Ken Paxton TRASHES Trump - on tape

Pete Hegseth summoned the military brass back to Marine Corps Base Quantico on Wednesday for a “State of the Force” address, and said this into a microphone:

“Simple translation of that: no fatties, no tr*nnies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors.”

He also bragged about the generals he’s already pushed out. “The number crunchers say we fired 10% of the generals and admirals across the force, and that number sounds about right.” Now he’s eliminating another 10% of general and admiral positions on top of that.

Hegseth calls it “accountability.” As for reporters who call it a purge, he said their coverage was “un-American; it’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason, actually.”

Then came Project Meridian, a 120-day study of “the battlefields of the future,” to be co-led by Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich.

Musk’s SpaceX launches satellites for the government. Luckey founded Anduril, which recently landed Pentagon contracts for long-range missiles and semi-autonomous fighter jets. Their job now is to recommend what the military should build next. Their companies happen to build it.

None of the three ever served. Gingrich, 83, sat out Vietnam on deferments and later admitted, “a large part of me thinks I should have gone over.”

This all comes with midterms just one month away. Make of that what you will.

South Carolina was supposed to be a lock for Republicans. Instead, Darline Graham is clinging to a one-point lead over Dr. Annie Andrews, and the GOP is starting to panic.

Graham was appointed in July to finish her late brother Lindsey’s term, after Trump recommended her for the job. Now, she’s in a desperately close race to keep it. A new poll of likely South Carolina voters has Graham up just one point over Andrews, a pediatrician. In late August, an Abacus Data poll had Graham up 13.

“I’m a pediatrician, not a politician. But either way I know how to handle people who are full of sh*t,” Andrews has said. She leads in every age group under 50.

Annie Andrews can win this, but not on her own.

Trump's super PAC dropped $827,000 on Darline Graham in a single day just to get her through the runoff.

She’s not getting the help she needs from the establishment — Chuck Schumer has put Kansas and Mississippi higher on the list, and Senate Majority PAC says it's still "watching this race closely."

Cook Political Report just moved this race toward Democrats, and the latest poll has it at one point. A race this close comes down to which candidate can afford to keep reaching voters.

Donate $10 to Annie Andrews on ActBlue and help take back the Senate →

Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital Wednesday night. More than an hour later, her lawyers said she still had a heartbeat and was “audibly snoring.”

An AP reporter in the witness room said Pike “appeared noticeably awake as the execution began.” At 8:53 p.m., media witnesses were ordered out. Emergency vehicles took her to a nearby hospital.

Gov. Bill Lee has now suspended every execution for the rest of 2026 and ordered a “comprehensive, third-party review.” The Department of Correction says its team “followed state protocol.”

Pike, now 50, was 18 when she and two others tortured and killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. She would have been the first woman Tennessee executed in roughly 200 years.

She had asked for a firing squad instead, citing childhood sexual abuse, PTSD, and small veins that could make an IV hard to place. Tennessee doesn’t allow firing squads.

Back in August, WSMV reported that the doctor overseeing her execution, Dr. Mark Fowler, also oversaw Tony Carruthers’ execution attempt in May, when staff couldn’t get an IV in for over an hour. Fowler admitted in a deposition he hadn’t placed a central line in more than a decade.

Tennessee kept him on the job anyway.

Nine months after taking office, Zohran Mamdani finally has clearance from the Trump administration to see classified threats against the city he runs. He confirmed it Wednesday. Until then, his police commissioner and chief counsel read the files and he got the summary. That included the stretch in March when Trump launched strikes on Iran.

The same president once threatened to arrest Mamdani. He has also stripped clearances from Letitia James and Alvin Bragg for investigating him.

On September 21, he sat down with Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. Nine days later, the clearance came through. City Hall says it never came up.

Whatever is going on between these two, it's the strangest relationship in American politics. We broke it down in our new video.

The Trump administration just launched America.gov, an AI chatbot meant to help Americans find government services and information. Within days, it was reprogrammed to stop contradicting the president.

Asked whether widespread voter fraud changed the 2020 election, it used to say: “No. Official findings did not show widespread voter fraud that changed the 2020 presidential election result.”

Now it says: “I do not provide political commentary.”

Budget expert Bobby Kogan asked it whether the tax law made the poorest Americans poorer and the richest richer. The bot’s answer was one word: “Yes.” Now it says, “I do not provide political commentary or assessments of how legislation affected income groups.”

It used to cite the Congressional Budget Office estimate that 10.4 million people will lose health insurance by 2034. It used to cite a Lancet study estimating 4.5 million additional deaths of children under five by 2030 from USAID cuts.

Now: “I do not provide political commentary or estimates of deaths from legislation.”

At the launch event on Tuesday, Trump needed Dr. Oz’s help to sit down.

The Republican coalition is not holding.

At a private Washington fundraiser last Thursday, Texas AG and Senate nominee Ken Paxton was asked if Trump was “a little bit of a drag.” Someone in the room was recording, and the tape went to the New York Times.

“So to be honest with you, the numbers—when we did that convention—it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped. Right now, yeah, not good.”

That’s Trump’s handpicked candidate, talking about Trump’s Dallas midterm convention. Democrat James Talarico’s campaign reported $31.6 million to Paxton’s $9.3 million in recent quarterly filings.

In West Virginia, Sen. Jim Justice, a Trump ally, broke with the White House on immigration, warning that “all of a sudden, then you’re dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years, and I don’t know that we need to be doing that stuff.”

His advice to the administration: “we probably got to step back from it and say, ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there.’” He has since tried to walk it back.

Then there are the voters. Jessica Cantu Vuittonet, a Hispanic Texan, voted for Trump believing he’d go after serious criminals. Her brother was detained days after a scheduled immigration check-in.

“They betrayed me, they turned their backs on us. Nobody cares about us here, I see that now clearly.”

Patrick Keating, a conservative Texas dad, backed Trump too. Now his Honduran wife, Anyi Hernandez-Escobar, the mother of their two kids, is facing deportation. An immigration judge refused to close her case, thanks to a June agreement between Ken Paxton and the Trump administration that killed a Biden-era policy.

“If I could go back, if my vote would somehow change everything, I’d go back and vote Kamala.”

The voters are just now getting the memo.

South Park’s latest episode, “Billionaire Weenietown,” turns the billionaire class into squeaky-voiced talking penises, with nods to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

“This is some new strain of billionaire,” one character says. “They like to go on podcasts and get into public arguments with Mark Ruffalo.”

The finale is a deepfake of Trump on the toilet while his midterm campaign ad plays. When the audio ends, cartoon Trump lets out loud bathroom sounds, sings about how rich he is, and blasts off like a rocket.

Characters keep promising that things will “get better” in November. Officially, they’re talking about the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.