The New Face of Trumpism in Texas
In 2015, in the Dallas suburb of Irving, the fates of two very different Texans collided.
One was 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed, a precocious kid in a NASA T-shirt who had built a clock out of spare parts and brought it to school in a pencil case. His English teacher decided it might be a bomb, and the school called the police, who arrested Mohamed for bringing in a “hoax bomb.” Because Mohamed’s family was part of Irving’s large Muslim minority, many liberals saw this as a baseless case of Islamophobia.
The other Texan was Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, a blond 44-year-old with Disney-princess bone structure. She defended Mohamed’s arrest on Facebook, then went on The Glenn Beck Program to repeat the “hoax bomb” lie and complain that the child hadn’t given police enough information. “We’ve heard more from the media than the child ever released to the police when we were asking him questions,” she said calmly.
The controversy dragged obscure Irving into the national conversation. Yet another brown kid in a red state was being overpoliced. Yet another public official backed the police response. Within days, the news had reached the BlackBerry of President Barack Obama, who tweeted, “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House?”
In the end, Mohamed was never charged, and he and his family moved to Qatar. As for Van Duyne: This past November, she was elected to the United States Congress.
Her victory was a surprise—at least to some. Last year, President Donald Trump’s popularity among Texans , and Democrats in the state, who hoped to take of the Texas House and win several congressional seats, thought such as Irving would be reluctant to elect Trumplike Republicans. Van Duyne’s district—where the Democratic Senate candidate beat Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018 while losing statewide—looked like one of their . Democrats enrolled Van Duyne’s opponent, Candace Valenzuela, in the , which aims to help Democratic candidates win Republican districts.
