Ronald Reagan, considered a secular saint before, during and after his two presidential terms by many in the Republican Party, an actor-turned-politician who also served as California’s governor, was famous for his stated disdain of the thing he spent much of his life doing: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”
Of course, his administration’s tax cuts were plenty helpful for high earners, but it certainly made for a catchy sound bite. And it became a guiding philosophy for his, and now Trump’s, Republican Party.
And that brings us to the culmination of the effort to paint any government acting competently with a dash of compassion as evil — Texas, the Lone Star State that went it alone. We all saw how that worked out. When a cold snap broke the state, exposing glaring failures in everything from its independent energy grid to its power and water systems, the state’s leaders were either ghosts — escaping to Mexico for a vacation, in the case of Sen. Ted Cruz, or to Utah, where state Attorney General Ken Paxton traveled — or defiant apologists.
