The State of Texas: A Report from the Republic of Abbott

By James Moore

I have spent so much time of late sitting in stunned silence at the idea our president is a pedophile and is enabled by the U.S. congress that I’ve stopped scrutinizing the horrors manifest in this state by our governor. But I’ve not ended my cataloguing and observing the absurdities and violations of normalcy affected by Greg Abbott, who says he wants yet another term. He wants to be elected to fix things but everything broken has gone to hell on his watch and with Republicans in full control of state government. Why would anyone vote for him? If you are contemplating supporting the man, consider this a “State of the Union” message for Texas, one that he has not written but an honest report of what has transpired under Republicans and Abbott in this once-mythical land.

There are days when I think Texas is still a republic, a sprawling, contradictory nation-state where political leaders behave as if Washington is a foreign capital and Texans are their personal subjects. And then there are days when I see Greg Abbott on television and realize we’re not a republic at all; we’re just somebody’s stage set. We are governed by a man who confuses power with spectacle and cruelty with resolve. Greg Abbott has made the governorship into a long-running piece of performance art, and if you measure success by headlines, Fox News hits, or applause from Mar-a-Lago, you’d think he’s leading some grand crusade. He’s not, and the people paying the cost are the ones living with those decisions, not making them.

Texas, in Abbott’s third term, is a place where political contradictions have become the governing philosophy. And as he gears up for an unprecedented fourth term, we’d better understand what those contradictions cost us, morally, financially, and structurally.

Let’s start with redistricting, which has always been a dark art in Texas, but Abbott has turned it into a kind of political taxidermy, posing a dead idea of democracy so that it still looks alive. I reported on legislative redistricting in Texas for the first time in 1980 when political disagreements were settled over hand-drawn maps and demographic reports. When Donald Trump demanded a mid-decade map, though, Abbott complied like a man accustomed to receiving orders from an employer, and journalists were kept at a distance. Trump’s request was not subtle, either. He told Abbott and his party’s officeholders to carve out five new Republican seats before the 2026 elections and solidify a House majority that might return Trump to the apex of American power, and never worry about the disenfranchisement of minority voters.

Abbott did not even pretend to hesitate. He called a special session, redrew the maps, and then held a signing ceremony with all the triumphalism of a man releasing a new constitution. The hypocrisy of Trump, meanwhile, suing California for its own redistricting while orchestrating Texas’s partisan overhaul would be comical if it weren’t so corrosive. Only in this political moment of weaponized grievance could a man demand loyalty in one breath and denounce the same political maneuver in another without blinking. Abbott didn’t blink either. And Texans will live with the consequences, because representation in this state now bends toward the will of a man who doesn’t live here and a governor who cannot say no to him.

If the redistricting circus is Abbott’s tribute to Trump’s political ambitions, Operation Lone Star is the governor’s personal monument, an eleven-billion-dollar exercise in militarized theater. It’s the kind of project that, in the old Texas, would have required a special session, a dozen studies, and a parade of county commissioners begging for reimbursement. In the Abbott era, it needs only a press conference, some razor wire, a few deputies shipped 400 miles south, and a press release that proclaims “crisis.”

We’ve reached the point where Abbott is essentially running a parallel federal immigration system. He arrests migrants for trespassing. He seizes land. He builds walls on private property after threatening eminent domain. Then he buses people to Washington, New York, and Chicago as though they were unwanted Amazon returns. And the absurdity compounds itself because Abbott has sent Texas National Guard troops to Chicago to help law enforcement arrest the very migrants he shipped there. It would be slapstick if it weren’t so cruel, if families weren’t the props, if tax dollars weren’t the price of admission.

Operation Lone Star has not made Texans safer nor has it slowed migration. It has not solved anything. What it has done is divert billions from education, health care, rural infrastructure, and public-sector wages into a program calibrated to impress exactly one audience, which is the man whose endorsement Abbott covets more than his own citizens’ futures.

What has been sacrificed for this state to be a Trump supplicant? Texas is not just the nation’s leader in uninsured people, it is the capital of preventable suffering. Abbott’s refusal to expand Medicaid is one of the most expensive, punitive, and irrational decisions any governor has made in modern American politics. More than 5 million Texans lack health insurance. Over 1.1 million children have no coverage. Nearly 22% of adults walk around praying nothing catastrophic happens because they know a single ambulance ride can force them into bankruptcy. And in the places where health care is already fragile, out in the rural counties where the lights dim early and hospital wards echo with emptiness, more than two dozen hospitals have closed on Abbott’s watch. Labor and delivery units are shutting down like small-town hardware stores at the end of the highway.

These are not failures of policy; they are the children of neglect. Abbott could change this with a signature. He chooses not to. The federal government has offered Texas money to expand Medicaid and it is cash that every other modern state has accepted. Abbott, though, turns it away while spending billions on razor wire and military deployments. If Texas were an abstract idea, maybe this would be philosophical. But Texas is not abstract. It is populated by people who need medicine, children who need insulin, seniors who need cardiology appointments 20 miles closer than the nearest county line. Abbott governs as if the poor exist only in speeches and budgets, not in emergency rooms and waiting lists. To him, the poor don’t seem to exist at all.

But he’s about to create a bigger population of poor by destroying the state’s public education system. Abbott’s new scheme to redirect public money into private-school vouchers, which his advisors wrapped in the euphemistic packaging of “Education Savings Accounts,” is another case study in ideological optimism versus fiscal reality. He promises families choice, but what he delivers is a slow bleed-out of the public school system. The first-year cost is projected around $1 billion, but every credible analysis predicts a ballooning obligation approaching $5 billion within a half-dozen years. Arizona tried the same experiment and found itself staring at a $1.4 billion budget hole almost overnight. Abbott, naturally, insists Texas will not suffer the same fate. But Abbott also insisted Operation Lone Star would “pay for itself,” and that has been as untrue as almost every campaign promise he has ever uttered into a microphone.

The truth is simpler. Vouchers are a gift to private schools, a nod of gratitude to donors, and a quiet abandonment of the teachers who keep the state’s economic future afloat. While Abbott waves checks at private academies, he insists he cannot afford across-the-board teacher raises. He claims the state simply doesn’t have the money, which is an hilarious assertion from the man who spent $11 billion on a border performance piece and billions more cutting taxes that largely benefit commercial property holders even as the state retains tens of billions in a rainy day fund.

In the arithmetic of Abbott’s Texas, teachers are always the remainder.

Texas homeowners are frustrated, too, angry, and overburdened, and Abbott has spent three terms telling them he’s working on it. He hasn’t. What he’s done is master the oldest trick in Texas politics; he cuts taxes at the state level and forces local governments to pick up the slack. School districts get hit hardest. The state trims its share of school funding; districts must raise property taxes to compensate. Abbott then claims credit for “state tax cuts” while criticizing school boards for raising their rates. The governor gets applause; the school trustees get angry phone calls.

Highways tell the same story. Texas has not raised its gas tax since 1992. In the meantime, roads have multiplied, congestion has worsened, and construction costs have soared. So what does Abbott and Texas Republicans do? They privatize the roads and bury the cost in tollways. A public obligation gets shifted into a private revenue stream. If you’re a commuter, you’re now paying a silent gas tax every morning and every evening; only now it goes to a private company, not a public treasury.

This is governance by misdirection when you privatize the expenses, socialize the blame, and then tell voters they should be grateful.

Abbott’s relationship with Trump, meanwhile, is less alliance than submission. When Trump says “Jump,” Abbott asks his staff to build a wheelchair ramp to the nearest trampoline. His supplication to Trump has brought Texas lawsuits, redistricting manipulation, and alignment with federal executive orders that work against the state’s long-term interests. Trump’s various assaults on the ACA and federal subsidies, in fact, threaten to swell Texas’s uninsured population by nearly 1.7 million more people, according to state health analysts. And Abbott applauds these policies because they come from the man who anoints Republican favorites like medieval kings.

But political loyalty is not governance. And Trump’s policy whims are not what Texas needs.

Texas, though, remains a place of mythic possibility with one of the world’s top economies, an engine of culture and innovation, a place where public spirit is more durable than any politician in Austin. But a bad government can distort a grand state, and Abbott has twisted Texas into something smaller, pettier, and meaner than it deserves to be. We are being governed for spectacle, not service, for power, not people, and for one man’s political ambitions, not the state’s future.

Greg Abbott has held power for nearly a decade. He wants four more years. But Texans must ask themselves whether the state can withstand four more years of border theater, unfunded hospitals, privatized schools, unaffordable homes, manipulated maps, and taxes disguised as tolls. Governors do not just manage budgets or sign bills. They set the moral temperature of a place. And under Greg Abbott, Texas has grown colder, not because its people lack compassion, but because its leadership has forgotten who it serves.

And it past time for a change.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

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