The Future of the Republican Party After Trump Is in Texas

New polling shows the Republican Party could be headed for a midterms wipeout, with voters seeming to prefer Democrats even on time-tested GOP issues like the economy and foreign policy. Donald Trump continues to deteriorate before our eyes—ever-more rambling, conspiratorial, and covered in cosmetic touch-ups. It’s the sort of stuff that might make you start to wonder about political life after Trump. But before we get too sanguine, I’d like to direct our attention to Texas and its Republican Party, which I believe currently offers the best picture of what the GOP will most likely look like in a post-Trump world. 

In Texas, one of the nation’s most draconian abortion bans strips women of their agency and safety. Republican candidates and officeholders are mired in corruption scandals and gobsmacking displays of personal bigotry and cruelty. Contempt for American democracy abounds. And the best of this lot only manage tepid paeans to decorum without anything that shows the courage of their stated convictions. 

Let’s start with the man of the hour: Bo French. French, the head of the Tarrant County Republican Party (Fort Worth), put himself in the news last week when he bemoaned the ethnic makeup of a crowd of UT Longhorns fans. As French put it, captioning a still image of the largely 18-to-22-year-old crowd of ecstatic Texas fans:

I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.

The problem, as French sees it, is clearly the mere existence of Texans with South Asian heritage. That’s it. That’s the entire message. French has been unapologetic in the aftermath, telling a radio interviewer:

I think that the bigger conversation is, are we going to have policies to prioritize Americans and the exceptionalism that I believe Americans have, or are we going to have policies that prioritize foreigners? I think most people in the America First movement think we ought to be prioritizing Americans.

Brown people are obviously not American. Students at the University of Texas who don’t look the way French would like are counted as foreigners. This isn’t sloppy. This is the natural endpoint of the blood-and-soil nationalism that has overtaken the GOP. There’s little in French’s comments that can’t be found in statements by Stephen Miller or JD Vance. 

Texas Republicans have been lukewarm at best in their rebukes of French. John Cornyn supplied some of the sharpest criticism. But he is on his way out, beaten in his primary by Ken Paxton, and Paxton has chosen to stay silent on French. 

And as for Paxton, if some Texas Republicans are mildly uncomfortable with French’s naked bigotry, we shouldn’t forget that the party came around on Paxton’s own misdeeds. He survived a 2023 impeachment fight, in which sixty Republicans in the Texas House voted to impeach. Sadly, the Texas Senate acquitted him, with only two of eighteen Republicans voting to convict on any specific article and none at all on some. Paxton is lecherous, bigoted, corrupt, and utterly graceless in his self-comportment. As Texas Attorney General, Paxton has waged one of the most illiberal, dehumanizing, and merciless campaigns against trans rights seen anywhere in the country. Understanding all of this, Texas Republican primary voters vaulted him over sitting Senator John Cornyn. As I’ve argued before, Paxton is emblematic of the new Republican candidate. He is, if nothing else, a man of his time. 

Lest you think either Paxton or French is the most egregious candidate for federal office running in Texas this cycle, consider the case of Brandon Herrera. In the past, on his podcast, Herrera derided Shannon Watts and her gun control organization Moms Demand Action for their activism to prevent school shootings. In a display of ogreish misogyny and callous disregard for human life Herrera said,

Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.

The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit they you say.

Herrera and French are pigs. They’re racists and male supremacists who embody the vulgar, fascist populism of the current GOP. We are only going to see more like them. But they’re hardly outliers right now. The tragedy is not that a diverse crowd of young people represents Texas in 2026 but rather that the rank bigotry and misogyny of Herrera and French are an exact portrait of the contemporary Texas GOP. The Texas Republicans are institutionally rotten, and that can be seen at the highest levels of politics. 

At the state level, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick have enjoyed the sort of power with impunity Trump only dreams of. Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border initiative has drawn widespread condemnation from civil and human rights groups for its brutal, ostentatious cruelty. As refugee rights campaigner Melina Roche argued in 2023:

“We were already shocked and appalled by the razor wire and buoy barriers, denial of water, and pushbacks of children into the river. With Texas troopers separating families at the border, the world can now see that Governor Abbott’s cruelty knows no bounds. The Governor will continue to punish families for seeking safety unless the federal government intervenes.”

Patrick is waging his own high-profile culture war fight, recently declaring “We’re coming for the books.” Patrick has said he’ll work to penalize school districts that fail to remove questionable books and then released a list of over 2,000 titles marked as unfit for school libraries. The list includes Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Elie Wiesel’s Night, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Aside from such acts of authoritarianism, Patrick is also a corrupt and self-ingratiating opportunist. He recently appeared to abuse Texas, Texas Tech, and Texas A&M’s protected brand identities in an AI-generated campaign ad. 

At the federal level, everyone’s favorite podcaster, insurrectionist, and sometimes-Senator Ted Cruz has distinguished himself as a craven enabler of Trump and a willing participant in the ransacking of American democracy. Cruz famously hid in a closet as the mob he helped Donald Trump to incite stormed the Capitol seeking to murder his colleagues. Cruz momentarily called January 6 a “terrorist attack” before disavowing those words. This week, Jim Geraghty mused at National Review that 2028 could see Cruz or some other “traditional conservative presidential candidate” take the Republican nomination. It’s a gormless, insipid bit of fantasy because no such type exists. The GOP is made up wholly of people who either believe in the destruction of our democracy or who are willing to go along with it for personal gain, a distinction without a difference. And Cruz, rather than offering anything like an alternative to that, perfectly symbolizes its moral degeneration. 

Texas is big. Its Democratic base dwarfs their counterparts in smaller, bluer states. Joe Biden received over five million votes there in 2020! And its cities, especially Houston, are incredibly diverse. However, Texas is also home to not only a strong religious right and a ruthless Republican Party but to other key constituents in the new, fascistic era of the GOP: MAHA influencers and tech oligarchs. 

As Isabella Cueto observed for Stat News, Texas “has become a testing ground for a spate of health-related legislative efforts in recent months.” I think Cueto does well to capture the idiosyncrasies of how Austin in particular, the state’s slightly quirky and once-overlooked capital, became a magnet city for a certain type of politics in the 2020s:

In some ways, Texas’ turn to MAHA has been a long time coming, starting in its capital: Austin. Beyond the state’s conservative bona fides, the city has long had a reputation for doing things its own way—and an overall high quality of life—that in recent years attracted tech workers and other wealthy Californians fleeing liberal politics and income taxes. Many descended on Austin during the Covid pandemic. 

Austin and its surrounding region have become the home for tech moguls and influencers looking to flee California’s regulatory environment and make a political statement at the same time. Joe Rogan moved to town during Covid, looking for “a little more freedom,” and setting up a comedy empire alongside his podcasting one. Jason Calacanis and David Sacks, two of the tech-bro handmaidens to fascism who host the insufferable All-In podcast, have also decamped to Austin. 

Most notably, Elon Musk recently relocated his social media platform X from California to central Texas, about half an hour east of Austin. Texas also plays host to Musk companies like SpaceX and the Boring Company. Musk’s Texas move is tied up in disdain for both the regulatory and cultural realities of California. In 2024, outraged by a California law barring school staff from outing trans children to their parents, Musk declared, “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.” In the meantime, X has become a hotbed of AI-generated CSAM and revenge porn content. 

Of course, Texas—and, more specifically, Austin—had already produced one of the defining voices of the Trump era well before Silicon Valley creeps and MAHA types began immigrating. Alex Jones got his start on radio, public access television, and later online in the Austin of the 1990s and early 2000s. This was a time when his tinfoil mania was less coherently partisan and more of a part with the kind of disaffected milieu not uncommon to creative, alternative-culture cities like Austin. 

Now, I want to offer a silver lining. What’s also happening in Texas is that Republicans have made a number of races competitive that Democrats usually have little hope of winning. They’ve squandered a right-leaning electorate and a cultural grip on the issues in ways that mirror how we could see the national GOP falter. Ken Paxton is narrowly trailing James Talarico, who would be the first Texas Democrat elected to the Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Greg Abbott faces a bonafide contest against Gina Hinojosa in his bid to serve a fourth term as governor. And so it’s with both apprehension and a bit of hope that I say Texas is the future of the Republican Party. 

Featured Image is Estan Calientes, by Francisco Goya