May 19, 2026, 12:59 PM EDT / Updated May 19, 2026, 1:01 PM EDT The NAACP launched a campaign Tuesday calling on Black student-athletes to boycott Southern colleges in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last month that weakened the Voting Rights Act, leading to the dismantling of one majority-Black congressional district and a push to scrap others. “The NAACP will not watch the same institutions that depend on Black athletic prowess to fill their stadiums and their bank accounts remain silen ...

President Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the state’s Republican Senate primary, a reversal of his earlier plan to endorse Sen. John Cornyn — and a victory for Trump’s MAGA base. Trump announced his endorsement of Paxton over Cornyn, the 23-year incumbent, after waffling for months on how to proceed. The runoff election between the two men is next week, and early balloting has already begun. Trump’s political advisers and top Senate leadership in Washington had urged ...

Addendum quietly slipped into widely criticized agreement creating a $1.7bn fund to compensate president’s allies The justice department quietly added a provision barring the IRS from auditing Donald Trump’s tax returns on Tuesday, amending a widely criticized agreement that creates a secretive and loosely controlled $1.776bn fund to compensate allies of the president. The addendum, signed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, says the government is “forever barred” and “precluded” fro ...

05/19/26 6:00 AM ET Republicans see President Trump’s sagging approval ratings as a major problem heading into the midterms. Their fears are underscored by a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday showing Trump’s approval ratings hitting new second-term lows as voters expressed anxiety about inflation, gas prices and U.S. involvement in the war in Iran. While GOP leaders are projecting confidence publicly, Republicans privately fear that rising costs mostly stemming from the ongo ...

-snip- Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs. -snip- This shift means that “searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. Instead, people will focus more on acting on the inf ...

(New York Times) The top lawyer at the Treasury Department stepped down on Monday in the wake of the creation of a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" that could soon make payments to President Trump's political allies, according to three people familiar with the move. Brian Morrissey, the Treasury's general counsel, resigned from the position seven months after he was confirmed to it by the Senate and just hours after the Trump administration announced the fund on Monday.

(Huff Post) Fresh after news that Trump’s Department of Justice plans to create a $1.7 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to sponsor so-called victims of political “lawfare,” Raskin told The Daily Beast there is nothing more critical than cracking down on the administration’s array of grifts during the site’s Sunday podcast. “We’ve never seen abuse like the kind of abuse that has taken place under Donald Trump,” he said, accusing the president of using legal loopholes and a “shadow government” to help his “personal wealth skyrocket during the second term.”

(ABC News) A former prison guard who was on duty at the federal Metropolitan Corrections Center in New York when convicted Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019 testified Monday that the late sex offender received "special treatment" at the jail, two members of the House Oversight Committee said. Democratic Reps. Suhas Subramanyam of Virginia and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico said Tova Noel testified that Epstein received extra bed linens and a CPAP machine, and had access to "medications in a way no one else did."

(Raw Story) President Donald Trump privately demanded that Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. According to NOTUS, "President Donald Trump pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she ruled Republicans could not include funding for the president’s ballroom in a budget bill, two sources familiar with the request told NOTUS." However, Thune is adamantly refusing to get rid of MacDonough, who was first appointed as the Senate rules referee in 2012 and has often frustrated majorities in both parties.

(Mediaite) President Donald Trump reportedly suggested the United States, China, and Russia should unite against the International Criminal Court during closed-door talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week. The proposal emerged during wide-ranging conversations between the president and the Chinese leader that also touched on Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Trump argued the three powers shared common interests in opposing the ICC, which his administration has repeatedly accused of overreach and politicization, according to the report.