Donald Trump's highest-ranking Texas loyalists have had lips sealed in unison since the GOP's three-time presidential nominee played the race card on Wednesday with claims that Kamala Harris was Indian before she remade herself as a Black woman.
Governor Greg Abbott hasn't mentioned Trump by name in his extensive social media postings throughout the past 10 days when Harris caught the former president in the polls and began to pull ahead this week. Abbott refused to say Trump's name in a speech to the state GOP convention in 2016 when he was the party's presumptive White House nominee. But Abbott has held Trump on a pedestal since his failed re-election bid in 2020.
Trump's two most prominent Texas allies - Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and Attorney General Ken Paxton - haven't typed the Republican's three-time presidential contender in their own X posts since early last week as well. Patrick and Paxton have an excuse because they've been busy working on state-related matters like legal fights that the AG is waging with the Biden administration and power outages that the Texas Senate president has been investigating in the wake of Hurricane Beryl.
Texans may be wasting time if they're waiting for Patrick, Paxton or Abbott to rush to Trump's defense for remarks at a Black journalists event that made countless Republicans cringe from coast to coast.
Harris “was always of Indian heritage," Trump explained. "And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?"
Trump - who's almost as old retiring President Joe Biden - didn't elaborate on whether he was talking about people from India or those who cowboys often fought in the movies.Trump's bizarre rambling could have been from a script for a remake of the classic 1964 film Black Like Me about a white journalist who disguised his skin with a darker tint while covering the civil rights movement.
“But you know what, I respect either one,” Trump said. “But she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way then, all of a sudden, she made a turn. And she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that.”
None of the top Texas leaders - including Patrick has the former president's state campaign chairman - had come to Trump's defense on X for the jaw-dropping observation on his Democratic rival's racial identity that's in a league with his advice on spraying lungs with Lysol to dodge the coronavirus. Patrick could feel compelled to break the inconspicuous silence on the ex-president's most shocking and latest gaffe.
Patrick assured Republicans one week ago that Trump would win in November despite the shocking evaporation of a sizeable lead in a matter of days after President Joe Biden passed the torch to Harris.
"The Republican Party is uniting as one and becoming stronger than ever," Patrick said in a post on X on July 25. "November 5th cannot come soon enough. America is ready to elect Donald J. Trump as the 47th President of the United States."
The lieutenant governor has yet to reveal whether he will resurrect a reward fund that he hatched after the 2020 election in a failed attempt to show that Trump wasn't lying about the presidency being stolen from him in an elaborate heist by Democrats. Patrick failed to find any evidence of voter fraud beyond one Trump voter who was ratted out by a poll worker in Pennsylvania for voting twice. Patrick paid the Democrat activist $25,000 for blowing the whistle that led to the Trump supporter's conviction for illegal voting there.
Patrick has had more important things to do in recent weeks - however - having spearheaded a probe into the blackouts in the Houston area after the storm crashed through southeast Texas while Abbott was missing in action on an all-expense paid trip to China. Patrick directed a housecleaning at the Public Utility Commission - an executive agency that Abbott controls on paper - after the governor tried to pin the blame for the worst Texas grid failure in history during a record freeze in 2021.
more to come ...
