President Donald Trump has kicked off the Fourth of July with attacks on two up-and-comers within the Democratic party.
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In a late-night post to Truth Social, the president shared an image of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff alongside a picture of Pee-wee Herman, the character portrayed by the American comedian Paul Reubens in several 1980s movies.
Trump later followed up with a comparison between Texas State Representative James Talarico-the Democratic Nominee for the state’s 2026 Senate election-and Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon boy who features on the cover of MAD magazine.
No caption accompanied the two side-by-side images, which were launched against two Democrats whose profiles have been rising within the party and nationwide.
Polls show that Ossoff holds a commanding lead over Representative Mike Collins in the Georgia Senate race, with the latest data from Fox Newsgiving him a 13-point advantage over the Republican challenger. Talarico, meanwhile, appears locked in a tighter contest with Ken Paxton, the Trump-backed Texas Attorney General who defeated incumbent Senator John Cornyn in May’s primary.
Trump’s History with Ossoff
In recent weeks, and following the launch of the Iran war in particular, Ossoff has emerged as a major critic of Trump and the administration.
“Because of his war and his tariffs, inflation rose to over 4 percent,” the senator said during a recent campaign rally in Savannah. “He promised to bring down prices on day one. Do you remember that? Do y’all know what today is? Today is day 524 and groceries, rent, and health care are at their all-time highs in American history.”
During the same event, Ossoff said that if the country’s founders were to return today, they would see “a nation that, at the height of its wealth and power, fell into the very traps they most feared-devouring itself in bitter conflict between warring factions captured by special interests.”
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“And they’d see a faithless president exploiting this rot to pursue the absolute power they overthrew,” he added. “A president who’s embarked on this unmistakable project not to lead us, but to rule us.”
And after Collins, who secured an 11th hour endorsement from the president, won his primary runoff in mid-June, Trump took to Truth Social to voice his confidence that the Republican representative would defeat “Os(jerk!)off,” whom he called “a pathetic failed Dumocrat Senator.”
Talarico has largely dismissed the public insults from Trump as well as Paxton, telling MS NOW in June that “people across the spectrum, across the state, are tired of this ‘politics as professional wrestling.'”
“You got these old guys lathered up in their fake tan, throwing corny nicknames at each other,” Talarico added. “And those corny nicknames, they don’t lower the price of groceries, they don’t lower the price of gas.”
Despite Texas’s long Republican streak in statewide elections, polling indicates that the party may be in with a chance of flipping the Senate seat.
The latest New York Times/Siena College survey had the pair tied at 47 percent, though other June polls from the University of Texas and Quantus Insights have given Paxton a slight lead.
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