Deadline: White House 5/27/26 | 🅼🆂🅽🅱️🅲 Breaking News Today May 27, 2026

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:06]Hi there everyone. It's four o'clock in New York. Stop me if you've heard this one before. A political candidate is dogged by fraud charges, allegations of adultery, allegations of abusing his office for personal gain. He's impeached and he's willing to go to court over baseless conspiracy theories that the election was stolen. That candidate then sails through the Republican primary and his party, including the candidate who lost to him, swallows his dignity, his pride, any qualms they had about having this particular candidate in office and pledges their support. We're actually talking today about Ken Paxton, who as of last night is the Republican party's standard bearer in one of the highest profile races in the 2026 midterms, the Texas Senate race. Of course, we could have just as easily been talking about Donald Trump and this Republican party because the biggest story in politics today, the race in Texas, is also the story of Donald Trump and the Republican party over the last 10 years. Here's how the loser last night, John Cornin, described Ken Paxton back in April.

[00:01:14]>> He is a con man and a fraud. And I think uh the people of Texas know that >> con man and a fraud is who John Cornin is supporting in the general election in November.

[00:01:30]Yesterday Cornin said he will support Paxton gave him his endorsement after being crushed by the person he called a quote con man and fraud by 27 points. It all sounds awfully reminiscent of this moment from 2016.

[00:01:45]There is no way we are going to allow a con artist to take over the conservative movement. And Donald Trump is a con artist.

[00:01:54]Said it two times. No way we're going to let a con artist take over the Republican party. And Donald Trump is a con artist.

[00:02:04]We all know what happens next, right?

[00:02:06]And now now Rubio works for Donald Trump. He has two jobs. He's his secretary of state and he's Donald Trump's national security adviser. Of course, after Donald Trump would go on after that moment to win the general election in 16, again in 2024 and to clinch the Republican party's nomination three times.

[00:02:26]But back to Texas, there would be no Ken Paxton, Republican nominee for the Senate in the great state of Texas. If there was no Donald Trump and if there was no Republican party willing time and time and time again to look beyond one's criminal charges or corruption or comments about women or people of color or immigrants or veterans and so on and so on and so on. But outside of the Earth two on which the Republican party resides, out in the real world, Donald Trump is a deeply unpopular president, including among big and growing swasts of his own political coalition. In poll after poll, Donald Trump is less popular now than he was in the aftermath of the deadly insurrection he incited at the US capital on January 6th. Voters despise the war with Iran. They are not happy about Donald Trump's lack of focus on the cost of living and his seemingly endless appetite for grift and corruption. They do not like the ballroom that Donald Trump now wants taxpayers to pay for. They don't approve of the $ 1.8 billion slush fund for Trump's allies and potentially the insurrectionists.

[00:03:38]They have questions about the 3,700 trades made in the first quarter of this year alone. That corruption is something our next guest, Senator Chris Murphy, has been warning about and talking about and highlighting since the first day of Donald Trump's second term as president.

[00:03:54]For almost a year and a half now, Senator Chris Murphy has been at the vanguard of the pro-democracy movement in America, highlighting the autocratic and corrupt impulses of the Trump administration while urging Americans of all stripes and all political persuasions to fight back against it.

[00:04:10]Here's what he said about the allegations of insider trading involving those in and around the Trump administration.

[00:04:18]>> There are a bunch of millionaires and billionaires in this country who are making money off of their inside information, their access to what President Trump is going to do or what he is going to say. You, as a regular person, don't have access to that information. So, you don't get to make those trades. You don't get to profit off of your connection to the Trump administration. But that's why we're not joking around when we tell you that this White House is a full-time corruption machine. Because every week, nearly every day, something like this happens.

[00:04:56]>> That is where we begin today with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. He's out with a brand new book called Crisis of the Common Good, which we'll talk about in a minute.

[00:05:03]Senator Murphy, thank you for being here. Yeah, great to be with you.

[00:05:08]>> What does it say about the Republican party that it's now throwing in behind Ken Paxton?

[00:05:15]>> It says a lot about this party, but nothing terribly new because the party unfortunately has been essentially a cult of personality for the better part of the last decade. It's certainly more acute today. There is just zero wiggle room. I mean, John Cornin was a conservative proTrump Republican. Yes, on one or two issues over the last 10 years, he may have believed differently than the president, but um the message is simply if you don't line up with me 100% of the time, 24/7, you have no room in this party. I I think you're right though to point out that he, you know, is endorsing Ken Paxton, somebody who he believes is fundamentally corrupt. And I think that says something else about the Republican party. They don't care at all about corruption. They don't seem to care much about democracy these days.

[00:06:08]What they do care about is the destruction of the left. They believe that the left, the progressive dem Democrats are an existential threat to the country. Why? Because we believe in civil rights. We believe that this nation is not simply a white Christian patriarchal nation. And to them that's unacceptable. So they are going to use any tactics including endorsing conmen um lionizing and celebrating corruption, destroying democracy in order to eviscerate the modern left from the body politic. It says a lot of really troubling things about this this party.

[00:06:48]Just more confirmation of how broken they are.

[00:06:52]>> What does it say about the stakes then about the midterms if that is the contest?

[00:06:57]Yeah. I mean, again, just in the last few weeks, you are seeing I I mean, I guess we didn't think it could get any worse when it came to corruption. Um, but you know what Trump has done in the last couple weeks in terms of just stealing 1.8 billion dollars from the Treasury in order to feed his political friends and cronies in order to pay money to those who carried out violence in his name. I mean, it is pretty radical and the stakes of this election, you know, listen, probably our democracy is on the line. I don't know that we recover in time for the 2028 election if Republicans win. But also, you're just going to see the wholesale theft of taxpayer money for Trump's purposes. If he can get away with what he's doing to the IRS, essentially suing himself and then when the judge says this isn't a real lawsuit, settling out of court with himself for $1.8 eight billion dollars.

[00:07:54]He can do that um with any agency and he'll ultimately have hundreds of billions of your money at his disposal for his political purposes. That's what this election is about.

[00:08:05]>> What do you think about his political standing? I mean, Trump is generously, you know, at at 32, 33, 34%. He's lost a big chunk of his own base largely over the economy coupled with the deeply unpopular war that he explicitly promised his base and the country he wouldn't get the country into. Um even at 32 33 34% you've got Republican voters um heeding his uh endorsements in all of these Republican only. They're closed primaries where he's influential.

[00:08:42]But what does it say about the stickiness of that, you know, 30 31 32 33 34%.

[00:08:53]>> Yeah. Well, I know we'll get to the book later, but I do talk about this in Crisis of the Common Good because um this is a problem we have to diagnose.

[00:09:02]In Connecticut, a couple decades ago, we had a corrupt governor, but his corruption was kind of quaint compared to this. He basically had a state contractor install a hot tub in his house. And he had a couple card games fixed by lobbyists that he always won at. And he was at 70% approval before that happened. And overnight he went to 24. He was impeached. He was out of office and ultimately in jail. And yet Donald Trump has engaged in levels of corruption a 100 times. Governor Roland in Connecticut. And he still has a sizable amount of support from his base.

[00:09:37]And I think it's important for us to ask why that is. Some of it is that the positive ways that we found and have historically found identity, you know, local identity, masculine, feminine identity, um, work identity have vanished. And so more people find their identity in politics. And so when your entire identity is based around being a Republican, being part of Trump's movement, it's you you you filter everything he does through a different lens because you're contesting your own identity. Second, Nicole, I think we've normalized corruption in government because we've normalized it in the private sector. If the winners in the private sector get to make trillions of dollars and just take everything that they can and leave the scraps for us, well, then maybe the winners in our politics get to just take everything they can grab and leave the scraps for us. Trump uses his power to make himself um three times richer than he was before his presidency. and a CEO of a big tech company uses the power he has to make himself a billionaire or a trillionaire.

[00:10:41]I think we have to ask a lot of these questions and that's what Crisis of the Common Good really does. Say, how did we get to this place where the way Trump is acting hasn't caused him to go to 10% approval as I think would have happened just a couple generations ago.

[00:10:55]>> Well, and and the the the book left me wondering about something I have wondered about since 2015, and that's the asymmetry. So Trump rises to the top of the heap in 201516 in the Republican primaries and stays there after the Access Hollywood tape after refusing to release his taxes, after all sorts of abortant behavior. Democrats still exist in a party where the laws of gravity apply and candidates rise and fall based on news cycles, based on ethical questions, based on norms of democracy.

[00:11:28]How do you solve for the political asymmetry?

[00:11:33]Yeah, I I I think that's a really important question. I I do think that one of the central features of what's broken in our country today is the fact that all of our politics are corrupt.

[00:11:45]Trump is specifically corrupt. But it is important to understand that money matters on both sides of the aisle. And in the end, the book is about how do you make Americans feel more spiritually powerful? I don't mean religiously powerful. I mean that they have meaning and purpose in their lives.

[00:12:01]They think that all of our politics is bought and sold. That is true, but it is much more true on the Republican side.

[00:12:08]The Republican side has become pretty fully captured by a handful of billionaires and corporations. Their individual candidates really don't raise a ton of money any longer. They rely on these big super PACs to fund them, which I think means that they have become a party that excuses a lot more bad behavior because it's really all about those handful of donors. The Democratic Party is still more accountable to our electorate because we still fund ourselves mostly by small contributions.

[00:12:37]That means that some of the old rules still apply to us.

[00:12:42]When you look at what you've written in this book and you take Bruce Springsteen's um hope and dreams tour and you take the things that the people of Minneapolis wrote on their signs when they walked out into the streets um before, during and after the murder of two American citizens during those um ICE occupations of those cities. Do you feel like the Democratic party at large should be led by the grassroots things that are happening, the things that are drawing huge crowds? I mean, do do you think a playbook exists now for how to get out of this and win elections?

[00:13:16]>> Yeah, Nicole, we've talked a little bit about this in the past. For the last year and a half, I've been raising a lot of money um politically, and instead of doing what we all generally do, just squirrel that money away in your campaign account, I've been spending it.

[00:13:29]Um, I've put about a million dollars into citizen-led organizations all around the country. One of them in Minneapolis, but some of them in South Dakota, in rural North Carolina, just empowering citizens all over the country to take control of this movement. Um, and and and I think that's the right thing to do politically, but I also think it's the right thing to do in this cultural moment. What I talk about in this book is that real happiness and purpose comes from being engaged with your neighbors in common cause that it ultimately feels empty to just work for your own material betterment. And those people in Minneapolis did something exceptional. But I know having talked to many of them that they believe it's the most important thing that they did in their life that has left them leaving fi feeling fulfilled and they are going to do more of that more community action more engagement with community groups in the future. So how do we structure a culture in which we don't wait for a crisis uh for people to step up and serve? One of the ideas I talk about in this book is you know is it time for mandatory national service? Should we, you know, ask every young person in this country to give 6 months um of exercising that selflessness muscle? I think they'd find that it's inspiring, that it's fulfilling, that it feels a lot better than scrolling on your phone or buying the latest upgrade on an iPhone. And it would build a long-term culture in which more people are giving back. More people are caring about the common good. More people are feeling better rather than empty. And less people are susceptible to the demagoguery of somebody like Donald Trump.

[00:15:11]>> And to all the disin I mean it sort of it sort of gets at the root cause. I want to ask you about that. I want to ask you more about your plans for the future. We have to sneak in a quick break before we do that. Um, we're going to talk more though about um action and the people taking action to deal with uh our divisions across our country. Plus, we'll look deeper into last night's results in Texas. And while it was technically a win for Donald Trump's preferred and deeply flawed candidate, there are a lot of people in the Republican party who are saying out loud that they are very worried about the talent of the Texas Democrat who could now very well prevail in the general election in November. Later in the broadcast, we'll look at the voter outrage growing beyond Texas and why Donald Trump and the group of loyalists he's isolated himself with and around are continuing to ignore and dismiss the very vocal concerns of American voters, including many in Trump's political coalition. We'll get to all those stories and much more when Deadline White House continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere.

[00:16:14]Back with Senator Chris Murphy. Senator, you write this. Um, everything in America not nailed down has become a commodity. Even middle school hockey.

[00:16:23]Every minute of our lives is fodder for profit maximization. Maximalization. And when everything exists primarily for someone else's gain, even your child's Saturday afternoon game, it breeds emptiness and resentment. That discontent doesn't stay contained. It spills inevitably into our politics.

[00:16:40]Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of America's spiritual unraveling. Make no mistake, he is no ordinary symptom. He could prove fatal to our 250-year experiment in multicultural democracy. But our nation would make a grave error if we believed we could repair what is broken within us simply by defeating Donald Trump or his successor at the ballot box. No. A deeper rot fers in the American soul. A callousness toward our neighbors. A me for selfishness. A relentless focus on getting mine even if it leaves others behind. Today we worship false cults.

[00:17:13]profit at any cost. Consumerism instead of citizenship, a blind faith in technology, a winner takes all politics that leave us feeling empty and devoid of purpose. Um, I remember reading George Packer's the unwinding back in 2013 and he's one of these folks who kind of was reporting it ahead of it, you know, warning that the disconnection um from one another and from our communities and from our towns and from our churches was go was sort of putting us on this path. I wonder if you think the solution is in a leader. I mean, will you use this book as a launch point for a bigger role for yourself in national politics?

[00:17:56]>> Well, he predicted it and it has come true. I know it may sound a bit controversial for somebody who spends all of his time confronting and opposing Trump to say that Trump is a symptom as much as the cause and that the actual cause is something much deeper. But I think we have to understand the gravity of this moment. We have to beat him at the polls. But we also have to confront what we all feel in our lives. That there's a coldness about our economy and our culture today. The fact that my kids hockey league is owned by a for-profit company that bans parents from live streaming the games for their the kids' grandparents because they've commoditized the streaming service. They literally buy our kids sports and sell it back to us. The fact that work doesn't feel like it has dignity any longer because we are just pawns in a game to make massive amounts of profit for people that we'll never meet.

[00:18:51]Technology that is designed to isolate ourselves and to withdraw our kids from socialization. All of it feels broken.

[00:18:59]And when you feel less meaning and purpose and connection in your life, you seek out these demagogues. So yes, I'm saying that um we have to do both. Beat him and fix the culture. And what I argue in crisis of the common good is that it's a crisis, but the things necessary to regulate technology and build a common good capitalism, those are actually things that right and left have a lot more agreement on. Yeah, they might disagree on climate and abortion and immigration, but there's there's some commonality between right and left on this crisis. Um, yeah, obviously I wrote this book because I, you know, want to be influential in rising this challenge to fix our culture. Um, and you know, it's interesting. I've gotten, you know, a couple texts just in the last 24 hours from um, some of my friends and colleagues who I know are running for president in 2028 who say, listen, I think you've really hit on something. Um, and I text back, well, let's talk about this. Let's do something together. And if we can build this conversation in the left about the spiritual disintegration of the country and what we have to do to build to build a common good to bring Trump's base into this conversation to maybe create a bigger coalition. Well, that would be uh that that that'd be a great success in and of itself.

[00:20:14]>> You're describing a role as in the conversation. Are you ruling out running yourself?

[00:20:20]>> Oh, I don't know what I'll do in the future. I I guess I do want this to be at the center of the conversation. Um I do want us to rise to this moment and I also think that it's kind of inappropriate for anybody to be working on their own political agenda right now.

[00:20:39]As I said, I've spent all the last couple years putting my money like not into an account that I can use to run for future political office. I've been literally putting it all out onto the streets of this country to support citizen- le groups because I just think that that should be what we work on right now is saving our democracy and supporting citizens and like not worry right now about what comes next for each of us personally.

[00:21:02]>> Is the decision to put the money into citizens taking direct action a rejection of the Democratic party structure?

[00:21:12]>> Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I I wish more of my colleagues did what I'm doing. I I mean I don't think all of us need $10 million, $20 million in the bank when our democracy is literally at risk and there are a lot of citizen groups that um badly need money. You know, when these no kings events started popping up, um I found out that there were a lot of really small groups of citizens that like couldn't even find enough money to, you know, rent a stage or a speaker system or get, you know, liability insurance for a protest. And so, you know, I just wrote a check for a big check to those little no kings groups, um, those little indivisible groups all across the country. And yeah, I think we should be doing more of that and maybe putting less of our money into official party structures, at least right now when the democracy seems at risk and it's citizens, not politicians, who have the most legitimacy in fighting back.

[00:22:05]I am very familiar with the voices that were available in the hours after Donald Trump won a second time and yours is one of the few. You were one of the few people who was still speaking out about the dangers his second term represented.

[00:22:21]You were one of the few people communicating directly to voters. you were using your social media sort of direct to camera videos like the one we played in our intro and and I went back and watched some of them um and every single thing you warned about the corruption. I think some of the early ones um after he after the inauguration were about Doge um around the oligarchs around him around every single thing has come to pass. as someone who predicted a lot of what he would do and has already done in year one, what are your warnings about what else what else he'll do in the next three years?

[00:22:56]>> Yeah. I mean, a lot of those warnings that I was issuing in those early days.

[00:23:01]You know, some of my colleagues said, "Hey, tone it down. Like, you're going to scare people." I mean, you're saying that he's trying to rig the election.

[00:23:07]People will give up if they think that there's maybe not going to be a free and fair election. My contention was no, it's exactly the opposite. people in this country aren't ready to give up on democracy. They think it's broken and corrupted, but they're not ready to give up. And so, if we tell them that it's at risk, people will actually show up. And that's exactly what has happened over the last year and a half. I just think we have to level with people about what the stakes are. I mean, make no mistake, um he he's building that ballroom because he doesn't think he's going anywhere. Uh you know, even if he may not run for another term, he thinks his family is going to still be in charge.

[00:23:43]He thinks he's building a a monarchical structure in which he and his family and his cronies never leave the White House.

[00:23:50]And so, yes, um if we don't stand up for our democracy, if we don't win this November, he is going to feel empowered, emboldened. There are going to be more people who are scared of him, more institutions in this country who will fold and it might be the end of our democracy. But that's not where we're heading right now, Nicole. We're heading on a path to actually have a free and fair election. We have defended most of his attempts to try to rig the rules.

[00:24:17]More citizens are involved than ever before. They're making horrible mistakes. And so, as alarmist as I have been, I am optimistic. I'm also optimistic about the stuff I talk about in this book. How do we rebuild the common good? You know what? Church membership is up. There are more independent bookstores being launched.

[00:24:36]Some kids are throwing out their smartphones and starting to use these dumb phones, right? I mean, the common good is something.

[00:24:42]>> It makes you feel hundred years old when they ask you what a start is. You're like, "What?"

[00:24:47]>> I know. I know. But so I The book is about policy that we need to rebuild a sense of common good, a more humanit more communitarian nation. But I also see the same citizens that stood up for our politics and our democracy in Minneapolis starting to say, "You know what? I want to shop at a local retailer. I don't want to spend all of my time online. And so the book in the end is a is a book that gives a positive prescription about how we can beat this guy and build a community in which we care more about each other.

[00:25:19]>> Senator Chris Murphy, someone who has never shied away from these conversations. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. The book is called Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America. It is out right now.

[00:25:32]When we come back, Donald Trump's allout revenge tour against a member of his own party backfiring bigly, only helping to lift up Democrat James Telerico. We'll dig into it with our political panel next.