COMMENTARY
Trump links don’t guarantee success
Donald Trump’s name wasn’t on the ballot. But his presence was unmistakable.
The major local Republican contests in Tuesday’s runoff election contained no Trump detractors. Even with the president’s national approval ratings submerged under the 40 percent mark and polls showing him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by double digits, Trump commands near-absolute devotion among GOP politicians.
Sure enough, Tuesday night’s key Republican races were between those who merely like Trump an awful lot and those who worship him with near-religious zeal, who consider even a minor critique of the president to be an act of heresy, punishable by excommunication from the party ranks.
Consider the behavior of Tom Rickhoff, a former judge with a long history of success in Bexar County politics.
In his race for County Commissioner against public relations consultant Trish DeBerry, Rickhoff tried to compensate for a 15-1 fundraising disadvantage by casting DeBerry as a Trump infidel with dubious loyalty to the Republican cause.
In a June video interview produced by the Bexar County Republican Party, Rickhoff said DeBerry “has always been aligned with Democrats,” and added: “That’s why she did a video that is anti-Trump.”
In fact, the video cited by Rickhoff merely was footage from a 2018 Pecha-Kucha presentation in which DeBerry jokingly shrugged off comparisons between her job, which involves crisis communications, and the work carried out by the fictitious character Olivia Pope on the TV show “Scandal.”
Pointing out that Pope had a romantic relationship with the president
of the United States on the show, DeBerry said, with regard to Trump: “No way, no how would I ever have an intimate relationship with this president — ever!”
DeBerry also referred to Trump as a “crisis communications unto himself.”
Everything that DeBerry said about Trump sounded perfectly reasonable, but Rickhoff saw it as his chance to position himself as the true Trump loyalist in the race.
It didn’t work.
For the first time in a 42-year political career that began with Rickhoff becoming the first Republican to win a countywide race in this community since Reconstruction, the former judge dropped a GOP contest.
Cozying up to Trump also did no favors for Cynthia Brehm.
The wildly divisive and conspiracy-prone GOP county chair had taken her love for the president to extremes. Over the past two months, Brehm identified both the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer as hoaxes that were staged to bring down Trump’s poll numbers.
Her runoff opponent, a lowkey, self-effacing real-estate broker named John Austin, also expressed his support for Trump. He just didn’t carry it to such bizarre lengths.
With her tweet about Floyd, Brehm’s rogue tendencies became too much for party leaders to bear. Gov. Greg Abbott, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Chip Roy all called on her to resign.
Tuesday night, Bexar County GOP voters did it for her, sweeping Austin into office in a rout. Nowhere was the Trump factor more complicated than in the race to succeed Will Hurd in U.S. District 23.
Raul Reyes Jr., a Castroville-based Air Force veteran, pledged his complete devotion to the Trump agenda.
Reyes enthusiastically supported Trump’s long-promised, coast-to-coast border wall and sent out mailers photo shopping his image alongside Trump. He promised that voters could “rely on Reyes to fight for Trump, for Texas and for you.”
For all his loyalty, Reyes got nothing but grief from Trump. The president endorsed Reyes’ better-funded opponent, former Navy cryptologist Tony Gonzales.
Trump’s campaign poured vinegar on the wound by sending a cease-and-desist letter to Reyes, saying he “misappropriated President Trump’s name, image and likeness to misleadingly suggest that the president endorses your candidacy.”
Trump even put out an election-eve robocall for Gonzales, saying: “Tony will work for you in Congress. And by working for you, he’s working for me.”
The affable Gonzales walked a fine line, trying to come across as a committed conservative and supporter of the president, but also conveying the idea that he would be a pragmatic lawmaker, willing to work in a bipartisan fashion to achieve results for the district.
Gonzales sought Trump’s help with the runoff, but surely knew an affiliation with Trump could hurt him in a general election.
With results still coming in Tuesday night, Reyes was running a surprisingly strong race, carrying a narrow lead over the favored Gonzales.
Like the rest of the local results, it suggested that in the summer of 2020, a connection to Trump can only carry you so far with Republican voters.