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Political analysts have joked for the last few weeks that members of the Republican Party who have lost their primaries but still have until the end of the year to govern have become part of the informal "YOLO Caucus," meaning "you only live once." According to an exclusive Semafor interview with outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), he has started flexing his voting power to get what he wants before leaving.

In one incident, Cornyn extorted the White House out of funds that his state had been owed for over a year. In 2025, Congress allocated more than $10 billion in funds for border security, but until Cornyn acted, Texas hadn't seen a dime of it.

“Basically, I told Senator Barrasso and Senator [John] Thune: ‘There’s a price for my vote, and it is to get the administration to release the money,’” Cornyn said in his interview with Semafor.

White House Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russel Vought quickly called, promising "we’ll put a notice of funding."

Cornyn, who has been a loyal supporter of Trump's initiatives, voting with him 99.2 percent of the time, but Trump never returned the loyalty, endorsing Cornyn's scandal-plagued opponent, Ken Paxton.

“That’s one example I think of what you can do when you have some cards to play," said Cornyn of his newly discovered powers.

Cornyn is also ready to be a thorn in Trump's side over his appointment of Todd Blanche for the attorney general spot. He said he's not a solid supporter, but he's willing to "listen."

The four-term senator also isn't going to help his opponent. Instead, he's opting to help his friends and allies in tough races in Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire.

“The president picked Paxton, and he’s got $350 million dollars. I think he can spend his money,” Cornyn said of Texas and Trump. “I’m going to try to help in other places.”

Cornyn isn't the first Senator to the mock caucus. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) lost his primary in May after a Trump-supported Republican ousted him. The founder could easily be considered Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who announced he was retiring after a number of public battles with Trump. He has become less fearful of the president's wrath in the past several months.

Cassidy told Semafor that he and Cornyn were "like-minded in the sense that we’re both not returning, and that gives a certain focus. And he’s conveyed he’s got no illusions about the president."

That said, he added, they're not scheming "in a smoke-filled room."

Cornyn frequently spoke to the president while serving as the Majority Whip, but doing so wasn't “particularly useful,” he said. Trump "can and will change his mind depending on the next person he talks to on the phone. The president seems to revel in chaos, which is so different from any other leader that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know about you, but I like to minimize the chaos in my life. He just seems to revel in it. We’ve seen even recent evidence of it on the DNI."

Cornyn went on to mock colleague Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who thinks “somehow we’re going to beat the opponents into submission." By opponents, he means the Democrats. The Texas lawmaker explained to the younger Lee, “I’ve worked here a long time. It doesn’t work that way."

The GOP lawmaker promises he's not a member of the "YOLO caucus"; rather, “I am free to disagree." Before was another matter.

Other than helping fund GOP candidates outside of Texas, he's thinking about possible contenders for the 2028 presidential election. While Cornyn is trying to decide between Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he joked he didn't want to "jinx either one of them."

“But don’t tell Ted Cruz that, because Ted wants to be the next president," he added.

Cruz ran for president in 2016, during which he was outspoken in his opposition to Trump.

GOP senators were quite frustrated when, on Wednesday, June 17, President Donald Trump delayed the nomination of federal prosecutor Jay Clayton for director of national intelligence (DNI) in order to keep Acting DNI Bill Pulte in that position longer. That delay, according to The Hill's Alexander Bolton, underscores growing tensions between Trump and Senate Republicans.

"President Trump's relationship with key Senate Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), is crumbling after repeated clashes over strategy on an array of issues," Bolton reports in The Hill. "The two sides are splitting further apart as the midterm election nears and GOP lawmakers fear the potential loss of both chambers of Congress. GOP senators say there has been a major loss of trust between the president and many members of their conference as the White House has repeatedly blindsided Thune and other Republican leaders."

Another source of frustration for Thune, Bolton notes, is Trump's decision to endorse far-right Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary for Texas' 2026 U.S. Senate race. Paxton won the nomination, and Thune isn't shy about saying that Cornyn would have had a much better shot against Democratic nominee James Talarico.

Cornyn told The Hill, "In my case, there was no real reason given my support for the president's agenda. When he endorsed my primary opponent, people realized you could never do enough to stop the president from endorsing your primary opponent. I think that destroyed what remained of any kind of trust. I think that changed the playing field in a way where you see a lot more what I would call transactional relationships as opposed to one based on trust."

Outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) warns fellow Republicans that Trump is making it easier for Democrats to flip either or both branches of Congress in the 2026 midterms.

Tillis told The Hill, "When we're five months out from a major election (when) we historically have headwinds, you've got to be pitch-perfect and you got to execute with precision. We can't surprise the president and the administration cannot surprise us. Every time we do that between now and November, we're diminishing our chances of holding our majorities."

This Wednesday, June 24, according to Bolton, Trump "will have a chance to discuss his differences with Republican senators in person" and address the Steering Republican Committee at the invitation of its chairman, Sen. Rick Wilson (R-Florida).

"Republican senators are growing more and more frustrated over Trump's unrelenting calls to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to show photo ID when voting, despite the fact that it has already failed five times on the floor," Bolton notes. "Trump surprised Republicans again when he posted on social media Wednesday morning that he would not sign an extension of FISA's enhanced surveillance authorities unless the SAVE America Act is attached to it — something that is a complete nonstarter with Republicans."

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the Immigration Council and a former immigration lawyer, shared a job listing with the Justice Department, which could indicate the future operations of President Donald Trump's administration in Texas.

"DOJ is indeed hiring attorneys whose primary job will be filing eminent domain and condemnation cases to seize private land (mostly in Texas) on which to build [a] border wall," said Reichlin-Melnick on X.

The post reads, "The U.S. Attorney's Office is currently seeking to fill Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) positions in our San Antonio, Texas office to perform legal work pertaining to the establishment of the Border Wall, If selected the individual will be working on land condemnation matters and related cases mostly involving the border with Mexico. Duties will include owners and witness interviews, confirming land titles, property negotiations, and federal eminent domain litigation among other things. Responsibilities will increase and assignments will become more complex as your training and experience progress."

It was first flagged by Big Bend Sentinel reporter Sam Karas, who linked to the USAJobs listing.

"Hadn't thought to trawl USA Jobs for border wall stuff yet –– the DOJ is hiring AUSAs specifically to help with condemnation proceedings. $78k to sue people out of their property to build the wall, with openings in San Antonio, Laredo and McAllen," he wrote on X.

"Based on courthouse geography, I'm guessing the San Antonio person would be in charge of the Big Bend and Del Rio Sectors. That posting closes at the end of the month, so if my guess is correct, they're moving quickly to try to get land deals squared away," Karas added.

Texas residents have been fighting against the federal government's attempt to take privately owned land. In a ruling earlier this month, the Texas state Supreme Court ruled that "state agencies cannot invoke sovereign immunity to block former landowners from reclaiming property taken through eminent domain and later deemed unnecessary for public use."

It's a case that has been bubbling since 2013, when Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) attempted to buy the land to install a new road. The owners pushed back, so the government simply took the land in an eminent domain case. They backed down once the state agreed to pay $1.05 per square foot of the land. There were about 20,000 square feet of land left over from the project, and landowners want that back, but the state refused.

President Donald Trump has long promised to build a large "Wall" that would prevent people from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. That promise became more of an incomplete fence project. That project began in 2006, when former President George W. Bush erected the fences, seizing land for the project and sparking a huge battle between Texas residents and the state's former governor.

Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Ted Brown commented that he opposes eminent domain and "supports the property rights of landowners at the border."

The issue may gain traction among the candidates for the 2026 U.S. Senate election in the state as the midterms near.

Every week, it feels like President Donald Trump’s administration is making a new piece of news about elections. It is investigating past elections in at least four states. It is exploring what feels like every possible avenue to get ahold of voter data in individual states and counties. It is attempting to create new administrative hurdles to mail voting and prioritizing major voting legislation over all else.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

But it all ties back to one thing: the repeated assertions from the president and his allies that noncitizens are voting in significant numbers.

No evidence has emerged to support that. Election officials and experts have repeatedly said those assertions are false and such cases are rare. But they appear to be the animating force behind everything the administration is doing.

Scattered reports that investigators for the Department of Homeland Security are requesting detailed data on individual registered voters confirm the administration’s ongoing focus on finding and prosecuting any such cases.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that the Justice Department was pressing prosecutors to focus on 90 open investigations into potential noncitizens voting as a top priority. Federal prosecutors have already brought some cases against individuals that officials are touting, including one in Louisiana last week.

But despite the administration’s zeal, it isn’t clear how many such cases there are to bring. States have run more than 60 million records of registered voters through a revamped federal immigration database that the administration has encouraged state election officials to use to validate the citizenship of registered voters, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That’s around a third of the voters registered in the U.S., according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Out of those, the department told Votebeat, the system has flagged around 24,000 as potential noncitizens — about 0.04%. All those cases “have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the department said in a statement.

As Votebeat reported in April, the Department of Homeland Security is sending subpoenas to local elections officials in Texas, searching for detailed information about individual voters. Investigators have also contacted at least one county in North Carolina, a development reported last week by Axios.

The Department of Homeland Security said it is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found,” and declined to comment on specific cases.

Twenty-four thousand potential cases sounds like a lot, but election officials have already found that at least some of those potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens.

It also isn’t clear how many of those people have actually voted. Experts across the political spectrum agree that noncitizens who don’t understand the laws may accidentally register to vote, so that in and of itself is not necessarily a sign of intentional fraud. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to questions about how many cases of noncitizen voting the agency has documented, or how many registered voters flagged as potential noncitizens have turned out to be citizens.

But administration officials and those who support the investigations have been quick to dismiss questions about whether the small number of cases means noncitizen voting isn’t a big issue.

Last weekend, CNN anchor Kasie Hunt asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about data from the conservative Heritage Foundation that showed only 25 cases of people being prosecuted for voter fraud where citizenship was an issue.

“Well, 25 is too many,” said Mullin. “It’s kind of like one illegal death, one individual that dies from the hands of an illegal is one too many. It’s all preventable. One person voting illegally is one too many. We shouldn’t have to worry about even one.”

Justin Riemer, president of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, a conservative nonprofit focused on voting issues, agreed with Mullin’s perspective.

“Why is it such a bad thing that they are enforcing federal law?” Riemer said. “To me, any election crime is serious and needs to be prosecuted. I don’t think it’s a good system that this happens, regardless of how often it happens.”

Ken Cuccinelli, who during the first Trump administration was acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said outside investigations are no substitute for federal investigations that have much more authority to examine potential fraud.

“It may be that they bring nothing of it and that will tell us more than anything else, but I suspect that’s unlikely,” he said.

Ultimately, Cuccinelli said, “this is as much about confidence in who is participating in the voter rolls and whether our states themselves are helping, hiding, or hurting the security and transparency of our elections system.”

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the White House on democracy and voting rights issues under Joe Biden, characterized the Trump administration’s search as an unproductive hunt for a “boogeyman” to cast doubt on American elections.

“The notion that noncitizens are voting in elections in sufficient quantities to swing those elections, particularly in statewide contests, is a fiction,” he said.

Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor and author of a book on voter fraud, suggested that the Trump administration investigations were an effort to create “maximum chaos and intimidation” across the country.

“The picture of the federal government sending Homeland Security to investigate is such overkill that you have to believe that they are trying to create a spectacle to intimidate people and go on a fishing expedition using bad data,” she said.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Federal officials have served a subpoena on one of the nation’s leading nonprofit voter outreach groups, which has financially supported the Ohio election advocacy group at the center of a deepening investigation by the Trump administration, according to a source familiar with the probe.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The FBI served the subpoena on America Votes, a Washington-based organization founded by prominent Democratic leaders that works to turn out voters nationwide, the sources said.

America Votes, which has given the Ohio Organizing Collaborative at least $500,000 in recent years, according to its tax filings, issued a statement Wednesday confirming it had received a subpoena “asking for basic records related to funding of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. We have been informed America Votes is not a target of the investigation.”

The subpoena signals a broader FBI investigation into the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a statewide nonprofit group founded in 2007 that works on voting rights efforts. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s sister organization, Ohio Organizing Campaign, said it registered nearly 160,000 Ohio voters in 2024, describing the effort as the largest independent voter registration program in the country.

Prentiss Haney, an Ohio Organizing Collaborative board member and former director of the group, said the FBI appeared to be seeking information from America Votes and other voting rights groups that worked with his organization.

“This is very far reaching,” he said. “They seem to be fishing for any- and everything related to civil rights and voting rights infrastructure.”

The FBI and Justice Department did not respond to emails seeking comment. Last week, FBI special agents searched the Ohio Organizing Collaborative’s offices and questioned staff members and volunteers about potential voter registration fraud, according to Haney and others familiar with the investigation.

Haney said he did not know the full extent of the FBI investigation.

The FBI probe comes amid rising concerns ahead of the November midterm election about Trump administration efforts to question the legitimacy of voting in America. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election. Most recently, he accused Democrats, again without evidence, of rigging results in the California primary earlier this month.

FBI agents have seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election in Fulton County, Georgia, and secured election records in Maricopa County, Arizona.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, has been at the forefront of efforts among elections officials to scrutinize potential voter fraud. Last year, LaRose referred more than 1,200 cases to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, largely related to alleged unlawful voter registration of voting activity. LaRose said he found more than 1,000 noncitizens who had registered to vote, including 167 noncitizens who appeared to have voted in federal elections between 2018 and 2024.

But the figures represent allegations, not yet proven cases. Previous batches of LaRose voter-fraud referrals have produced few prosecutions: AP reported that of 621 criminal referrals sent to Ohio’s attorney general, prosecutors secured indictments against only nine people for voting as noncitizens over a decade.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare across the country and studies, audits, and court cases have found no evidence that it occurs at anything close to the scale needed to alter modern statewide or federal election outcomes except in very unusual cases.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

Jared Kushner's investment fund, Affinity Partners, and its ties to Saudi Arabia not only drew scrutiny from Democrats; even conservative Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) warned that it "crossed the line of ethics." According to Mother Jones' Casey Michel, Kushner was "denied top-secret clearance" — that is, until his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, stepped in and "overruled intelligence officials."

"Of course, it wasn't just Saudi Arabia that saw Kushner as a pliable source of influence," Michel explains in Mother Jones. "The United Arab Emirates, whose own despot had cultivated Kushner years before, began tossing money at Affinity Partners around the same time. So did the Qatari regime, which slipped back into America's good graces as it was helping bail out Kushner's family company. To date, firms linked to the UAE and Qatar have invested at least $1.5 billion in Kushner's fund. With more modest infusions from smaller investors, nearly all foreign, Affinity's asset pool grew and grew, topping $6 billion and generating more than $100 million in management fees for Kushner and his partners…. The investments themselves weren't enough of an ethical hornet's nest, the contracts Affinity signed give the regimes troubling leverage over Kushner."

Michel adds, "They allow investors to pull out after a five-year window, which means Saudi Arabia and Qatar have the power to implode Affinity in the middle of Trump's second term, decimating Kushner’s standing — a financial sword of Damocles that, by extension, dangles over the federal government."

A former White House official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told Mother Jones, "There was a risk the Saudis were playing him."

Michel notes that according to NBC News, Kushner's application for a top-secret security clearance was initially rejected because of fears "about potential foreign influence." But when Trump overruled intelligence officials, Kushner was, Michel reports, granted "access to America's most closely held secrets."

"As MBS (Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman) tucked Kushner further into his pocket," Michel reports, "other regimes tried to replicate the Saudi success. One year into Trump's first term, U.S. intelligence analysts reported that officials from a range of foreign countries had 'privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner,' the Washington Post noted, 'by taking advantage of his complex business arrangements, financial difficulties, and lack of foreign policy experience.' They'd hit on the same conclusion as MBS: Kushner was tractable, and perhaps the best vector for influencing Trump."

Michel continues, "One of those countries was Israel…. Russia had a similar epiphany. Once Trump was sworn in, Kushner became a Kremlin target second only to Trump himself. President Vladimir Putin, federal documents show, tasked businessman Kirill Dmitriev with courting top White House officials, and Dmitriev took a particular interest in Kushner."

According to Michel, "Kushner's assertion" that he "would play no role in a second administration crumbled as soon as Trump returned to power" — and foreign powers have been "quick to recapitalize on his proximity to the throne."

"(Kusner) and his partners are traveling the world, gleefully raking in cash as they cultivate relationships with sordid regimes and kleptocratic leaders in the interest of making a buck," Michel warns. "The world burns, and Jared Kushner gets richer."

Ohio will lose 51,000 jobs and $5.3 billion from the state economy in 2029, according to a new analysis.

That’s the effect that cuts to Medicaid and food assistance under a massive 2025 spending law will have when they’re fully phased in. It’s also the consequence of Republicans allowing Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire at the end of the last year, according to a Commonwealth Fund analysis which was published last week.

Those losses come despite $200 million in rural health money Ohio will get from a fund that Republicans built into the spending bill. The measure was meant to quell concerns that Medicaid cuts could close rural hospitals, the analysis said.

“While the infusion of $10 billion into state economies for rural health contributes to some economic growth, it is overshadowed by the $31 billion in federal funding cuts to ACA marketplaces,” the analysis said.

That’s a reference to pandemic-era subsidies to buy insurance in Affordable Care Act Marketplaces.

When Congress allowed them to expire, most of the 600,000 Ohioans who bought insurance on the exchanges saw premiums for their plans double. That prompted many to drop down to cheaper, lower-quality plans and many more to leave the marketplace altogether. KFF reports that Ohio enrollment was down 20% this year.

Even bigger losses to the state loom when the provisions of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” take full effect, the Commonwealth Fund report said.

The legislation cut more than $900 billion over 10 years from Medicaid. It also cut $187 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps or EBT.

Along with deep cuts to the safety net, Trump’s signature law gave huge tax cuts to the richest Americans. The Commonwealth Fund analysis said it amounted to yet another upward redistribution of wealth.

“Under (the Trump spending law), cuts to health and nutrition programs largely harm Americans with lower incomes, while tax cuts primarily benefit those with higher incomes,” it said.

“The (Congressional Budget Office) estimates that Americans in with lowest 10% of incomes will lose about $1,200 per year (3.1% of their incomes), while those with the top 10% of incomes will gain $13,600 per year (2.7% of their incomes). Other analyses reached similar conclusions.”

The cuts won’t just harm low-income Americans, the analysis said, they’ll damage entire state economies. It’s a consequence of taking away huge streams of funding for healthcare and food.

“In 2029, federal Medicaid funding will drop by $90.9 billion, causing state GDPs to fall by $118.5 billion,” it said.

“Medicaid cuts also mean 996,000 fewer jobs nationwide in 2029, half of which will be health-related, including in hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, or nursing homes. States with the largest job losses include California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, and Michigan, which lose between 150,200 and 36,600 jobs.”

It projected that Ohio will lose the eighth-most jobs — 51,200.

It also said the state will lose $4.4 billion in federal funding, thereby reducing state GDP by $5.4 billion and state and local revenue collection by $368 million.

The largest single measure to produce Medicaid savings in the Trump spending law is a broader, stricter work requirement.

But the Commonwealth Fund report predicted that it will end up making it even harder for recipients to find jobs.

“Proponents of the law explained that the budget cuts were intended to exclude ‘undeserving’ populations from accessing benefits, such as able-bodied people who choose to not work, claiming these changes would ultimately help them gain jobs and incomes,” it said.

“But evidence indicates that work requirement programs do little to increase employment because they fail to address underlying reasons for unemployment. Moreover, by reducing the number of jobs in low-income communities, the new law could make it even harder for people to find jobs.”

The coalition Trump built in 2024 is fracturing, and now even his MAGA base is feeling the pain.

The blue-collar supporters who have long aligned themselves with the Trump base are beginning to abandon him as he's failed to make good on economic promises, The Guardian reported on Monday.

Those who once gave Trump strong support are now frustrated by rising costs, weak economic results, and a growing sense that his policies are not improving their lives. The shift comes months before the 2026 midterm elections, where Republicans are depending on such voters to keep them in power.

The report cited 2024 numbers showing "Trump won 66 percent of white voters without a college degree." That has changed, according to a new CBS News poll, which "found that 54 percent of that demographic disapprove of his performance. That was up from 45 percent disapproval in February (before Trump began bombing Iran) and up sharply from 32 percent in February 2025."

New data suggests that the slippage is coming most sharply from white working-class and lower-income voters rather than the more affluent voters.

The larger problem for the GOP is that these voters aren't merely abandoning Trump; there is a deeper erosion of trust among voters who felt like Trump understood their economic plight more than Democrats. Blue-collar voters have traditionally been supporters of Democrats. But now, that base, including union workers, has gone full MAGA.

Trump has spent most of his first 17 months in office claiming that economic affordability was nothing more than a "Democrat hoax" and a "con job." At one point, he went so far as to claim that Democrats "made up the word affordability."

When Trump was running for office in 2024, he promised lower gas prices and lower food prices. At one point, he did a press conference with a table full of food items and gushed about the word "groceries."

Instead, voters now "face painful 4.2 percent inflation, the highest rate in three years," The Guardian continued. "Trump has utterly failed on another important promise to blue-collar Americans: to increase manufacturing jobs. Ever since Trump returned to office, the number of factory jobs has declined by 68,000. As for Trump’s promise not to begin any foreign wars, many blue-collar Americans are furious that he launched his unsuccessful war against Iran, which, to their huge dismay, has pushed up gasoline and grocery prices."

One loyal Trump supporter in Ohio, Peggy Liff, talked about how excited she was for lower inflation in the first three months of the new administration. After Trump announced his trade war, however, inflation increased. It hasn't been that low ever since and is now on the rise.

“He’s concentrating on other things, like overseas, Iran,” she told The Washington Post. “He says he’s doing it for us, but I don’t see where that’s happening.”

That said, The Guardian explained, those voters aren't ready to return to Democrats; instead, they're thinking of staying home in November.

The negotiations to end the US-Iran war, resulting in the signing of a memorandum of understanding on June 17, have been something of an acid test of Donald Trump’s approach to diplomacy. What does it tell us? And has this US president changed the way diplomacy is done?