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

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0:33Apoorva Mandavilli:From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, May 27th. Here's what we're covering.

0:44Simar Bajaj:Tonight, we just sent a Texas-sized message to Washington. Change was on the ballot, and change won.

0:53Zolan Kanno-Youngs: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.

1:09Yeganeh Torbati:President Trump is the leader of our party, and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics.

1:15Zolan Kanno-Youngs: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.

1:59Reid J. Epstein: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.

2:14Apoorva Mandavilli:Lisa Lair is a national political correspondent for The Times.

2:17Zolan Kanno-Youngs:She says Democrats are feeling confident about their own candidate for Senate, James Tallarico. No Democrat has won statewide office in Texas for decades, but Tallarico's quickly become a national name, gaining a huge amount of momentum, a lot of fundraising, and his Bible-infused messaging has really resonated in Texas. Democrats feel he'll be a serious contender up against Paxton and all his baggage.

2:44Reid J. Epstein:Look, the idea of turning Texas Democratic has been like Charlie Brown and the football for Democrats. They keep trying to get it, and the football at the last minute is taken away. And that could very well happen again this election cycle. It will be very hard for Democrats to win Texas, which is, you know, one of the most stalwartly red states in the country. But they feel that Paxton gives them the best shot that they've had in a really long time.

3:14Zolan Kanno-Youngs: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, according to several people familiar with those plans. It's a starkly different approach than how past administrations have responded to outbreaks. In those cases, healthcare 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.

3:49Zolan Kanno-Youngs: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.

4:22Apoorva Mandavilli:A White House spokesman declined to comment.

4:31Apoorva Mandavilli:And one last update on the Trump administration.

4:33Zolan Kanno-Youngs:Over his time in office, President Trump has disrupted a lot of funding for medical research. In some cases, it's since been restored. But the Times has been looking at what even short pauses in grant money have meant for the work.

4:47Natallie Rocha:When the funding came back, it wasn't just like turning back on the research light switch, so to say.

4:54Zolan Kanno-Youngs:My colleague Simmer Bajaj dug into one research project in particular, where a biomedical engineer at Cornell University, Dr. James Antaki, is trying to create an artificial heart for babies. It is very, very tiny. The pump is 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 was ready to make the device, and an animal study was lined up with sheep just the right size to model a baby's circulatory system. Everything stopped, though, when the Trump administration temporarily froze more than a billion dollars in funding for the school, amid a civil rights investigation.

5:33Zolan Kanno-Youngs:And while Cornell later settled with the White House, Simmer said getting things going again has been hard.

5:39Natallie Rocha: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.

6:15Natallie Rocha: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.

6:37Apoorva Mandavilli:In Iran, the government has started restoring internet access for tens of millions of people.

6:43Zolan Kanno-Youngs:They've been largely cut off since the war began three months ago. The Iranian 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 just do basic things like reach their friends and loved ones. A 39-year-old woman who works in advertising in Tehran told The Times getting access again has felt like coming out of prison. She said she didn't really know what was happening in the world or with people she hadn't been able to see in person.

7:20Zolan Kanno-Youngs:She said she just wanted to catch up with friends online. but she also resented that the government's internet shutdown left her craving such a basic thing. She said, quote, that sense of humiliation is what really bothers people. They feel like hostages in this country.

7:35Apoorva Mandavilli:The sad part is that we are starting to get used to it. One cybersecurity expert said internet traffic in Iran is going up now, but it's unclear how long that will last.

7:52Apoorva Mandavilli:And finally, in Silicon Valley, AI startups are now everywhere, promising they can do just about everything.

8:00Zolan Kanno-Youngs:And in that flood, it's become hard for companies to stand out.

8:04Lisa Lerer:What is our AI search strategy?

8:09Zolan Kanno-Youngs:So they've started making slickly produced hype videos to try and get attention, filling social media with some bizarre ads.

8:17Sanam Mahoozi:It's not a dream. You just have to wake up.

8:21Zolan Kanno-Youngs: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.

8:58Apoorva Mandavilli:Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.