Texas Republicans Siding with Trump
with Silence on Wild Election Claims

Trump Bid to Steal Election Step Toward Facism

Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside
November 21, 2020

Texas GOP leaders and lawmakers have been quiet as church mice on President Donald Trump's push to overturn the general election based on sensational claims about an international conspiracy that it might take James Bond to crack.

Governor Greg Abbott hasn't found the extraordinary challenge to democracy worthy of comment in the past two weeks when he's been distracted by the coronavirus that had another record spike in Texas on Saturday with 12,597 new cases.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick - the Texas campaign chair for Trump - seems to have gone off the grid in the past 10 days after hatching a $1 million reward fund for luring snitches out of the shadows with dirt on President-elect Joe Biden and the Democrats. Patrick hasn't provided any updates since he dropped the bombshell on the bounties on November 11 - offering no subsequent public words of support for the president's epic attempt to hang on to power after being thrown out by the voters this month.

The Republicans here should be hoping and praying that the madness ends with a Trump concession and peaceful transfer of power. The Texas GOP could find its majority in the Legislature to be at risk if Trump prevailed in a development that could prompt the Democrats to decide that they want to control the statehouse instead regardless of the election results.

The Democrats might not expect much resistance from Abbott and fellow Republican lawmakers based on the way they've marched in passive subservience to Trump. But Texas GOP Chairman Allen West's apocalyptic visions could prove prophetic if Trump opened a can of worms that put the Capitol up for grabs in a titans clash that would pit socialist mobsters who've pledged their loyalty to ANTIFA against the Proud Boys and other heavily-armed Trump followers.

But the Republicans here run the risk of looking like cowards if they try to ride out the storm in the safety of a silence that's deafening. Voters should assume that Abbott and GOP lawmakers are backing Trump's attempt to cancel the general election retroactively for all practical purposes until they say otherwise. They're probably mistaking if they think they can have the best of both worlds in a no-win situation.

The Trump campaign endorsements didn't expire on November 3. They are good until publicly rescinded. The question until that point is how long the Republicans in Texas can pretend to ignore the madness without a ruffled feather.

Do Abbott and the Republicans here believe there to be a shred of truth in Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani's breathless account of a scheme to steal the election getting under way with the communist mafia in Venezuela? None of the judges who've heard the ex-New York City mayor's frantic narrative that features links to Cuba and China as well has appeared to take a word of it seriously.

But Guiliani has been peddling the amazing accusations with a whirlwind tenacity - going viral this week at one point when sweaty drops of hair dye were streaking down the side of his face during an interview. The prevailing sentiment on both sides of the aisle in recent days has been that Giuliani - a great American hero on and after 9/11 - has been making a fool of himself and Republicans across the country and clearly needs some rest.