Texas Republican Candidates Need Donald Trump More Than He Needs Them
About thirty minutes into Donald Trump’s speech Saturday night at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Conroe, north of Houston, the former president stopped playing the familiar rhetorical hits and a curious thing happened: many in the crowd began to leave. For the first half of his speech, Trump had kept the tens of thousands in his audience enraptured. He had been railing against Biden administration border policy and vaccine mandates (while extolling his administration’s program to expedite vaccine development), when he suddenly turned to the ostensible purpose of his visit: endorsing a dozen or so Texas GOP candidates ahead of their March 1 primaries. But as he began to talk about the first recipient of his blessing, Governor Greg Abbott, the energy of the audience waned. The bleachers flanking the former president thinned, like the throngs of festivalgoers in 1965 had when Bob Dylan went electric. The crowd had come for something else.
One man wearing a “Let’s Go Brandon” sweat shirt remarked to his friend, who’d donned a “Let’s Go Brandon” ball cap, that they knew what Trump was going to say from here on out and should try to beat the traffic out. An elderly woman, who had been sitting in a folding seat about fifty yards from where Trump loomed on the stage, remarked that she had been waiting to use the bathroom for more than six hours in order to save her seat, and now was the time to make her break. They’d come to celebrate their devotion to Trump, after all. Texas has primaries coming up on March 1, but those were earthly matters; Trump could speak to their souls.
Indeed, the event was a reaffirmation of the hold Trump has on Texas politics. The whole grounds had the feel of a music festival, as Houston Chronicle writer Jeremy Wallace noted. Those attendees who had not, like some, started camping at the festival grounds 36 hours before Trump took the stage shared snacks and chargers with one another, and lit up cigars to pass the time in the two-hour line of vehicles to get in. Merch tables lined the entrance to the grounds, with items bearing messages ranging from the messianic (images of Trump alongside Jesus) to the action-heroic (the forty-fifth president as Sly Stallone’s Rambo or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator). Parents brought toddlers, and teddy bears with Trumpian haircuts for them to play with; truck decals on countless autos warned of both the Q revolution and “baby cowboys” on board. One grandparent got up from his seat when Trump took the stage so that his elementary-school-age granddaughter could stand on it and “see something she’ll remember for the rest of her life.” Only a few were not there to worship: outside the entrance gates, an evangelical preacher warned that the crowd was forsaking God in its complete devotion to Trump—and received a chorus of heckles and curse words.
As much as the event was a celebration of Trump, it also threatened to be a rejection of the governor. Many right-wingers in the audience felt betrayed by his border policy, which they view as too migrant-friendly; a few opposing campaigns had plans to stir up audience members to heckle him. At the head of the main road to the festival grounds, a Trump 2024 broadside was obscured by a hand-painted canvas reading “Abbott Is a Lying RINO.” And outside the entrance gates, the audience could pose for photos with a handful of cardboard cutouts—MyPillow CEO and election conspiracist Mike Lindell, Melania Trump, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis—but not Texas’s leader.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-gop-trump-rally/
