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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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 won.
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, and 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.
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Chapter 2: What does Ken Paxton's victory mean for Texas politics?
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 Simar Bajaj 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 for babies. So very, very tiny, like the size of a AA 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 back 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. Ntaki 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.
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