Remove the attribution from some of the most inflammatory quotes coming from politicians on a given news day, and it can be impossible to tell whether they were spouted by President Donald Trump or one of his state-level acolytes.
Take Gov. Greg Abbott, for example. Late last year, and without reasonable justification, Abbott declared Muslim civil rights group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a “foreign terrorist organization.” Subsequently, he bullied a North Texas school district into cancelling an all-ages sports competition for Muslim athletes because of its ties to the group.
And, early this month, after an adult man was charged with assaulting a teen girl participating in a school walkout in Kyle protesting Trump’s immigration policies, Abbott fired off a tweet praising the arrest of students who fought back against the alleged assailant. Beyond that, he threatened to yank funding from schools that allow protests.
“It’s about time students like this were arrested,” Abbott said, adding, “Schools and staff who allow this behavior should be treated as co-conspirators and should not be immune for criminal behavior.”
Abbott’s not alone in lobbing incendiary words, though. Texas Republican officials have increasingly emulated the coarse, divisive rhetoric popularized by Trump, calculating that cultural grievance and combative language play well with the GOP primary electorate.
To be sure, Trump’s brand of norm-shattering bombast has filtered down from national politics into statehouses, county courthouses and school board meetings. In Texas, leaders such as Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton, regularly lean into rhetoric that casts political opponents not as colleagues who disagree but as existential enemies.
The political payoff in low-turnout primaries may be real. But the broader cost to governance, public trust and civic peace is enormous, political scholars warn.
“We’ve already had coarseness in our state politics, but it’s been ratcheted up to stratospheric levels during the Trump era,” UT-San Antonio political scholar Jon Taylor said. “They have created a high degree of distrust toward politics and toward government in general. I would hope that they’d feel at least some sense of remorse and regret, but ain’t holding my breath.”
In the campaign leading up to his 2016 election, Trump demonstrated the power of provocation. His language about immigrants as invaders, his branding of political rivals as treasonous criminals and his frequent attacks on the legitimacy of elections reset the boundaries of acceptable political speech.
In Texas, Abbott has repeatedly echoed the racist language of “invasion” in describing migration across the southern border. In doing so, he frames a complex humanitarian and economic challenge as a quasi-military threat.
Meanwhile, Patrick has warned of “radical leftists” bent on destroying Texas values, often portraying Democratic legislators as saboteurs rather than partners in lawmaking. Not content with the racist dogwhistles of old, he’s resorted to a megaphone — making the fact-free claim in 2021, for example, that Blacks bore responsibility for a surge in COVID-19 cases.
Paxton, who’s running for fellow Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s seat, has built much of his public persona around firing off headline-grabbing lawsuits against perceived progressive enemies. Almost always, those legal disputes are wrapped in culture-war language that suggests Texas itself is under siege from evil and immoral forces.
The political logic is straightforward. In Texas, which hasn’t elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, Republican primaries are dominated by the party’s ideological zealots, the ones who reliably make it to the polls. In such an environment, sounding bilious and uncompromising can be an asset.
“Abbott and the others know that the Republican primary is 2-to-1 in favor of social conservatives,” Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said. “So, they want to be sure they have that social conservative claim and that no one is getting to their right. You may embarrass yourself, you may lose a little support in the general, but you’re still counting that once you get through the primary, you can win the general.”
Gridlock and stalled policy
Candidates who promise to “fight” rather than to negotiate are rewarded. Moderation is framed as weakness. Nuance becomes suspect. The result is a rhetorical arms race where officials compete to prove who’s most willing to own the libs, flip the bird at Washington or treat migrants as subhuman filth.
But governance isn’t a primary campaign.
When the language of existential conflict becomes the norm, legislative bodies bog down. Lawmakers who constantly accuse one another of treason, tyranny or moral degeneracy become less and less likely to sit down and hammer out policy compromises, according to political observers.
The nation’s broken immigration system is case in point. The last time Congress passed comprehensive reform was nearly four decades ago — back when Reagan was in the White House in case you need a reminder how long ago that was.
Yet all we see from Capitol Hill is continued deadlock on the issue.
Meaningful reform would require cooperation between federal and state leaders, Republicans and Democrats, business interests and labor advocates, immigrant advocates and those worried about too-porous borders. Instead, border policy has become a stage for political theater — Abbott shipping buses of migrants to blue cities and stringing razor wire as a symbolic barricade — while lawmakers remain paralyzed.
The same dynamic threatens efforts to confront emerging challenges such as AI-driven job displacement. Automation and artificial intelligence are poised to reshape labor markets in profound and damaging ways, and addressing the disruptions will require guardrails, not to mention investment in education, workforce retraining and social safety nets.
Health care affordability offers yet another example. Texas has the nation’s highest rate of uninsured residents. Expanding coverage, stabilizing rural hospitals and lowering prescription drug costs are pragmatic goals that affect millions.
Yet when political branding revolves around slogans that best fit on a sticker slapped on a F-150 window below its Punisher decal, compromise becomes politically risky. Any deal can be portrayed as surrender.
Here’s the bumper sticker version of that risk, according to political scientists: “As rhetoric coarsens, policy stalls.”
Eroding trust, encouraging violence
The damage extends beyond legislative gridlock, however.
Trust in institutions erodes when leaders repeatedly question the credibility of courts, elections and law enforcement agencies — especially when those institutions deliver unfavorable outcomes.
When public officials suggest that electoral defeats are the product of fraud rather than voter choice, or that prosecutors and judges are inherently corrupt if they rule against them, they chip away at the foundations of democratic legitimacy.
Citizens who hear constant claims that the system is rigged may conclude that participation is pointless — or that threats, violence against elected officials or even mass shootings are justified, experts argue.
“The major concern I have is that if you lose faith in dialogue, constructive disagreement and debate, you create frustration in people about the inaction that’s going on, the paralysis,” said Trinity University professor Mike Fischer, author of the text How Books Can Save Democracy. “Some people become tempted to use undemocratic actions to solve their problems and advance their goals.”
The spillover from inflammatory rhetoric into political violence is no longer hypothetical. The Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol followed months of false claims by Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen. Across the country, election workers and public health officials were subjected to threats and harassment.
Certainly, Texas isn’t immune to political violence. Most notably, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius entered an El Paso Walmart store in 2019 with an assault rifle and targeted Latino shoppers, killing 23 and injuring many others. He vowed in an online manifesto stop the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” echoing rhetoric still invoked by Abbott and others Texas Republicans.
While not every harsh word leads to violence, a steady drumbeat of dehumanization lowers the barrier for those prone to lash out.
Despite its utility in turning out the party base, degradation of political discourse remains unpopular with mainstream voters. Recent polling shows large majorities of Americans — including many Republicans — are exhausted by partisan rancor and want leaders to work across the aisle.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans in a December Gallup poll said the Republican Party and Republicans have gone too far in using inflammatory language, a 16-percentage-point increase from 2011. Meanwhile, 60% currently believe that applies to the Democratic Party and Democrats, nine points higher than in 2011.
And the backlash to Trump’s scorched-earth rhetoric has spilled into the streets.
The “No Kings” protests that have drawn massive crowds in San Antonio and other U.S. cities are, in part, a response to what demonstrators decry as the president’s strongman style and the willingness of other GOP officials to mimic it.
In the Alamo City, anti-Trump rallies regularly feature chants of “Fuck Greg Abbott,” a blunt expression of anger at a governor protesters see as embracing Trump’s brand.
“It makes me wonder if these [Republican Texas officials] are living in such echo chambers that they think what they’re saying now isn’t going to resonate negatively with voters in November,” UTSA’s Taylor said. “This is a president who’s not only unpopular nationally, but unpopular in Texas. He may not be unpopular with Texas Republicans, but he’s unpopular overall in the state, decidedly so with Democrats and Independents.”
Coming retribution?
Americans are exhausted.
They’re tired of cable news shouting matches, tired of social media feeds saturated with outrage, tired of lawmakers more interested in trolling than problem solving. And the fatigue isn’t confined to Washington. It trickles down into the Texas Capitol and the state’s city halls, shaping how citizens view their local representatives.
When state leaders adopt the harshest elements of national political rhetoric, they also import the shit-slinging dysfunction.
Predictably, many politicians calculate that short-term rewards outweigh the long-term risks. In safely drawn districts and low-turnout primaries, appealing to the most rabid slice of the electorate is the front-of-mind strategy, as SMU prof Jillson pointed out.
But general elections, demographic shifts and generational change tell a more complicated story. Younger voters, independents and members of the growing number of marginalized groups targeted by the GOP are fed up.
“This is the election cycle for the Muslim community to make it clear that there is a political price to pay for picking on Muslims,” said Imran Ghani, director of CAIR Texas’ Houston chapter. “Here in Texas, as with other states, we are very focused on voter mobilization at the local level, at the state level. Because, at this stage, American Muslims have seen that we can make a difference in local elections and even state-level elections and at the national level.”
The organization recognizes there’s strength in numbers, and it’s building coalitions with groups such as NAACP, LULAC and the ACLU, which have overlapping objectives, Ghani said. Indeed, when Abbott issued his proclamation declaring CAIR a terrorist organization, more than 60 groups and politicians joined in a statement blasting the claim.
If the backlash builds, politicians who have embraced the coarsening of discourse may find themselves on the receiving end of voter anger. Political brands built on outrage can be brittle.
The pendulum swing against Trump is proof of that.
UTSA’s Taylor points to the cratering of the president’s numbers as his mass-deportation push extended to aggressive police actions in U.S. cities and led to the deaths of Minneapolis residents Renée Goode and Alex Pretti. Captured on video and inescapable in U.S. media, those moments of brutality have become symbolic not just of Trump’s immigration policy but his larger effect on U.S. politics.
“It’s almost a Vietnam War-like moment in that public sentiment on the war started to shift when the body bags started coming home,” Taylor said. “The visuals were on TV, and the visuals were on TV every night. We may be seeing that right now with Trump.”
Even so, Taylor’s not holding his breath to see the pendulum swing end the careers of some of Texas’ most entrenched Republican political leaders. Strident segregationist Strom Thurmond continued to serve in U.S. Senate until 2003, even after he led a filibuster to stop passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
“I’d love to see people actually face some consequences for hardening and coarsening our politics in general, but history being a guide, that won’t necessarily happen,” Taylor added.
Of course, the shift won’t come overnight, but some observers see signs of long-term change. Trinity’s Fischer, for example, points to the proliferation of courses on his campus and others focused on reasoned discourse and finding common ground through political disagreements.
“I’m in a more optimistic mood right now about where this is headed,” the professor said. “I don’t know that I can fully justify it, but I do see signs of interest in having more constructive dialogue.”
Whether a restoration of civility actually takes root depends on voters as much as politicians, though.
The current moment suggests that many are hungry for a politics that lowers the temperature and avoids outright racism, conspiracy mongering and perpetual punching down. If that sentiment continues to grow, those who have ridden the wave of divisive rhetoric may discover that the backlash is not only real — it’s painful.
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