Based on the identity of the caller and the fact that he was phoning at noon on a Saturday, I knew my lunch was going to be ruined. I was in the parking lot of Whiskey Cake, one of my favorite restaurants in San Antonio. Even the cell phone ring sounded nervous.
“Hey, Congressman, we really need some help.”
It was Maverick County Judge David Saucedo. He was upset. He was tired. He was frustrated.
Two weeks after the July Fourth holiday in 2020, a desperate battle was being waged in Eagle Pass, Texas. Fort Duncan Regional Medical Center was Maverick County’s largest hospital; it had been depleted of supplies and lacked sufficient personnel when it was overrun with COVID-19 patients.
As I recall the conversation, Judge Saucedo continued, “We need a mobile medical unit. We need nurses. We need oxygen machines. Honestly, Congressman, we need whatever you can get us. And we need it today.”
While the COVID situation in Texas was bad in urban areas like El Paso and San Antonio, the limited medical facilities in rural areas—as we saw in other rural communities around the country—were stretched unbelievably thin during the crisis. By early July, during the first of many waves of the pandemic throughout 2020 and 2021, an average of 48 new cases were diagnosed per day per 100,000 residents in Maverick County. This was double the state average, making it one of the worst-hit counties in the country.
It only got worse.
I remember reading reports of the coronavirus in early January 2020 as it emerged in China. I had become more aware of the potential impact of novel viruses because of Texas’s experience with the worldwide Ebola epidemic of 2014 and 2015, when cases broke out in Dallas. One man died, and two healthcare workers tested positive.
I was in Seattle two days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) diagnosed the Emerald City as having the first case of COVID in the U.S. During my thirty-six-hour trip to discuss quantum computing and artificial intelligence, I had a sinking feeling that this virus was going to be trouble, although, like most people, I certainly didn’t anticipate the catastrophe that ultimately developed.
The inability to flatten the COVID curve, despite the efforts undertaken to do so, shook Americans’ faith in their leaders. Through the height of the pandemic, trust in the government to deal with COVID plummeted. And COVID was just the latest sign of America’s crisis of confidence. Trust in government and its leaders has been cratering for decades (from close to 80 percent in the mid-1960s to almost 20 percent now).
Trust—whether it is in a loved one or a government—is neither a gift nor an inheritance. It is earned. The solution to this trust deficit is not Republican leaders pandering only to Republican voters or Democratic leaders pandering only to Democratic voters. Leaders must engender the trust of all the people they represent by showing competent action through problem-solving rather than trying to just influence their partisans.
In a country where the political parties are constantly at each other’s throats, is this approach unrealistic? No. Because it’s the only pragmatic option that will help the greatest number of people possible. I’ve seen it work in a politically divided district and in Washington, DC, the NBA of partisan fighting.
In my experience, building trust involves two things: First, engaging everybody, no matter whether they voted for you, against you, or didn’t vote at all. And second, building credibility by solving real problems.
In the last few years, we’ve seen how not to build trust. Announce you have irrefutable evidence of the leader of the free world colluding with Russia but never produce any evidence. Deny a devastating disease and ignore science. Be outraged that poor Ukraine was being extorted for political gain but fail to demonstrate this or even talk about it again after the TV cameras are turned off. Reject and try to overturn the indisputable results of a presidential election and act like sore losers.
These actions have eaten away at faith in our constitutional republic because those entrusted to safeguard it are afraid of the extremist wings of their parties.
I first decided to go into public service because I thought it would be exciting to serve my government in exotic places doing dangerous things. I continued my service in a different way because I believed that while my friends and I were putting ourselves in harm’s way to protect our country, some in Washington were being negligent in their duties.
The preamble of our Constitution outlines what citizens want and should get from their government:
As a representative democracy, we elect legislators to enact laws on our behalf. It’s about finding a compromise that is amenable to the greatest number of people possible.
Engendering trust doesn’t mean agreeing. Those are two different things. The desired end-state is to be able to trust each other without agreeing with each other 100 percent of the time. Now, you got to agree sometimes. I’ve found it’s somewhere between 65 and 70 percent. You don’t agree with your spouse or best friend 100 percent of the time, so why should that be the standard for your elected official?
This trust deficit isn’t just plaguing political leaders. The degradation of trust in our traditional media—newspapers, TV networks, magazines, and the like—has pushed people in our country and around the world to seek “facts” from alternative sources like social media. This transition to sources that blur the lines between facts and opinions has fueled the colossal misinformation crisis we are witnessing. If you watch Fox, you have one set of beliefs. You have another set of beliefs if you tune into MSNBC and read the New York Times. If you scroll through YouTube, you can have whatever convictions you want confirmed, depending on which rabbit hole you dive into. Facebook and Twitter operate the same way.
People aren’t believing facts because of cognitive bias, defined by the think tank the Rand Corporation as a situation where people “look for opinions and analysis that confirm their own pre-existing beliefs, more heavily weigh personal experience over facts, and rely on mental shortcuts and the opinions of others in the same social networks.” We saw the disastrous results of cognitive bias during COVID: People refused to wear face masks, didn’t social distance, and declined vaccines because of misinformation they had found on social media.
The chaotic, ignore-the-science COVID response of some within the Trump administration, along with some of our nation’s governors, negatively affected the president’s reelection chances and prevented Republicans from taking back the House. Some postelection analysis showed 55 percent of voters disapproved of President Trump’s handling of the COVID crisis, while an overwhelming 83 percent said the federal government’s handling of the pandemic was an important factor in their vote.
Imagine if Republicans hadn’t ignored or downplayed COVID and President Trump demonstrated decisive collaborative leadership in dealing with the pandemic. Imagine if the presidential campaign had been waged on the strong economy that existed before an out-of-control pandemic crashed the country. Imagine if the president, instead of pandering to the extremes within the Republican electorate, built trust within those communities that were the largest-growing voting blocs. Would Donald Trump still be president? Would Republicans have taken back the House? Possibly. Or even probably.
Texas 23 was one of the first areas in the U.S. thrust into the pandemic maelstrom when ninety-one American citizens living in Wuhan, China, were evacuated to San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force Base for quarantine during early February 2020. They were followed by passengers from the virus-stricken cruise ship, the Diamond Princess.
Local residents were panicked over the presence of the evacuees in their community, so I decided to tour the Lackland quarantine facilities. My staff disagreed with my decision to go. They were worried that people would think I would become contagious. Some on my staff were worried that I might catch COVID and die. I believed it was important to show up, see what was going on, help fix any problems, and confirm for my constituents that they were getting correct information. I also wanted to make contact with the knowledgeable staff from the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Defense who were directly dealing with this issue.
On my visit, I had a sense that the evacuees were being well cared for. The staff demonstrated the kind of compassion for the families’ well-being that I would have expected from a pastor at a church, not an overworked government employee. The facility looked like a normal apartment complex—with the exception of buildings surrounded by an eight-foot security fence weighed down by sandbags, and scientists and medical professionals in hazmat suits. To be honest, it looked like a scene from the movie Outbreak, where a deadly Ebola-like virus hits a small town in the U.S.
More than anything, that visit, along with the conversations with the professionals dealing with the brewing crisis, impressed upon me the magnitude of COVID’s looming threat. When I got back from the base tour, I instructed our staff to call local officials around the 23rd, to start banging on doors and sounding the alarm. Do you have emergency pandemic plans? Have these plans been stress tested? What are your contingencies if your hospitals run out of beds? What will you do if your hospitals are unable to transfer patients to medical centers in El Paso and San Antonio? Some local officials were on the ball. Others shrugged it off. But we gave everyone the same message: “Tell us what you need, and we’ll try to get it.”
As case counts increased throughout the state, our office went into 24/7 mode. We also worked on building relationships with state and federal officials who could help us. I established contact with Blair Walsh, section chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), who was incredibly cooperative, unbelievably effective, cool as ice, and as nice as can be. My chief of staff, John Byers, and my district director, Stacy, as well as other staff, burrowed through the state and federal bureaucracies, looking for whoever could assist as we tried to prepare the district for the storm.
I was able to sympathize with the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose families were devastated by COVID because I, too, lost a loved one to the virus. My mom’s brother, my uncle Dennis, succumbed in June 2020. When I was a kid, Uncle Dennis, Aunt Jean, and their six kids drove from their home in Indiana to Texas in a Winnebago, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. It became my dream at a young age to travel the country in a Winnebago like Uncle Dennis (that dream was partially realized when we rented an RV for one of our DC2DQ trips). Uncle Dennis was a marathon runner, a kind of quirky guy who was always doing magic tricks, like taking a quarter out of your ear.
Afflicted with Parkinson’s disease, he was a resident in a Florida nursing home that the virus viciously spread through. We weren’t able to travel to the funeral, and none of his kids could be at his bedside when he died. He and my mom used to talk weekly, and for a while, my family wrestled with whether to even tell her about his death because of her dementia. In the end, we did, and she took it as best she could, though I’m not sure she remembers that her brother is no longer with us.
When the pandemic struck nationally, some communities in the Texas 23rd were among the hardest hit. Wave after wave of major outbreaks occurred in El Paso and San Antonio, and vast stretches of the rural areas of the district were also in crisis. Penitentiary inmates were tasked with moving the bodies of coronavirus victims to relieve medical examiners’ personnel, emergency rooms and ICUs were overflowing with patients, children were left orphaned when parents succumbed to COVID, and local companies laid off thousands of workers. My favorite local coffee shop went under, as did many other small businesses. The pandemic decimated so many small businesses that are the backbone of the communities in El Paso and San Antonio.
As the crisis mounted in the early months of March and April 2020, I remember Stacy’s daily briefings. First the virus was in five counties. Then ten. Then fourteen, and, like a wildfire, it had spread to twenty-eight out of twenty-nine counties. In the early days, when personal protective equipment for medical staff was in desperately short supply, my staff and I acted fast to connect private companies with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and TDEM, to make sure masks and other supplies got into our communities.
When it came to the crisis at Fort Duncan Regional Medical Center, my staff and I were already aware that the hospital was struggling. Eagle Pass Mayor Luis Sifuentes and Judge Saucedo had been in communication with me for weeks. I told them the same thing every time, “Just tell us what you need.”
In Texas, county judges are the elected executive for the county and operate much like mayors, and Judge Saucedo was pretty powerful. He was one of the longest-serving elected officials in Maverick County. When we first met in 2009, he was the kingmaker for Ciro Rodriguez, the former Texas 23 congressman. The first three times I was on the ballot—2010, 2014, and 2016—Judge Saucedo worked hard for all my opponents, to ensure I was defeated. I didn’t take it personally; he knew my opponents well, and as one of the senior Democrats in the county, he was going to support Team Democrat.
That never changed my approach to him. When Maverick County needed help to rebuild after a major flood, we helped. When low staffing levels at the border checkpoints were causing unnecessarily long wait times, we worked to right this wrong. When the county library needed help with a grant, we did it. So the judge knew that when he was getting crushed by COVID-19, I would be there for him and the community we represented. Most people wouldn’t help a political adversary, but being a true representative means transcending politics.
After hanging up with Judge Saucedo in the parking lot of Whiskey Cake, my staff and I did what we always did—tried to solve a problem. We mined our contacts at TDEM, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), FEMA, and Health and Human Services (HHS), making sure that Fort Duncan was at the top of their lists for resources.
A Navy Rapid Rural Response Team arrived at the hospital, as well as resources from the state—medics, nurses, and paramedics. In all, thirty-two new staff were deployed to the hospital, easing the immediate crisis.
Did that solve all Maverick County’s COVID problems? No. By late October 2020, average new daily cases in Maverick County per 100,000 people were four times higher than the average in the entire state. By March 2021, more than three hundred people had died. And the carnage continued.
Across South Texas, thousands died and tens of thousands were infected. We couldn’t fix all the problems our communities were dealing with, but by demonstrating we would engage with everyone to actually solve real problems, we repaired the trust local officials and the community had in their federal partners.
While providing help goes a long way in engendering trust, solving problems is easier when you have an expertise. Expertise creates an opportunity to have instant credibility. When people ask me what they need to do to run for office, I always advise getting experience in something that you will have to work on in the office for which you want to run.
In a fifty-fifty district like mine, establishing credibility is critical, and I was able to do it because I had spent my entire adult life protecting our homeland. My very first bill was aimed at an important group of constituents—U.S. Border Patrol agents. Along the Texas-Mexico border, the Border Patrol is a major employer. Agents work in harsh conditions and oftentimes put their lives at risk. But in 2015, their overtime pay was going to be reduced because of bureaucratic ridiculousness. I passed a bill that fixed the problem.
By the end of my first term, I had seven bills and two amendments signed into law by President Obama—the highest number of bills to become law out of all 435 members of Congress and 100 senators during that term. I focused on issues that I had an expertise in and always had a bipartisan partner before I even began writing the legislation.
Helping Border Patrol was not the only way I leveraged my expertise in that first term.
When I was running for office in 2014, the Islamic terrorist group ISIS was the biggest issue worrying my constituents and Americans around the country. Fellow Texan Mike McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, tasked Rep. John Katko (R-New York) to form a bipartisan Foreign Fighters Task Force to counter ISIS’s tactics of explicitly encouraging “foreign fighters” who could not make it to Iraq and Syria, to join their struggle in other locations. I joined my buddy Katko, who ultimately introduced the Tracking Foreign Fighters in Terrorist Safe Havens Act, which provides law enforcement with the necessary resources to stop foreign fighters from traveling overseas to fight with ISIS and then return to the U.S. The bill was signed into law by President Obama as part of an appropriations bill.
Solving real problems is hard. So is engaging people who don’t agree with you. The difficulty of doing this is why many leaders prefer to pander to their extremes. It’s easier. Dealing with an increasingly complicated future that includes a New Cold War with a peer like the government of China, growing inequities across communities, and a technological explosion that is making science fiction science reality, will require making tough decisions as a country. As painful as this will be, we absolutely can’t avoid it. Addressing these challenges will require the consent of the governed, which can be earned if the trust deficit is eliminated by leaders having the courage to inspire rather than fearmonger.