Have you ever tried to run a marathon while stuck in waist-deep mud? Me neither, but that’s about what this year’s primary season felt like.
After last week’s runoffs and the entire thing is but a memory, if you’re like me, you’re left feeling exhausted, irritated, but also amused. It’s par for course now in the age of Donald Trump: every election cycle seems to demand more and more outrage, more loyalty tests and more emotional energy than the preceding one. Elections have become less a civic exercise and more of a circus.
The sheer volume of it all is enough to seize all of the space and grace one might possess. From being bombarded with fundraising texts; inflammatory social media posts; television news arguments; podcasts; reams of mailers and endless rhetoric on the campaign trail, it all wears on a person. And rhetoric is exactly what it is. Most garden-variety candidates in 2026 do not offer up solutions or address the actual issues that We the People are concerned with, but just culture-war nonsense about why the other guy is so bad.
It’s no longer a debate about mere policy differences, but a contest as to who can prove themselves the most aggressively “conservative,” in the case of the GOP primaries; the most combative and the most devoted to orbiting Trump.
Maybe I’m in the minority, and maybe I’m out of step with the culture, but I’d much rather hear coherent and cogent talk about infrastructure, education, property taxes and some real conversations about water infrastructure and the looming evil of AI data centers instead of hearing about why John Cornyn is a “RINO” or about how ideological pure the corrupt Ken Paxton is.
That’s the one amusing part of all of this, that whole Paxton thing. After Paxton’s victory last Tuesday, in which the walking ethics violation, himself, handily defeated John “Beige Wallpaper” Cornyn, there was not a moment wasted to paint Paxton’s Democratic opponent for November, James Talarico, as some sort of villainous, verminous scum.
For about a decade now, Paxton has begged Trump to notice him, and it’s been cringe to watch, almost as if he’s been screaming, “Please Daddy Trump! Please endorse me! I’ll commit a crime for you!” Trump’s endorsement of Paxton was likely the culmination of his dreams, and I’m surprised he didn’t die of a heart attack upon receiving it.
The amusing tactics used to combat Talarico seem to be about the man’s gustatory preferences, specifically whether or not he’s a vegan. Talarico, who seems to have a gift for soundbites, said he’d been eating barbecue since before Paxton’s first indictment, which made me almost fall out of my chair.
It’s hilarious, even more so, when the narrative seems to be that Talarico is some sort of weak or feminized vegan-type, yet Paxton is so co-dependent on Trump that he may as well travel down to Mexico with the president and get some sort of experimental surgery to graft both their bodies together.
Furthermore, that run-up to the November general election will be beyond exhausting, and no telling how much money both camps will spend, all the while, there is a Libertarian option in Ted Brown, just saying.
However, We the People will be left to believe that civilization itself hangs in the balance if we don’t vote for this candidate or that candidate come November, just like we were told in the primary season.
Of course I use the term “primary season” here, but that, too, seems like a thing of the past. Politics once had seasons, but now it seems permanent, especially here in Texas.
In the age of Trump-era politics, where conflict and chaos have replaced any meaningful discussions on policy, and outrage is more captivating than nuance, anger is always rewarded over competence, and the loudest voices get the carrot at the end of the stick.
My buddy Kent Hutchison mused on this topic the other day, and he’s absolutely correct. Better leadership has to start with better citizenship, and that includes you and me. Instead of feeding the outrage machine and letting fear-mongering and ridicule capture all of the oxygen within the marketplace of ideas, we need to do better, starting inside our own backyard. I know it sounds tired and maybe even trite at this point, when loud voices and insults are what garners headlines, but feeding the growing outrage machine only creates more demand for outrageousness.
I believe I’ve written in this space before that I long for a time when politics was boring, and the constant emotional escalation leaves me longing for that era, still.
We the People are not merely asked to vote anymore, but to remain permanently mobilized, permanently paranoid and permanently angry. It’s exhausting.
Still, while shrewd political operators will truck in conspiracies, accusations of stolen elections and other nonsense to pit candidates against each other, nonstop ideological warfare does nothing to lower the cost of living in these United States.
Outrage might be the fuel that is central to voter participation nowadays, but it doesn’t buy bread, milk, eggs or gas. It’s not just the primaries that have left the electorate drained, but the uncertainty that all of the tap-dancing politicians are doing on our pocketbooks and with our lives make that old James McMurtry song “We Can’t Make It Here” seem all the more closer to reality, a reality where there’s nothing to ship and nothing to pack, storefronts are empty around the town square and some are working two jobs, yet living in cars.
But that’s okay as long as there’s carnivalesque campaign hijinks to keep us all distracted, er, I mean entertained.
Chris Edwards is editor of the Tyler County Booster, a sister newspaper in the Polk County Publishing group. He can be reached at news@tylercountybooster.com.
