Walz, O’Rourke Visit To Texas Riles Ardent Trump Backer

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke last week drew the ire of one of the most pro-Trump Republicans in Congress before arriving in Texas for a town hall meeting at the Fort Bend County Fairgrounds.

Rep. Troy Nehls, who represents Richmond just outside of Houston, recorded a video before the governor’s plane touched down on Thursday denouncing the former vice presidential candidate as a “loser.”

“Give it up. You are not relevant,” Nehls said to Walz, who still is serving as Minnesota’s governor.

Walz and O’Rourke have been holding town halls across the country in Republican strongholds because they say that the GOP is avoiding public forums for fear of blowback from constituents who are upset with President Donald Trump’s controversial policies, which have included sizeable tariffs on imported goods, massive cuts to international aid and medical research grants and targeted deportations of people accused of living in the U.S. without documentation.

Nehls also criticized O’Rourke, calling him a “three-time loser” for his unsuccessful bids to unseat Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and to replace Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the state’s executive branch.

He defended his constituent outreach by pointing out that he sends a weekly newsletter to more than 35,000 constituents. Hearing from constituents should be “an open, respectful, two-way conversation,” he said, shortly after calling Walz and O’Rourke “radical left lunatics who are out of touch, out of touch with what the majority of the American people want.”

Nehls called their campaign a “stunt” and said he would refuse to hold town halls “where George Soros-funded Democrat activists, they scream, they yell and they disrupt.”

Since his election to the U.S. House in 2020, Nehls, a former sheriff, has been one of President Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders. He was among a handful of Republicans who last year proposed renaming Virginia’s Dulles International Airport after the twice-impeached former president, who refused to accept his loss in the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.

And in November, he pledged total allegiance to Trump, telling fellow members of Congress that “Trump is right all the time.”