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Silence of Laughter Deafening after Abbott
Threatens Tariffs on Relocations from NYC
Capitol Inside
November 4, 2025
Governor Greg Abbott may have a better shot at the White House than he does at a career as a comedian if a bizarre tweet about imposing tariffs on people who migrate to the Lone Star State from New York City was supposed to be a joke.
The Republican leader of the nation's second largest state threatened on Monday to slap tariffs of no less than 100 percent on New Yorkers who relocate to Texas after the elections there today. But Abbott issued the warning without any details like the reason he would make such a claim, where he would get the authority for such a move or how the state government here would enforce it.
The prevailing consensus in the media is that Abbott was referring to the mayor's election in New York City where Democrat Zohran Mamdani is favored to beat Andrew Cuomo and GOP contender Curtis Silwa. But that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense given that the people who'd be the most likely to flee the Big Apple for Abbott's homeland would be Republicans who are trying to escape socialism like the frontrunner in the mayoral.
A politician like Abbott - especially those with presidential ambitions - would typically welcome an influx of voters from their own party instead of trying to scare them off with threats that a governor does not have the power to carry out. With a re-election race in full swing and a potentially tough test with a Democratic challenger on the horizon, Abbott might think he has a better chance to win a year from now if there were more Republican voters in Texas than there are now. The math isn't that hard to calculate and comprehend.
Cuomo, a former New York governor who left office in the midst of a sexual harassment scandal in 2021, decided to run for mayor as an independent after losing to Mamdani in the primary there during the spring. Cuomo has packaged himself as the centrist or moderate option in a fight with rivals on opposite ends of the specturm.
Moderate Democrats aren't going to pack up and ditch their homes in NYC because they can't handle the thought of a liberal running the biggest city by far in all of the USA. Maybe Abbott's own polling shows a Cuomo upset in the making as the potential trigger for a mass exodus of progressive Antifa apologists to the land that the Grand Old Party has ruled for most of three decades. Texas would be the last place that any left-wingers would want to live in America.
The Mamdani victory exit that the Texas governor could have envisioned with the relocation tariffs post on his X page is pure fantasy. That's why the Houston Chronicle portrayed the threat as a unique attempt at humor more than anything else. People would quit taking Abbott seriously if he was serious with the social media message. The problem with the tweet as a wittism, wisecrack or attempt to make people laugh is the fact that it wasn't funny. The silence of the laughter is deafening if comedy had been the central objective of the governor's word play.
Congress has the ultimate authority over the imposition of tariffs and has been willing to share it with the president. But the congressional Republicans have delegated much of their own powers away to President Donald Trump amid fears of his wrath if they resisted him on the tariffs he's announced, modified, cancelled and reinstated over and over again during his second term. You'd need a Big 8 accounting firm with a fancy calculator to keep up with all of those.
Abbott could have failed to read between the lines of recent polling that shows that the tariffs and other Trump policies are starting to backfire and have the potential to be the GOP's undoing at the polls in 2026 and beyond. A University of Texas poll late last week found that Abbott's favorabilty ratings had plunged by double-digit sums among the overall electorate here and among GOP voters as well in the past six months. Abbott, who's UT's most famous living graduate, didn't seek to dispute or to question the numbers on declining popularity during a pep talk at a tailgate party before the Longhorns tangled with Vanderbilt on Saturday.
Abbott's ambiguous warning could have been tied in some way to the fact that Trump and Elon Musk are both backing Cuomo in the fight for mayor in NYC. But anything in the form of additional costs that Abbott might try to force on people moving to Texas from places he doesn't like would be taxes for all practical purposes no matter how he chooses to characterize it. A tariff is another form of taxation that countries impose on the goods that come from countries that are not allies. That might not work so well in a state where the governor hails from a party whose members in Texas are all opposed to new or higher taxes.
The only really plausible explanation for the tariffs tweet was a need for attention on a slow news day. He probably won't expect a major bump in the polls as a consequence of the post.
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