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Governor Confuses Trump Philosophy
with Old-School Capitalism in Analysis
Capitol Inside
November 6, 2025
As President Donald Trump blamed his absence on the ballot for the nightmarish election for the GOP this week, Governor Greg Abbott contended on Wednesday that the Democrats who swept the major races across the country as socialists while depicting Texas as the center of the capitalistic universe.
"The battle lines between capitalism and socialism were clearly drawn last night," Abbott declared in a post on X. But the Republican leader of the second largest state turned an analysis of the Tuesday vote into an advertisement for the Lone Star State, which he depicted as the ultimate seawall for a rising tide of socialism from coast to coast.
"Texas is now the unrivaled HQ for capitalism in the US," the Republican governor declared. "We lead the country in finance sector employment & new stock exchanges. Capitalism always prevails. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than all of the social programs in the world. We will secure capitalism for the future of our country and deny the expansion of socialism that is creeping across the US."
Abbott declined to speculate on how and why socialism became such a dangerous threat on President Donald Trump's watch. Based on a report in late August from the CATO Institute, a Libertarian think tank that Texas conservative Charles Koch co-founded, Trump has advocated an ideology that the Republican governor may not understand.
The essay in the organization's blog on its web site points to a Wall Street Journal report that described Trump as a "state capitalism" proponent - a position the publication characterized as a “hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.”
State capitalism is a term that was used to portray the economic system that Adolph Hitler put in place in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The Nazis billed themselves as the National Socialist German Workers' Party - a moniker that was a propaganda ploy designed to lure working people from the traditional socialism and communist movements. State capitalism was the path to totalitarian control in Germany before and during World War II.
Abbott didn't go as far as Trump and other Republicans who are falsely claiming that New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is a communist because he's a self-styled advocate for socialism. But the rhetoric from the president to the governor of Texas appears to be more of a desperation distraction from the fact that the GOP will be in trouble in 2026 if Tuesday's elections were a harbinger for what to expect at the polls a year from now.
The governor has been pulling rabbits from the hat this week in a bid to keep the spotlight off California where voters approved a new congressional map that was drawn to give Democrats five more seats in the delegation there.
After ordering the Texas Legislature to redrawn U.S. House boundaries in a way to put the GOP in position to win five more seats in 2026, Abbott would have major egg in the face if the Republicans here flip fewer than the targeted goal while Democrats pick up five in the Golden State. While California Governor Gavin Newsom successfully pushed to give the voters there the opportunity to make the final call on the redistricting plan, the Republicans in Texas did not give the electorate an opportunity to weigh in on the congressional plan they approved during the summer.
Based on Abbott's examination of the mid-term elections, socialism beat capitalism in every major contest on the ballot in U.S. this week. Instead of stopping the socialism expansion like the Texas governor vowed after Tuesday's vote, the Lone Star State's Republicans would have helped facilitate the expansion by giving California Democrats the incentive to redraw their own map for Congress.
more to come ...
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