Governor Greg Abbott left the heavy lifting to Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick again on Wednesday so he could focus on social media posts that included an attempt to feed on a Texas family's grief over a 12-year-old girl's rape and murder in a desperate bid to give Donald Trump a boost.
As Patrick issued a veiled ultimatum to the Public Utility Commission on Wednesday in a probe into extended power outages that were caused by Hurricane Beryl, Abbott gave the U.S. Olympics team a plug on X the night before he heard today that the women's basketball squad endorsed Kamala Harris for president.
Abbott waved the pom poms for the Americans in Paris on Tuesday night in a post that expressed his admiration and awe for Houston gymnast Simone Biles as "most decorated U.S. Olympic gymnast" in history. CNN announced hours later that the U.S. women's Olympics team pitched its formal support to Harris as the presidential contender for the Democrats this fall.
Abbott could face a pivotal decision if Biles decides that Olympics competitors have the right to have a voice in the nation's affairs and leadership and dishes out an endorsement to Harris as well at some point. Would the Texas governor delete the X post on Biles or leave it up and run the risk of drawing the wrath of Trump and MAGA?
With @TeamUSA as the third and final line in Abbott's post on the famous Texas athlete Abbott already could be in Mar-a-Lago sights if he doesn't make it go away so it won't look like he's an avid fan of Trump's enemies. But the top Texas leader didn't know that some of Team USA's most exciting and better-known members would rally behind the Democrat just hours later. No one saw that coming because it appears to be unprecedented.
While Patrick demanded that the PUC force CenterPoint Energy to return $800 million to customers for wasting it on generators that weren't activated after Beryl, Abbott saved his venom for Harris with a tweet that may have raised the bars on ludicrous and dishonest to record levels.
"Three years ago, I sent a letter to Vice President Kamala Harris urging her to address the border crisis—she never bothered to respond," Abbott said today on X. "Jocelyn Nungaray would be alive today had Harris taken her job seriously."
Abbott - for the record - has no clue if Nungaray would be among the living if Harris had handled her responsibilities the way he had demanded. The remark makes it look like the Texas governor was playing God in a desperation Hail Mary to help save Trump from a second straight defeat in his third White House race.
Abbott may not have considered that the politicizing of the young Texan's tragic ending would magnify the grief that her family has been forced to confront since she was killed by a migrant in the state illegally. Abbott's attempt to capitalize on the horror show could be a red herring designed to take attention from the fact that he failed to protect her after falsely claiming that Texas was in the process of eliminating rape.
The governor has yet to comment on the fact that migrant apprehensions plunged at the southwestern border in the past six months as a result of Biden-imposed restrictions, added enforcement in Mexico and obstacles that Texas has installed at the Rio Grande to a some degree.
Abbott has been mum on the fact that the number of migrants who federal agents encountered fell in June to a mark that was lower than the mark recorded at the zenith of a historic surge when Trump was president in 2019.
The Democrats could have an opposition research professional analyze migrant crime in the U.S. on Trump's watch to determine how many Texans of all ages were murdered and raped by people in the country illegally during that four-year stretch. Assuming there were some, the Texas governor might wonder if they'd all still be alive today if Trump had done better job on illegal immigration. Fortunately for Abbott and the Republicans, that would be impossible to know.
