In the era of President Donald Trump, any admission of weakness or wrongdoing has become increasingly rare, but tension over the future of the party could hardly be denied at last week’s midterm Republican convention in Dallas. While the floor and lower levels of the arena were well attended, the upper levels of the arena were sparsely populated—despite the GOP giving out free tickets leading up to the event.

“I will be the first to go ahead and say that it is a little concerning as a Republican that we have to be summoned in the midterms,” said Jason Fricks, a young Republican who drove down from Oklahoma to attend the convention. “That’s never been done before.”

The GOP sought to project a united front against what they called radical communism with a two-day lineup of speakers that regurgitated the same talking points and even the same jokes in an attempt to plaster over the public’s discontent with the high cost of living. They flaunted Trump’s tax cuts and aggressive immigration enforcement while targeting the Democratic Party’s left-wing figures, such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed. Their own controversial right-wing ideologues, who have publicly clashed over the party’s vision, could still be seen walking the halls of the American Airlines Center and emphasizing that the perceived threat of a socialist takeover was too great a risk to not vote Republican this November.

President Trump speaks at the 2026 GOP midterm convention in Dallas. (Photo by Eden Shamy )

Figures like the right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro, the failed Florida gubernatorial candidate and provocateur James Fishback, and conspiracist Laura Loomer, for example, could be seen rubbing elbows with devoted members of the MAGA base. All have expressed their concerns about losing to the Democratic Socialists of America, but all share deep disagreements on the level of acceptable overt bigotry, support for Israel, and whether Trump has gone far enough.

“While you might have frustrations with the Republican Party, I think we can all get behind good America first candidates up and down the ballot,” Fishback said in an interview with the Dallas Express, one of the many right-leaning outlets featured at the convention.

Fishback won only 10.5 percent of the vote in Florida’s Republican gubernatorial primary this year, but his audience consists mostly of young conservative men who could shape the future of the party. That’s in large part because of Fishback’s Christian “America First” stance and opposition to the Iran war, which he believes Israel dragged the U.S. into—a framing that has won over conservatives who are skeptical of Trump’s foreign policy.

Fricks is one of those young men who’s been watching Fishback carefully from Oklahoma and was excited to meet him at the convention. The 20-year-old communications student is chairman of the Rogers State University College Republicans. Fricks said he disagreed with Fishback’s “comments toward the Jewish community” and his “comments toward Byron Donalds” (the Republican nominee for Florida governor), but he admired Fishback’s personality and ideals.

“He puts things like it is, and he’s not afraid to stand up and defend his beliefs,” Fricks said. “He wanted to put Florida first.”

Fricks said he also sees people like Vice President JD Vance, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and the late Charlie Kirk as the figureheads of the future conservative movement. 

Convention-goers at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. (Photo by Eden Shamy )

The second day of the convention landed on the one-year anniversary of Kirk’s assassination and just a day before the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Speakers at the convention often spoke about both acts of extremism in the same breath, as well as the numerous attempts on Trump’s life, tying them into one narrative about the dangers that the radical left poses to the future of the United States.

“The hate that killed Charlie Kirk, that knocked down the Twin Towers, that led to two assassination attempts on President Trump, it just keeps getting worse and worse,” U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said. “And we are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance: communists and islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party.”

Attendees wore red t-shirts and hats honoring Kirk, who has become the face of a deeply loyal and religious MAGA base. Like Fishback, Kirk’s often polarizing and unapologetic stances wrapped in Christianity connected with young men. Fricks said he considered himself “more of an independent, more outside the MAGA spectrum—but recently, with the passing of Charlie Kirk and the election of Trump, I have kind of come around.”

Few politicians have delivered that brand of Christian conservatism in the same edgy manner as U.S. Representative Brandon Gill. He is the youngest Republican in Congress, representing Texas’ 26th Congressional District in North Texas, at age 32. Gill walked onto the stage on the first night to loud cheers and shouts of “I love you Brandon!”

Gill’s love of leading questions and outright trolling of government officials during congressional committee hearings has turned him into a quickly rising star in the party and online.

“I think it’s only appropriate that we kick this convention off properly… with a land acknowledgement,” Gill quipped, met by laughter and surprise. Only an hour later, the longtime talk show personality Adam Carolla also began his remarks with a land acknowledgement that fell flat by comparison.

Gill was just one of many Texans who dominated the agenda. Hosting the convention in Dallas allowed the GOP to spotlight critical races in the state, including the newly gerrymandered districts that the party is hoping to flip this November.

Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz from the 15th District spoke early on day one and took shots at her opponent Bobby Pulido, an award-winning Tejano singer beloved in South Texas who is polling strongly despite Trump previously carrying the district by 18 points. She was introduced by her brother Carlos De La Cruz, who is seeking to join her in Congress from Texas’ 35th Congressional District outside San Antonio.

On day two, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina received applause for talking about how he abandoned the Democratic Party and ran for Congressional District 28. According to Texas Southern University, Tijerina is also polling lower than his opponent, Henry Cuellar, despite the redistricting.

(Photo by Eden Shamy)

Attorney General Ken Paxton isn’t looking too hot either, according to polling, campaign finance reports, and even the president who endorsed him. Trump spent both nights of the convention acknowledging that Paxton is hard to look at, listen to, or vote for.

“I said I don’t like the way Ken dresses,” Trump said, backdropped by a crowd of supporters who waited hours for a position behind the president. “And then I said I don’t really like the way Ken talks. And then I said something that they really hated… I don’t really like the way he looks. I don’t like it!” The stadium erupted in laughter.

Trump insisted that voters pretend it was him on the ballot rather than Paxton to make the idea easier to swallow. He also pledged that he would return to Texas and other competitive states to rally voters in an all-out push to November. Those tactics might work for the loyal “Front Row Joes,” as Trump calls them, but not for the 51 percent of Texans who said they disapprove of Trump’s performance as president in the latest polling from the Texas Politics Project. That includes 14 percent of Republicans who said they somewhat or strongly disapprove.

“I have some friends who usually support Trump,” said Michael Rosenberg, who has attended two previous Republican conventions. “They’re seeing higher gas prices and higher inflation going around and things that affect their business, and they’re saying that they think this is wrong.” Rosenberg came all the way from New Jersey decked out in a big Uncle Sam hat, having lucked into one of the free tickets. He believes Trump has done a tremendous job during his presidency so far, but he said he can’t convince everyone that the war in Iran has been worth it.

Rusat Ramgopal, executive director of the GOP in Queens, New York said this year’s midterm convention offered a unique opportunity to bring the party together. He argued it should happen more often, pointing to the annual party conferences in places like the United Kingdom. While Republicans are apprehensive about losing seats in November, Ramgopil said he thinks the Democrats are actually far more divided.

“The Democrats are increasingly going down a socialist path,” said the New Yorker, repeating one of the convention’s core themes. “Who is the leader of their party? Is it Gavin Newsom or AOC? Is it Zohran Mamdani or Hakeem Jeffrees? That party is in such a disarray right now.”

Inside the American Airlines Center, which sat within an even larger security perimeter, convention-goers were insulated from the protests and rallies on the outside. The Texas Democratic Party held a press conference on day one led by Chairman Kendall Scudder and joined by fellow Dems from around the country. They called out Trump for the high cost of goods, citing his calamitous war on Iran and the trade war with Canada.

“We’re here to point out the facts over the farce. If you listen to what’s being said across the street, you might feel like you’re living in some separate reality,” Pennsylvania Congresswoman Madeleine Dean said. “The truth is that the average family lost nearly $3,800 to inflation and tariffs by President Trump.”

President Trump at the 2026 midterm convention. (Photo by Eden Shamy)

One protester did manage to burst the RNC bubble during Vance’s keynote address, waving the flags of Palestine and Mexico as he descended the steps of the stadium. The crowd broke into chants of “USA!” and pumped their hands against their chests as the protester was quickly escorted out by security.

The convention ended with a brief rehashing of Trump’s rambling two-hour speech from the night before and a tsunami of balloons as opera singer Chris Macchio belted out “America the Beautiful.” 

Press and delegates waded across the floor through balloons waist-high, popping underfoot, and exited into the hot Dallas night still not quite knowing whether this unexpected convention and Trump’s leadership would carry them through the midterms.

The post  Free Tickets, Familiar Jokes, and an Unsettled Party Grasping for Unity—and a Fight appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The progun shibboleth that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” has become so commonplace that it’s easy to forget its grisly origin. 

In 2012, after a 20-year-old with severe mental illness who was raised by a gun-loving mother killed 20 first graders at a Connecticut elementary school, National Rifle Association (NRA) President Wayne LaPierre made the phrase his opening salvo in what would become a successful campaign to derail national gun control legislation. Only “properly trained, armed good guys,” he claimed, stand between America’s vulnerable children and its “genuine monsters.” 

The year after Sandy Hook, sociologist Harel Shapira took an academic appointment at the University of Texas at Austin and began spending time where many of America’s gun-owning “good guys” are ostensibly being forged: the firearms training center. While his new book-length culmination of that research, Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America, briefly mentions the time he spent at schools in crunchy Portland, Oregon, and liberal suburban Massachusetts, the bulk of Shapira’s narrative unfolds in the rural middle of the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle, where Shapira participated in a legion of courses at a center he pseudonymizes as “Tactical Training.” 

While Texas is often typecast as “the mythic heart of American gun culture,” Shapira argues that it is more bellwether than avant-garde. In 1995, under then-Governor George W. Bush, it became the 22nd state to pass a concealed carry law, which gave Texans the right to carry a handgun in public, provided they completed a training course. Firearms classes boomed and increasingly specialized in training citizens in armed self-defense, a once-rare rationale for gun-owning that would soon eclipse hunting or sport as the dominant justification. They became settings where Texans were inculcated not just with the rudiments of gun use but with a whole way of life.

“I guess you could call it a church,” Tactical Training’s main instructor admits to Shapira, while another teacher jokes that while his wife “carries a rosary … I carry a gun.” 

Basic Pistol: Living and Dying by the Gun in America

The comparison is apt. In this book, there are fire-and-brimstone preachers and enthusiastic converts. (Apostates are much rarer.) There is an agreed-upon catechism and points of dogmatic dispute, such as the NRA’s recommendation to always keep your gun unloaded, which Shapira’s instructor ignores, declaring that doing so is an undue burden. There is a sly mingling of faith and commerce, wherein the exhortation to believe tends to be followed by the injunction to open your wallet. There are patron saints and pilgrimages to holy sites, like the school of a famed instructor who brags about his former students who have been involved in self-defense shootings. Above all, there is an intensely felt moral Manichaeanism: The armed and virtuous elect must prepare to enact righteous violence against the evil perpetrators who seem to lurk around every corner. 

Tactical Training’s main instructor, whom Shapira pseudonymizes as “Tom Krone,” claims that self-defense is a natural evolutionary instinct, “something humans have been doing since the dawn of time.” But Shapira’s book clearly depicts how firearm training centers assiduously cultivate a hair-trigger sensibility. The good guy with a gun is made, not born, and he is made through fear. 

Basic Pistol is full of descriptions of macabre role-playing games, often requiring students to imagine how they might react to witnessing a loved one’s rape. An instructor says he even brought his own daughter to act in a scenario in which she is sexually assaulted. Tactical Training’s lessons also routinely foreground mentally disabled people, who are portrayed as “irrational forces of violence” incapable of feeling pain, giving the student with a gun no choice but to wield it. 

Shapira’s instructors claim to be cribbing their confected scenarios from real-life stories in the news. Their training, they argue, simply reflects the violent reality of a world where, as one instructor puts it, “evil is everywhere.” But Shapira punctures the pretensions of this hard-bitten realism. In one revealing example, the students are presented with a scenario in which a restaurant owner is closing up shop and comes across a deranged drunk person, who violently attacks. Shapira reads the corresponding newspaper clipping and learns that the owner had simply encountered a homeless man who’d come into the restaurant after it closed, looking for food and a bathroom. The exchange was completely nonviolent. In the dog-eat-dog world of Tactical Training, however, such an encounter with a stranger is no occasion for dialogue, let alone mercy. 

The result of this social conditioning is that many of Shapira’s fellow students live in what he calls “a never-ending loop of risk perception and reduction.” Workaday encounters with fellow citizens, such as eating at a restaurant or filling up on gas, become freighted with mortal peril. In one darkly comic scene, Shapira has a video call with an instructor who demonstrates how he keeps his gun at the ready while sitting on a public toilet. (It’s more complicated than you might think.) Shapira writes that his instructors wanted him to draw, aim, and fire so frequently—including by practicing at home without live ammo, like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver—that it became “automatic, instinctual.” 

A few months into his time at Tactical Training, one of Shapira’s instructors confronts, in real life, the kind of scenario that firearm classes are designed for. Early one morning, a young Black man whom Shapira calls “Isaac” breaks down the front door of an instructor he calls “Michael.” After yelling at Isaac to leave, Michael shoots him five times, including once in the back, killing him. He refuses a request from his 911 dispatcher to check if Isaac is alive. “’Cause I am thinking, ‘Dude’s got friends,’” he tells Shapira. 

Isaac turns out not to be a burglar trailed by shadowy accomplices, but rather a young man suffering from severe mental disabilities who, seemingly in distress, had run out from a nearby home for people with special needs. He is the sort of person routinely dehumanized by Tactical Training’s instructors as both subhuman and superhuman, and, in the wake of the killing, the instructors vilify him in familiar terms. Krone calls him “a crazy person who doesn’t feel pain”; another describes him as “retard strong.” The police deem the shooting a justifiable homicide. 

Debates about gun violence, whether committed by private citizens or police, tend to narrow the aperture to the moment of the shooting alone, to focus on the question of what was in the gunman’s mind when he pulled the trigger: Did he fear for his life? Shapira deems such questions secondary. Isaac’s shooting was, he argues, “not a split-second decision but rather the outcome of a long process.” 

More important are the ways American gun culture has socialized millions of people to believe in the necessity of carrying machines designed to kill—and in the righteousness of using them against subjectively perceived threats. Michael himself articulates his pride at how “mechanically proficient” the killing was; he compares it to how, for an academic like Shapira, typing on a computer must become second nature. 

The gun control movement is animated by the tragedy of deaths like Isaac’s, and rightly so. But Basic Pistol also suggests a deeper tragedy wrought on the relationships of trust and mutuality that make American democracy possible in the first place. The gun lobby likes to claim that an “armed society is a polite society.” But Shapira’s sobering book reveals more of a Hobbesian war of all against all, one in which our neighbors appear as so many potential threats to our lives and liberty, rather than equal members of a shared democratic project. 

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