exposed to Ebola were brought back to the U.S. to be treated in specialized medical units. One public health expert told the Times, he was surprised by the change. Ebola has a high death rate, about 50 percent, and he said people's chances of getting through an infection would be higher in the specialized facilities. The Times talked with an American doctor who got Ebola back in 2014 when he was treating patients in Guinea. He was then brought home, and he said he thought it was unlikely that the facility the Trump administration is setting up in Kenya could match the sophistication of what the U.S. already has. He called leaving Americans there, quote, a dramatic abdication of what we owe our own.

A White House spokesman declined to comment. And one last update on the Trump administration. Over his time in office, President Trump has upended a lot of funding for medical research. Sometimes it's been only temporary, but the Times has been looking at what even a short pause can mean for that work. When the funding came back, it wasn't just like turning back on the research light switch, so to say. My colleague Simmer Bajajaj dug into one research project in particular, where a biomedical engineer named Dr. James Antaki at Cornell University is trying to create an artificial heart. heart for babies, so very, very tiny like the size of a double A battery. Last year, the project seemed close to a big step, starting a clinical trial. The doctor had the right team, a manufacturer

ready to make the device, and an animal study lined up with sheep, just the right size to model a baby's circulatory system. Everything stopped, though, when the Trump administration temporarily froze a billion dollars in funding to the school amid a civil rights investigation. And while Cornell later settled with the White House, Simmer said getting things going again has been hard. He called back his postdoc that he had been working with, but that guy had taken a job elsewhere. He wanted to work with his manufacturer

to get the device backing up and running, but that manufacturer had moved on and he had to find someone else. He wanted to restart the animal study, but when he reached back to the farms, the sheep had grown, and they weren't the right size anymore to test this device in. The funding pause was for seven months, but Dr. Intaki estimates that it set his research back,

at least double that amount of time. This has been playing out in labs across the country where research has been turned on and off because of the Trump administration's approach to science funding. And really what it reveals is that high-level scientific research is fragile. It depends on timing. It depends on momentum. And when all this is thrown off,

the research and its life-saving potential is really thrown into question. In Iran, the government has started restoring internet access for tens of millions of Iranians. They've been largely cut off since the war began three months ago. The government claimed it was for national security reasons, but many people argued it was imposed to suppress communications and help the regime maintain control of the population. The blackout hit Iran's already shaky economy hard, crippling the tech sector, and it made it incredibly difficult for people to reach their loved ones outside the country, as people tried to send messages in brief moments of connectivity. One cybersecurity expert said traffic is going up now,

but it's unclear how long that will last. And finally, in Silicon Valley, AI startups are now everywhere, promising they can do just about everything. And in that flood, it's become hard for companies to stand out. So they've started making slickly produced hype videos. So they've started making slickly produced hype videos to try and get attention, filling social media with some bizarre ads. It's not a dream. You just have to wake up. They're trying to catch the eye of talent they may want to recruit or funders who could back their latest project. In some cases, companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars on production for these videos. And notably, a lot of them

are not using AI to make them. They're bringing in actors, full crews, etc. The head of marketing at a company that dropped $80,000 to make a video, told the times they didn't want to use AI because they felt like it would make the company look sloppy. Quote, I feel like people would know. If we had done that, it would just look very cheap. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.