‘Paxton Is Cooked’: Eyes Widen as Texas Slips Away From the GOP

Trump's new reported weight sparks questions; no one wants to play for the 250th and Trump is openly doubting his own heir

Good afternoon. I’m John Byrne.

The White House quietly released a medical memo that has Trump on the doorstep of clinical obesity. A new poll has Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate in Texas trailing a Democrat. The president is openly second-guessing whether his own vice president has what it takes to succeed him. And America’s 250th birthday concert is collapsing as musical act after musical act refuses to take the stage.

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Trump’s Own Doctors Put Him on the Edge of Obesity

The White House doesn’t usually drop medical news late on a Friday unless it’s hoping nobody reads it. So when a memo about Trump’s latest visit to Walter Reed went out after dark, it was worth a closer look.

According to the Washington Post, the president’s height was listed at 6’3” and his weight at 238 pounds, fourteen pounds heavier than his 2025 exam. That weight, paired with that height, lands him less than two pounds under the line the CDC uses to define clinical obesity. Retired Air Force colonel and administrative law judge Moe Davis noted that the commander-in-chief is right at the threshold.

Plenty of observers found the specific number suspicious. One retired senior assistant special counsel argued the 238 figure was deliberately chosen because it sits just on the “overweight” side of the obesity border, not the obese side. Whether or not that’s true, it tells you something that the White House felt the need to thread a needle that fine.

The founders never wrote a clause about presidential body mass, of course. But they did design a system that depends on an informed public being able to judge the fitness of the people they elect. When a White House drops a carefully engineered number on a Friday night and hopes the weekend swallows it, that’s not transparency. That’s the oldest trick in the book, performed by people who think you aren’t paying attention.

‘Paxton Is Cooked’: Texas Slips Away From the GOP

Texas isn’t supposed to be a competitive Senate state. Republicans have spent decades treating it as a vault. This week, the lock started to rattle.

A new poll from Texas Public Opinion Research has Democratic state lawmaker and Presbyterian minister James Talarico leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton 47 to 43. What makes that number dangerous for Republicans isn’t just the four-point gap, it’s that Talarico is closing in on the 50 percent mark, meaning Paxton would have to sweep all remaining undecided voters just to catch up.

Paxton beat incumbent Senator John Cornyn in a blowout primary runoff after Trump endorsed him. Now nearly a third of the Republicans who backed Cornyn in that runoff say they’ll vote for a Democrat in November. More than half point to Paxton’s criminality or corruption as the reason. Paxton carries a previous criminal indictment, an impeachment, and accusations of an extramarital affair.

A separate poll this week showed Talarico leading among Latino voters, a plurality of the state, by 27 points. Election analyst G. Elliott Morris put it plainly: if the real result lands anywhere near that, Paxton is cooked.

The trouble for Republicans is that even holding Texas now looks like it’ll cost hundreds of millions of dollars, money that gets drained away from every other battleground state on the map. This is what happens when a party lets a president pick its candidates based on loyalty instead of electability. Trump demanded Paxton. Trump got Paxton. And now the most reliable red state in the country is suddenly a race.

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Trump Is Already Doubting His Own Heir

Loyalty is the only currency that matters in Trump’s world, and JD Vance has spent two years paying it in full. It may not be enough.

The New York Times reports that in private conversations with aides and allies, Trump keeps circling back to the same question about his vice president: does Vance have what it takes to go all the way?

The president usually answers his own question: he’s not so sure.

The needling is relentless. Trump reportedly reminds Vance that he’s never won a tough race without Trump’s help. He’s brought up the number of vacations Vance has taken. He’s raised, to Vance’s face, the vice president’s initial opposition to the Iran war, telling him, “I’m more of a peace person than you are, but I had to do it.” He’s revisited the moment Vance fumbled a national championship football trophy on the White House lawn.

Trump is running a running focus group on his own successor, in public, for sport.

Meanwhile, Trump has showered praise on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who travels with him on Air Force One and bonds with him on Florida weekends. At a Rose Garden dinner this month, Trump went around the room asking guests, “Who likes JD Vance? Who likes Marco Rubio?” and made clear he was endorsing neither.

Vance’s problem runs deeper than trophy fumbles. His political brand was built on opposing exactly the kind of foreign war Trump just launched. Tucker Carlson, an ally, says the Iran war has put Vance in a tough spot. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once recommended Vance for the job, warned that there’s nothing left to protect his old antiwar reputation. And in Indiana and Hungary, the two places Trump sent him to deliver wins, Vance came up empty both times.

Nobody Wants to Play Trump’s Birthday Party

The country turns 250 this year, and Trump wanted a concert worthy of an emperor. What he’s getting is a punchline.

The plan was a star-studded musical extravaganza on the National Mall, the Freedom 250 concerts running from late June into July. The reality is a steady stream of artists announcing they won’t be there. The Commodores, Young MC, Morris Day and the Time, Bret Michaels, and country star Martina McBride have all pulled out.

McBride said she was misled, told the event would be nonpartisan, and didn’t want her fans to feel she’d abandoned the meaning behind her music. That’s an artist with a conscience reading the room. The acts that have stayed on board tell their own story. Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli, the group whose Grammy was famously stripped after it came out they hadn’t performed their own recordings, is appearing. So is Vanilla Ice, who told a celebrity outlet, “I don’t even vote, so I don’t even care.”

Bill Maher had the line of the week, joking that it’s got to hurt when you can’t close the deal with Milli Vanilli. He also took a shot at the other vanity project Trump is pushing, a new $250 bill with the president’s own face on it, a denomination no functioning economy has ever needed.

There’s something almost perfect about all of it. A president who governs through spectacle planned a spectacle, and the actual artists of the country looked at the invitation and said no. The founders built a republic, not a monarchy, specifically so that no one man’s birthday became a national obligation.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the test of that idea is playing out in the simplest way imaginable: when the king throws a party, do people show up? So far, mostly, they’re declining.

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