Some Texas Republicans had signaled they hoped their nominee would face Democratic U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a Senate race that is now headed for a runoff between incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn and embattled MAGA firebrand Attorney General Ken Paxton. Democratic state Rep. James Talarico’s win in Tuesday’s primary has further complicated matters for the Texas GOP, which now faces a grueling 12-week — and potentially $100 million — brawl to choose its nominee.

President Donald Trump has signaled he does not want that fight, and on Wednesday floated endorsing one of the GOP candidates and asking the other to withdraw from the race.

“The Republican Primary Race for the United States Senate in the Great State of Texas,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “cannot, for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer. IT MUST STOP NOW! We have an easy to beat, Radical Left Opponent, and we have to TOTALLY FOCUS on putting him away, quickly and decisively!”

“I will be making my Endorsement soon, and will be asking the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE! Is that fair? We must win in November!!!”

According to Politico, Trump is being pushed by multiple Republicans to endorse Senator Cornyn.

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Wednesday that he hopes the president’s endorsement comes “soon,” remarks he made “hours after making his latest plea on Cornyn’s behalf to the president.”

Republicans have “warned Trump that if scandal-plagued Paxton becomes the nominee, it could cost Republicans a seat they have held since 1961. There’s even more GOP anxiety now that state Rep. James Talarico secured the Democratic nomination — a candidate many believe could give Democrats their best chance at flipping the seat.”

But if he puts his thumb on the scale and wipes out MAGA favorite Paxton, Trump’s MAGA base has made clear they will be furious.

Far-right influencer, activist, and provocateur Laura Loomer, who reportedly has ties inside the Oval Office, “made her choice for the GOP nominee clear in a post on X on Wednesday,” The Daily Beast reported.

“JUST IN: President Trump says he will soon endorse in the Texas Senate GOP race, & whoever he doesn’t endorse must drop out,” Loomer wrote. “Hopefully he endorses @KenPaxtonTX, because @JohnCornyn has a long record of being anti-Trump, pro-Islam, weak on illegal immigration, and anti 2A.”

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Numerous other MAGA world influencers also urged the president to endorse Paxton.

“Mr. President @realDonaldTrump,” right-wing Blaze TV host Sara Gonzales wrote in a post on X. “I am one of your biggest supporters and I am urging you as someone who is in the Texas grassroots: do NOT endorse Cornyn. It will be one of your biggest mistakes.”

The Daily Beast also noted that conservative radio host Jesse Kelly “called Cornyn, who has held his Texas Senate seat since 2002, a ‘swamp rat,’ and said if Trump endorses him, it would be a ‘total scumbag move.'”

Republican former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a top Trump ally, now an “America First” activist, blasted the president.

“Trump now says he is going to endorse either Cornyn or Paxton and demands that whoever does not get his endorsement must drop out of the runoff. This is wrong and the people of Texas should be able to vote for WHOEVER THEY WANT!!! NOT the candidate Trump demands.”

“People are furious over this and if Trump does this, it could actually be the real reason Texas Senate seat flips blue,” she warned. “Stealing people’s opportunity to elect their leaders by force will definitely piss off voters and will lead to even more sitting it out.”

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Political science professor Robert Pape, an expert on national security and terrorism, explains why President Donald Trump is “losing control of the situation” in his war of choice against Iran.

Pape, the founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) at the University of Chicago, told New York magazine’s Intelligencer that the one aspect missing from the president’s execution, along with Israel’s, of military action is the political dimension.

“The fundamental problem here is that bombing by a foreign power changes the politics of the situation,” he says. Despite the precision of today’s modern bombs, “that doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t help.”

“The problem is not that the bombs don’t go off. The problem is not that the bombs don’t hit the targets. The problem is not that the targets aren’t cratered or the leaders aren’t killed. The real problem is we’re a foreign power, and we’re using military force to pick a new government.”

On his Substack, Pape writes, “no regime in modern history has fallen solely because it was bombed from the air.”

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“Strategic bombing has destroyed armies and shattered cities, but it has not by itself toppled a functioning regime,” Pape notes. “Political collapse happens when ruling coalitions fracture under internal pressure, not when buildings burn.”

“Bombs can devastate states,” he adds. “They do not, by themselves, disintegrate regimes.”

Speaking to Intelligencer, Pape said, “We’ve seen regimes crack under military pressure, and it’s when they lose major ground wars. That’s what happened with Russia in World War I. They had these massive battlefield losses, their soldiers came back, and they were very angry at their regime, their czar.”

“But that was a bottom-up process,” he explained. “The Germans were not bombing Moscow to accelerate it — in fact, had they done that, they probably would’ve extended the czar’s reign. Not only was it not up to the control of the Germans, but look who came into power: the Leninist communists and later Joe Stalin, who then really strengthened Russia and the Soviet Union and crushed Germany. So they got regime change.”

Today, he says, the “waves of nationalism” are “being left out of this conversation” in Iran.

“The politics are being left on the side. We’re spending time talking about the hardware and the technology and the sensors, and we’re missing the discussion of the politics.”

He says that the military technology has “almost like a mesmerizing effect.”

“And you hear this in President Trump in the last three days, where he’s saying, ‘I have all these off-ramps, and I can do this, and I can do that.’ Well, notice he’s now doubling down in ways he wasn’t expecting to. He’s no longer taking ground forces off the table. He’s losing control of the situation.”

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Miles Taylor, the prominent former Trump Department of Homeland Security chief of staff, is warning that his former agency has never been less prepared for a terror attack on U.S. soil.

“I oversaw counterterrorism at DHS for two years in the first Trump administration,” Taylor writes. “I’ve never seen DHS less prepared to defend the U.S. against a terrorist attack. And Trump took us to war five days ago — with a country that is hellbent on retaliating.”

Taylor says that “the Trump administration has left us vulnerable to an Iran-backed terrorist attack,” and he warns that “the way I’ve watched the White House and DHS fumble the preparation for war is beyond a dereliction of duty. It’s borderline criminal.”

On Substack, Taylor outlines five reasons — and “foolish mistakes” — he says have left America vulnerable to a terrorist attack “that could get Americans killed.”

“The administration appears to have done no ‘defensive’ prep for war,” he says. “And it’s spent a year shifting counterterrorism personnel to domestic immigration enforcement.”

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“Anyone who has partial cognition knows that a U.S. war with Iran — whether airstrikes, naval confrontations, or targeted assassinations of its leadership — carries an immediate and predictable consequence,” Taylor says. “You hit someone, they hit back. In this case, we should be expecting Iranian-directed or Iranian-inspired attacks on American soil.”

Serving up a “serious warning,” Taylor says: “Wars do not stay overseas. They come back to haunt you at home. And if you’re not ready, then you’re tempting fate to take the lives of your own people.”

He also says it appears DHS was not even consulted before Trump ordered U.S. Armed Forces to attack Iran.

“There is no public evidence of any meaningful interagency preparations. No indication that DHS, the FBI, or the intelligence community were brought in to war-game the domestic security consequences of military escalation,” he writes. “What’s worse, the people whose job it is to answer the question ‘what happens here at home if we do this?’ were apparently not in the room at all when the bombs started flying.”

Another reason America is not prepared, Taylor says, is that Trump has moved thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts, and officials to “immigration” enforcement — “and away from other missions, including foreign terror threats.”

For example, “Border Patrol Tactical Units (BORTAC) — the elite DHS counterterrorism teams — have been conspicuous on U.S. city streets going after citizens, rather than hunting down Iranian operatives.”

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All the time these counterterrorism agents spend away from their core duties is time they cannot spend chasing down tips or “locating and removing potential assassins, bombers, and plotters here within our borders.”

Another reason the U.S. is unprepared for a terror attack is that the Trump administration claims the top terror threat to America is Antifa.

“DHS Secretary Noem and an FBI leader testified under oath in front of the House Homeland Security Committee that their biggest terrorist worry inside the U.S. Homeland was ‘Antifa.’ That’s right. Not Iranian IRGC operatives. Not ISIS or al Qaeda agents infiltrating the country. But left-leaning Americans they’ve deemed to be ‘Antifa,’ even though Trump’s lieutenants couldn’t even figure out how to describe the danger when they were pressed.”

Also, the Trump administration has been firing FBI agents who were specifically tasked with monitoring Iranian threats — reportedly because they also had been involved in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s alleged removal, retention, and refusal to return classified documents that were stored at Mar-a-Lago.

And the final reason the U.S. is unprepared for a terror attack: Trump took America to war before getting DHS funded.

“Perhaps most damning of all is that the president of the United States launched a war before making sure his Department of Homeland Security was back up and running.”

He says that “if Trump knew he was going to launch strikes against Iran, he should have made damn sure he found a way to cut a deal on Capitol Hill to get DHS funded.”

Taylor laments that “that clearly wasn’t a priority.”

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