Everything's Bigger in Texas — Even the Corruption | Rick Wilson LIVE with Sen. Roland Gutierrez

Key Takeaways

• Texas Democrats are using every rule in the book to stall a redistricting plan that Sen. Roland Gutierrez calls “a pretty bad idea” — and one even GOP Texas AG Ken Paxton defended as fair in 2021.

• Trump’s latest executive order is basically an open invitation to money launderers, tax evaders, and kleptocrats.

• The corruption in Texas politics isn’t subtle — it’s cash-in-hand, Montblanc-pen-in-pocket blatant, and voters are still rewarding it.

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Texas Senator Roland Gutierrez joined Rick Wilson for a conversation that ripped away the polite fiction that Texas politics is just a difference of opinion. It’s a system where power isn’t just hoarded — it’s engineered, traded, and defended like contraband. Trump doesn’t need to draw the map himself; all it takes is a phone call, and loyalists scramble to bend the lines in ways that guarantee more seats and fewer voices.

This is a governing culture where corruption is so normalized it’s almost boring. Gutierrez detailed Trump’s new executive order that greenlights moving money overseas with all the subtlety of a bank robbery in broad daylight, and how Texas’s top law enforcement officer, Ken Paxton, has turned grift into an art form. The rot is hiding in plain sight — and the people paying for it are the communities politicians claim to champion.

While the headlines focus on power plays in Austin, Gutierrez argued the real damage is being done far from the Capitol. Rural hospitals are closing, farm subsidies have been gutted, and basic infrastructure — from bridges to radio towers — is crumbling. These are problems that don’t care about party affiliation, but in a state where political loyalty matters more than outcomes, they’re left to fester.

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