Ousted Republican Senator Says Trump Likes to “Revel in Chaos”

Outbound Senator John Cornyn is getting candid about Donald Trump.

The former GOP whip described the instability fueled by the White House in a Semafor interview published Monday, lamenting about how talking with the president isn’t “particularly useful” because “he can and will” flip his opinion depending on whoever he last spoke to.

“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,” Cornyn told Semafor. “He just seems to revel in it. We’ve seen even recent evidence of it on the [Director of National Intelligence].”

Cornyn was referring to Trump’s sudden cancellation of a Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton—the president’s pick to run the Office of National Intelligence—via a Truth Social post mere hours before the hearing was set to take place last week.

Trump tapped Clayton earlier this month as DNI in place of acting Director Bill Pulte.

Pulte’s leadership had sparked a maelstrom in Congress. Democrats refused to renew FISA Section 702, a federal spy bill, until Pulte was replaced by someone with legitimate national security experience, as the position requires by law.

Clayton, unfortunately, does not satisfy that requirement either. The former law professor and corporate crisis management counsel has no national security experience to bring to the role.

Yet rather than quell the furor, Trump opted to make the stalemate even more difficult for his congressional allies by tacking his dead-in-the-water voter ID bill, the Save America Act, onto negotiations over the lapsed spy statute.

Cornyn has become a more vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to Trump’s preferred candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: One of the party’s most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races. The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November.

JD Vance blamed Iran’s “trash talk” for nearly torpedoing peace talks on Sunday, after aggressive comments from President Trump caused Iran to pause negotiations.

“What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us millennials might call ‘trash talk,’ you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond, and not to correct the record,” Vance said on Newsmax Monday morning.

As Vance met with Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and other Iranian officials in Switzerland, the president was firing off insults from miles away.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.

The comments were seemingly triggered by Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon, which Iran claims is a violation of the 60-day ceasefire deal.

Trump told Fox News journalist Trey Yingst Sunday morning that he spoke with Iranian officials over the phone about the closure, telling them, “You close it and you won’t have a country … you won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

In response to these comments, Iranian state media declared the talks had been paused.

“They would do better to be careful about their statements,” Qalibaf said after Trump’s comments, according to PBS. “Our armed forces are prepared to respond to them in a different manner. They may keep talking, it is we who act.”

Ultimately, Iranian negotiators did not walk away, and the talks were able to continue. Vance said the talks resulted in “a lot of good progress,” and had laid the groundwork for a final deal. But rather than acknowledge that this progress happened despite Trump’s comments, Vance blamed the Iranians for the holdup. “There was a little bit of threatening, there was a little bit of whining, but at the end of the day the talks continued and we made great progress,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance announced Monday that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would be allowed back into Iran in a “major milestone and a first step in permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.” There’s just one problem.

Speaking at a brief press conference about the “great progress” made in negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend, Vance offered few details about the plan for inspections of nuclear sites.

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. He simply said that IAEA inspectors could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.” Iran has yet to confirm, according to Axios.

The 14-point memorandum of understanding doesn’t add much clarity: The agreement asserts that Iran can not produce or acquire a nuclear weapon, and that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors.

Vance’s supposedly major milestone is already something the U.S. had already won—then lost under Trump.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action included the “most comprehensive and intrusive IAEA weapons inspection system ever negotiated,” according to the Center for International Policy. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, allowing Iran to resume its enrichment program. In January 2020, Iran announced it would no longer place limits on uranium enrichment after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at Trump’s direction.

Following the U.S. and Israel’s military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, the Iranian parliament passed a law suspending its cooperation with the IAEA altogether. In September, Iran agreed to allow the agency’s inspectors back into the country. Inspectors had previously visited Iran as recently as December 2025, but received limited access to the country’s nuclear sites.

It’s not even clear that Vance’s announcement was the product of the weekend’s negotiations.

Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly told U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

Multiple images mocking President Trump and his cabinet have been projected onto walls and sidewalks in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital continues to reject the leadership on Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of the president’s Independence Day celebrations.

One projection near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool depicts Senator Mitch McConnell as a turtle and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a crocodile crawling around in a swamp. Another shows White House adviser Stephen Miller as a bat hanging from the ceiling of the Lincoln Memorial. There’s Senator Ted Cruz depicted as a sex worker wearing “Trump” underwear, Vice President JD Vance as some kind of worm, and old footage of Trump and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein together at an event.

At the Kennedy Center, a two-minute video was projected showing a mugshot of Epstein with the words “No one bends the knee like the GOP,” followed by images of Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled “guardians of pedophiles.” Another Kennedy Center projection showed the letters “Donald” being rearranged into the word “pedo.”

The guerilla art collective VJayBombs, who posted footage of the projections to its Instagram page, is said to be behind the display. The group gained attention earlier this year during Trump’s State of the Union address, when it projected a looped video satirizing the speech onto the Los Angeles Downtown Medical Center.

This isn’t the first time this term that D.C. has seen anti-Trump political art in its public spaces. The anonymous group Secret Handshake placed at least four statues around the city depicting Trump and Epstein together, and someone tried to cut “8647” into the grass on the National Mall last week.

President Donald Trump furiously accused The New York Times of supposedly “treasonous” reporting about his disastrous peace deal with Iran.

In a series of posts on Truth Social Sunday, Trump ranted about the Times after it published an analysis of the president’s war in Iran: “What Changed After Almost 4 Months of War? Analysts Say Not Much.” The article highlighted that Trump’s deal failed to achieve any of his war’s objectives: eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic missile stockpile, annihilating Iran’s navy and security infrastructure, and installing a new regime.

The president disagreed.

“Their Military is DONE, their Navy is GONE, their Air Force is GONE, their Launching Pads, Missiles, Drones and Manufacturing of same, is almost GONE, their top two sets of Leaders are GONE, their Inflation is at 250%, their Economy is BROKEN, their Soldiers aren’t being paid, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN, THE OIL IS GUSHING, and the U.S. Stock Market and Jobs are at record HIGHS,” Trump wrote. “That’s what’s CHANGED, you corrupt and unethical cowards, and MORE!!!”

In reality, Iran shuttered trade through Strait of Hormuz yet again over the weekend, citing Israel’s ceasefire violations in Lebanon.

But Trump didn’t care about any of that. Instead, he shared a post by Senator Lindsey Graham, who echoed the president’s claim that the reporting had revealed the outlet’s “bias.”

“The way the Corrupt and Failing New York Times is covering stories on a very battered and beat up Iran, through FAKE & MADE UP ‘FACTS’ is, in my opinion, ‘TREASONOUS,’” Trump wrote in yet another post.

“I will be adding all of their false and ridiculous reporting to my multi Billion Dollar lawsuit against them. They are Criminals!”

In October, Trump refiled an abridged version of his dismissed $15 billion defamation suit against the Times, alleging that reporters at the paper had sought to undermine his reputation as an entrepreneur and reality television star.