Global Minded Gov Tweets Love for Trade
after Border Round Up Numbers Cooking

Capitol Inside
July 2, 2022

Governor Greg Abbott may have been playing with fire on Saturday with a social media post that set himself up to be portrayed as a globalist in a league with a pair of fellow Texas Republicans - U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Houston. But there will be no Honest Abe comparisons for anyone who analyzes Abbott's latest update on statistics from the border security mission Operation Lone Star.

The Republican governor claimed in a tweet on Friday that the state police and military initiative on the Rio Grande had culminated in 270,400 migrant apprehensions - an increase of 4,900 from the tally that he touted exactly one week ago.

Unless Abbott is counting 53 migrants who died in an abandoned semi-truck in San Antonio earlier this week, there is no record of any apprehensions by the Department of Public Safety or the Texas National Guard in the past seven days.

The U.S. Border Patrol - unlike the state of Texas - has reported 1,946 migrant apprehensions here in the same span of time. That's less than 40 percent of the total number of migrants that Abbott says the DPS or Texas Military Department rounded up in a week. But Abbott has made no attempt to substantiate the ever-soaring apprehension count for Operation Lone Star - apparently because that would be impossible for him to do.

"Operation Lone Star is filling in the dangerous gaps left by Biden’s refusal to secure the border," Abbott tweeted. "Texas is doing the federal government’s job to keep America safe."

The horrific scene on the edge of the Alamo City was the latest proof that Abbott's grandiose claims on Operation Lone Star are false. The governor was telling the truth - in contrast - with the salute to Texas ports on Twitter.

"The Lone Star State is a gateway to global trade!" Abbott exclaimed. "Our ports are vital to the economic success of our state & nation."

Abbott declined to mention the extraordinary power he wielded in April with Department of Public Safety truck inspections that brought trade to a halt on international bridges linking Texas to Mexico for nine days in April. The gubernatorial muscle-flexing cost the Texas economy an estimated $4 billion. But Abbott apparently saw the damage he inflicted as an investment that produced historic agreements with four Mexican border state governors for joint police operations on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Now Abbott runs the risk of being singled out by the far right like Crenshaw and Cruz were at the Texas Republican Convention in Houston two weeks ago. A delegate from Texas Senate District 12 confronted the pair of high-profile GOP officials at the George R. Brown Convention Center on the event's final day - branding Cruz as a "globalist coward" and Crenshaw as a "globalist RINO" in videos that he tweeted.

Globalist became a popular anti-Semitic term that Donald Trump introduced to the GOP during a lone term as president. Conservatives used the epitaph initially for Jewish people before expanding it to other religious faiths during the Trump years.

If the hard right outs Abbott ala Crenshaw and Cruz, the question then becomes what kind of globalist could the governor be? A globalist trader? Or traitor perhaps?