A Texas Tornado of it
“Telegraphing” is a euphemism for unconsciously signalling your intentions. Telegraphing a punch in the boxing ring. Like a player’s “tell” in poker. Donald Trump must be the worst player in either arena. Arrogance works like that. Where once he spoke in code like a mob boss, now Trump speaks like an aspiring dictator.
When Trump promised Waco, Texas rallygoers in March, “I am your retribution,” collaborators began singing his song like a Greek chorus (ABC News):
“We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” said former Defense Department official Kash Patel during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
Patel, who served as chief of staff in the Department of Defense during the Trump administration and Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council, was asked by Bannon if he would be able to deliver “serious prosecution and accountability” against their political opponents during a second Trump presidency.
“We’re going to come after you whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said of Trump’s political foes. “We’ll figure that out.”
Retribution tomorrow
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (yes, he still holds that job) heard Trump’s Waco message five by five. He was sitting there. Retribution? Yes, sir!
After (in Paxton’s words) “an activist Travis County Judge” issued a temporary restraining order Thursday allowing Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two and pregnant with a fatal fetal condition, to receive an abortion under Texas’ near-total abortion ban, Paxton was not amused (Washington Post):
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, threatened legal action if the abortion takes place. In a letter addressed to the hospitals involved with Cox’s care, Paxton said that Cox’s doctor did not meet “all of the elements necessary to fall within an exception to Texas’ abortion laws” and that the judge was “not medically qualified to make this determination.”
And Paxton and Texas Republican lawmakers who passed the ban are?
Paxton said the judge’s order would not excuse the hospital or doctor from civil or criminal liability “including first degree felony prosecutions.” He added that the temporary restraining order “will expire long before the statute of limitations for violating Texas’ abortion laws expires.”
The Texas Tribune has more.
Retribution now
Texas was not done, however (Texas Monthly):
After visiting the Varner-Hogg plantation an hour south of Houston, amateur historian Michelle Haas was incensed by what she had seen. At an exhibit that details the farm’s use as a sugar plantation worked by at least 66 slaves in the early nineteenth century, she’d watched an informational video. To her mind, it focused too much on slavery at the site and not enough on the Hogg family, which had turned its former home into a museum celebrating Texas history. She’d also seen books in the visitor center gift shop written by Carol Anderson and Ibram X. Kendi, two Black academic historians who have been outspoken on the issue of systemic racism. Outraged, she emailed David Gravelle, a board member of the Texas Historical Commission, the agency that oversees historical sites at the direction of leaders appointed by Governor Greg Abbott. “What a s—show is this video,” Haas wrote on September 2, 2022. “Add to that the fact that the activist staff member doing the buying for the gift shop thinks Ibram X. Kendi and White Rage have a place at a historic site.”
Haas spent eight months agitating to have the books and video removed. She got her wish this month.
The Texas Historical Commission no longer sells White Rage by Anderson or Stamped From the Beginning by Kendi, or 23 other works to which Haas later objected, at two former slave plantations in Brazoria County, including Varner-Hogg. Among the literature no longer available for purchase is an autobiography of a slave girl, a book of Texas slave narratives, the celebrated novel Roots by Alex Haley, and the National Book Award–winning Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
[…]
In 2022, Haas launched the Texas History Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization that aims to fight back against what it describes as “historical societies, university history departments and authors who warp Texas history based on feelings, not the historical record.” She has protested the inclusion of so-called “woke ideology,” “neo-Marxist” influence, and critical race theory in Texas schools, even though CRT—a framework for examining systemic racism, for example in lending patterns—is not taught below the college level in the Lone Star State.
“We stand in defense of fact-based history,” the Texas History Trust declares. They’re just highly discriminatory about what Texas history they’ll defend.
That culturally significant books about slavery were apparently made casualties of the culture war deeply concerns historians such as Michael Phillips, who is writing a book on eugenics in Texas, was recently a senior fellow at Southern Methodist University, and who filed an initial records request regarding the commission’s efforts to remove the works from gift shops. “We have an appalling situation,” Phillips said. “The idea that these books are irrelevant somehow is really striking.” He added, “to eliminate books about racism at slave plantation sites is like doing an Auschwitz tour and never mentioning antisemitism.”
Lord Acton warned in 1887 about the corrupting seductiveness of power. Trump has never known life without it. He’s never been without money shielding him from accountability for sins as uncountable as his lies. Now he’s tasted real power in the White House even if he was clumsy about wielding it. Winning the presidency again means shielding himself from justice. It means punishing his enemies. Or sending his cult to do it for him. The Oval Office must be like heroin compared to mere wealth.
Hangers-on in Trump’s orbit, like Bannon and Patel and Paxton, and those a few astronomical units distant, like Haas and Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, have had their taste. Just enough to be besotted. They want more.