Politics
Trump plays Texas hold ’em with Senate endorsement
As the MAGA faithful gather for another day of CPAC in Grapevine, Texas, they are openly celebrating what they believe is tantamount to a major midterms victory: keeping President Donald Trump from endorsing John Cornyn ahead of May’s GOP Senate primary runoff.
MAGA world is taking a victory lap — and fresh comfort — in the receipts: A lack of significant spending and polling so far by not only Cornyn’s campaign, but also the NRSC and One Nation, the Senate Leadership Fund-aligned nonprofit. It amounts to a pattern the MAGA cohort reads as Washington making peace with a matchup between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, their anointed candidate, and Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico.
“The grassroots stood in the breach and said a resounding ‘NO’ to Cornyn,” Steve Bannon, who has framed Paxton’s bid for the nomination as a battle for MAGA’s soul, told Blue Light News. “Polling and spending indicates that the Republican DC establishment reluctantly concurs. This could be the victory that empowers MAGA through the midterms.”
Paxton, though, hasn’t rested his case. He traveled to Mar-a-Lago last Friday for a Palm Beach County GOP dinner, and was spotted speaking to Trump himself, according to three sources familiar.
Trump and Paxton were on the patio, one source added, with another saying the two discussed the runoff. “It was a positive meeting,” said yet another person. A Paxton spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting.
It’s the latest sign of a fierce and feverish effort to keep Trump from endorsing Cornyn.
Even when all signs pointed to a Cornyn endorsement following the longtime senator’s showing in the primary, MAGA faithful kept pressing for Paxton. Now they’re optimistic their guy can come out on top — and they’re still taking shots at Cornyn every chance they get.
“The Cornyn endorsement looks dead, but it’s Trump, so it’s never certain,” a person close to the White House said. “Cornyn sealed his fate by carrying Mitch [McConnell]’s water on that ridiculous gun grabbing bill. No one thought he would be dumb enough to run for reelection after that but here we are.”
Now, Trump may not give an endorsement at all. Or if he does, he may endorse Paxton after the SAVE Act debate in the Senate is over, three sources tell Blue Light News.
“Nothing is dead,” said a source familiar with the president’s thinking. “It’s all just stasis at the moment.”
“It’s looking like he may not endorse at all,” another White House official said. “But it doesn’t seem like he has made up his mind.”
But the endorsement equation in Texas amid the SAVE Act saga is still very much vexing Trump, according to five Republicans in and around the White House. The president, who will not be in attendance at this year’s CPAC, is “being patient” and “trying to exact” a policy win, another person said.
“Trump isn’t going to endorse against Cornyn while the Save America Act is still being debated,” one White House ally said. “So for now I think he stays out, but if Thune files cloture and Paxton continues to lead in every poll then I could see him endorsing Paxton. No question Paxton wins if Trump stays out though.”
Every Republican who spoke to Blue Light News cautioned that Trump could change his mind at any moment. It’s still early for the runoff, they said, with Election Day still nearly two months away. But the deadline for a candidate to drop off the ballot passed last week.
One person familiar told Blue Light News that the Senate Leadership Fund and NRSC aren’t spending in order to conserve resources. “Not cause they are throwing in the towel,” this person said.
The campaign will be spending soon, a Cornyn spokesperson said. “Ken Paxton said he needed $20M to win this primary and he’s barely raised a quarter of that,” said Cornyn campaign senior adviser Matt Mackowiak. “His professional failures and indefensible personal conduct make GOP donors and Texas primary voters deeply uncomfortable.” He added: “We have a plan to win this race and we are executing it. Ken Paxton is busy whining and hiding.”
Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s top campaign hands who works as a senior adviser for the pro-Cornyn super PAC Texans for a Conservative Majority, said the runoff boils down to a resource equation. “The question remains the same,” LaCivita said. “Does the GOP want to spend $150-200 million holding what should be a safe seat and giving up other opportunities to gain advantage?”
Joanna Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the NRSC, said it’s “been very clear that the fight to protect President Trump’s Senate Majority should not be fought in Texas, and John Cornyn is the only candidate who ensures that does not happen.”
When it comes to money, Republicans are planning for MAGA Inc. to be “responsible for resources needed in a general election if it’s Ken Paxton,” according to two GOP operatives briefed on strategy (one cautioned that “planning is probably more hoping.”). A MAGA Inc. spokesperson declined to comment.
On the sidelines of CPAC, where bedazzled and sequined conservatives gathered for the base’s annual pep rally, the overwhelming feeling was that most Texas GOP primary voters had already made up their minds — and a Trump endorsement in either direction wouldn’t make much of a difference. Some attendees said they viewed Trump’s silence as a nudge toward Paxton.
“Texans — we’re done,” said Gregorio Heise, a Paxton supporter and Republican running for Congress in Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s Dallas district. “It’s already showing, even in the polling. Cornyn doesn’t do what Texans want, and [Paxton] does.”
On Friday night at CPAC, attendees will hear from Paxton, who’s headlining the conference’s Ronald Reagan dinner. Cornyn isn’t planning to attend.
“It’s an opportunity to be able to, you know, share your vision and basically sell yourself to the crowd, to the Texas crowd,” CPAC host and organizer Mercedes Schlapp told Blue Light News. “So Ken Paxton agreed to come, and he has a very high CPAC rating. And you know, we’ve invited Cornyn, and so we are still open. The invitation is still open for John Cornyn to come.”
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Daniel Lurie is already imagining the scene at Levi’s Stadium on July 1.
The San Francisco Democrat — who, according to at least one recent poll, is the most popular mayor in America — was circulating around his city ahead of Levi’s Stadium hosting Turkey vs. Paraguay tonight, when he began to wrap his head around his good fortune.
The venue is scheduled to host the Round of 32 match featuring the Group D winner on July 1, and that’s very likely to be the U.S. team.
“It’ll be incredible,” Lurie, a no-nonsense technocrat, told Blue Light News. “It’ll be a thrilling moment for San Francisco, and for our region.”
He beamed in to a FaceTime interview from Southern Station, having already been at two watch parties that capture the new San Francisco he’s trying to build: the East Cut neighborhood, and then Fieldwork Brewing at China Basin.
And Lurie knows ball: Not only has he attended five World Cups, he is also an investor in 49ers Enterprises, which purchased Leeds in 2023.
He drew a parallel to his English club’s own turnaround this season: newly promoted and expected to go straight back down, Leeds instead finished safely mid-table. Lurie is trying to engineer a similar revival in San Francisco, using major events like the World Cup and February’s Super Bowl to project competence and attract visitors and families.
In San Francisco, such a turnaround means restoring a sense of competence to city government — and managing large events like the Super Bowl and the World Cup are key to that effort.
“We are managing for results here in San Francisco, and what’s critical about those results is keeping people safe, making sure that people want to be here in San Francisco, that they have a great time, and that they want to come back,” Lurie said.
His turnaround effort will be vastly aided by Open AI’s expected IPO, which will expand his tax base but also pose challenges.
“We got Anthropic. We got Open AI. We have a company that’s four years old in Cursor that just got acquired by Elon Musk’s company for $60 billion and hardly anyone’s talking about that,” Lurie said. “I think we want these companies here. We want them paying their taxes here, and we want them being engaged in the community. We want them involved in civic life, we want their employees involved and engaged in their neighborhoods, but we also want an economy, and we want an economy that works for everyone — that lifts up the entire community, and isn’t just for the select few.”
Lurie said he is laser-focused on affordability.
“We are every day focused on building more housing, building more affordable housing, making child care more affordable,” Lurie said. “We are the first city in the country to provide access and opportunity to free early childhood education, [age] zero to five, for any family of four making $210,000 a year or less.”
The aim? Draw more families within the city’s confines.
“We’re gonna hopefully keep more working families here in our city, and we want them to believe that they can build a life here long term, so people don’t get priced out — so we have a lot of work to do.”
Lurie largely avoids the national spotlight — the rare exception coming when he netted a jumper on “The Pat McAfee Show” early this year — and feverish culture war issues in favor of a get-shit-done approach to governing.
“Our number one industry is tourism,” Lurie said. “And when people visit our city or when they take their kids to school each day, they don’t care if their mayor is a Democrat or a Republican.”
As of Friday evening, as he prepared to watch Turkey vs. Paraguay, Lurie couldn’t fully allow himself to contemplate what it would mean for Levi’s Stadium to play host to a U.S. squad that’s rocking and rolling over opponents.
“We cannot jinx it,” Lurie said. “But it’s looking very much like we will host USA in the first knockout round. My hope: I’ll be there to root on USA.”
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
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