Trump’s Texas Rally Goes Off Rails—and Reveals a Shrinking MAGA Bubble

The Texas Senate race is on a razor’s edge: James Talarico has a very slim lead over Ken Paxton in the polls, yet the race is effectively a toss-up. But whoever is to win, here’s something we can say right now: Donald Trump and his team no longer seem to think he is even capable of winning back independents and moderates in the state, at a time when lots of data suggests that their deficits among those groups could cost them the race. Trump just held rallies in Texas that put this strategy—and its apparent shortcomings—on almost comically garish display. In both, Trump seemed to be talking almost exclusively to his own voters, indulging in juvenile name-calling, boasting about his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico—really, he did that—and treating it as given that his audiences see his Iran war as a world-historical triumph.Right now, polls show Trump is even underwater with large numbers of Republican voters who don’t heavily identify as MAGA. So ask yourself this: Does anything he’s saying at these rallies appear likely to win back those people, let alone moderates and independents?Take Trump’s rally in Corpus Christi. He repeatedly insisted oil and gas prices are coming down, while claiming our country is making an “absolute fortune” off the Iran War, seemingly meaning in oil exports. (As TNR’s Michael Tomasky explains, we did sell more oil abroad for a time but not anymore, and oil prices remain astonomically high). Trump also insisted that the “deal” he made to seize control of Venezuelan oil was a “big victory” for America. “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump declared.As these examples show, even when Trump is addressing the cost of living—the top concern of voters—he’s treating it as a non-problem, one he has solved via foreign conquest and plunder. He also falsely proclaimed a massive factory boom without mentioning the awful recent inflation and jobs numbers. Who is going to believe any of this? Only voters who are already so invested in seeing Trump succeed that they’re primed to see his destructive adventurism and pillage abroad as some sort of victory for what might be termed vulgar MAGA nationalism.Trump also declared that oil is now flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, essentially hand-waving away the very thing that has driven oil and gas prices so high, rendering his Iran war deeply toxic. “We’re thinking of renaming it the Trump Strait,” Trump smirked. “We did that with the Gulf of Mexico,” he continued, adding: “Lake Ontario is now Lake America!”Trump: "More oil right now is flowing out of the Hormuz Strait. We're thinking of renaming it the Trump Strait, should we do it? We did that with the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America! We did that with a little lake, one of the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario is now Lake America."— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 27, 2026 If you watch Trump deliver these remarks, it is absolutely clear that he really thinks his audience will see his scribbling of new names on his little toy globe as genuine indicators of American dominance, prosperity, and flourishing. Again, who will believe any of this other than the most besotted of MAGA voters, the ones who are conditioned to associate national success—and their own—with whatever Trump claims as a success for himself?Then there are the attacks on James Talarico. “He actually said that if Jesus Christ himself came and visited the Texas legislature, Jesus would be promoting sex changes for little children,” Trump insisted. This is a bizarre distortion of Talarico’s frequent claim that lawmakers should minister to the vulnerable. But who is it supposed to persuade, exactly?Senior Democrats involved in the Texas race tell me they think these attacks are aimed at firing up the MAGA faithful—but also at Republicans who voted for Trump but are disillusioned with the country’s direction and may stay home. Disqualifying Talarico as a “freako,” as Trump puts it, is supposed to give them a reason to vote. Yet notably, these attacks—and everything else Trump said at the rally—don’t offer those voters any serious reason to think things are getting better under Trump-GOP rule. To really grasp the nature of the Trump-GOP bet here, see this gold-standard poll that The New York Times released earlier this month finding Talarico up by six points, 51-45. The race is likely closer than that, but the poll’s internals are illuminating. Talarico leads Paxton lopsidedly among independents (60-37), among Latinos (62-30), and among young voters (66-22). If Talarico is to win, these levels of support from groups like that are how he gets there.So how does Trump fare among those groups? Horribly! Among independents, Trump’s approval is 29-67, among Latinos it’s 26-69, and among young voters it’s 12-85 (not a typo). And note this crucial detail: Solid majorities of all those constituencies strongly disapprove of Trump. His presence actively and energetically repels them.Let’s repeat this part for emphasis: A majority of Texas independents strongly disapprove of the president. So bringing in Trump to campaign—and traffic so heavily in MAGA tropes and obsessions—isn’t about reaching these voters. It’s only about speaking to Republicans. A recent Fox poll—which has the race as a dead heat—also finds that a staggering 47 percent of non-MAGA Republicans disapprove of Trump, and shows that Talarico is winning a surprising 28 percent of those non-MAGA GOP voters. The Trump rally strategy is so heavily geared to juicing MAGA Republicans that it offers little if anything to non-MAGA ones. There is a way, of course, that all this could save Paxton, given that the state is so Trumpy (he won it by 14 points in 2024). It’s this: Get turnout among MAGA voters to improbably high levels for a midterm election. Count on Elon Musk’s hurricane of ads attacking Talarico as a woke leftist freak to disqualify him with just enough non-MAGA Republicans—and just enough independents who are Republicans-in-all-but-name—to get them to the polls. Bet on anti-trans attacks getting Talarico’s margins down a smidgen among Latinos. Hope that the math adds up. It’s possible this will work. But right now, Trump’s rallies look less like a considered strategy than a pure vanity project. After all, in Corpus Christie, the MAGA faithful cheered when he bragged of plundering Iran and Venezuela. They bellowed loudly when Trump called Talarico a “freako.” They were transfixed when he talked about his heroic adventures in renaming things on maps. Up there on that stage, deep in his own head, Trump heard all of America cheering him on. But outside the MAGA bubble, it’s all exhaustion, revulsion, and disgust—and most importantly, a desire to replace all of it with something far, far better.