There Is No Such Thing as Two First Places

A candidate for office posted it the other day. He is “America First,” he wrote, and “Texas First” too, both at once, offered as proof that nobody loves this state more than he does. He is not the only one. More reach for both every cycle.

The proliferation of the term “Texas First” does not surprise me. We built that phrase. “Texas First. Texas Forever.” was ours long before any of them reached for it. What gets me is the pairing, the idea that a man can bolt “Texas First” onto “America First” and stand there wearing both. He cannot. The trouble is the word “first.”

“First” is a ranking. It answers a question that only comes up when two things you care about pull in opposite directions at the same time. On the ordinary days, when Austin and Washington want the same thing, the word costs nothing and decides nothing. It earns its keep on the day they disagree, when it tells you which one gives way. There is only one first place. Name a second “first,” and the first one no longer means anything.

None of this is new. You cannot serve two masters, the Gospel says, because the day comes when the two masters want opposite things, and the servant has to choose. Elijah put the same question to a crowd that wanted it both ways. How long, he asked, will you halt between two opinions? A loyalty that folds the moment it costs something is not worth the word.

Now bring it down to the ground, where these things get settled instead of argued. Texas moved to secure its own stretch of the border. Washington hauled the state into court to stop it, and in 2024 the Supreme Court let federal agents cut Texas’s own concertina wire. The candidates who run on “America First” wanted that border held. Washington handed them the opposite, then tied the hands of the one government still trying to act.

And it is not one fight. When Texas lawmakers moved to end birth tourism, they were told immigration belongs to Washington. The Federal Reserve sets the interest rate on a Texan’s mortgage and prints the dollars that thin his paycheck, and no Texan casts a vote on either. Economists at the Dallas Fed recently tied Washington’s immigration surge to close to a third of the run-up in home prices, a bill Texas families are paying on a policy Texas never approved. At the end of June, in a single week, nine judges with not one Texan among them settled questions of Texas citizenship, Texas elections, and what may be taught in Texas schools. Term after term, the decisions that set the shape of a Texas life are made by a government no Texan elected, and Texas takes the answer it is handed.

So the collision is not a thought experiment. It happens on the Rio Grande, in the courtroom, in the mortgage, in the grocery aisle. And on the day it happens, only one question matters. Which “first” is in charge?

That is the question the slogan is built to dodge. A politician who claims both “firsts” has already told you how he breaks the tie, whether they understand it or not. A person who will not decide in advance folds, when the hour comes, to whoever already holds the gavel. The gavel is in Washington. “America First and Texas First” does not split the difference down the middle. Under pressure, it comes down on the federal side every time, which is exactly why the phrase is so useful. It lets someone sound like Texas while they default to Washington.

The two halves are not even the same kind of claim. America is not a rival homeland standing next to Texas. America is the union Texas joined, by the consent of Texans, in 1845, and the government it set up in Washington is the creature of that agreement, not its owner. Texas is older than our participation in the union. It spent nearly a decade as its own country, with its own president and its own army, recognized by Washington, London, and Paris, before it ever signed on. Its constitution still opens by calling Texas “a free and independent State.” So “America First” set beside “Texas First” asks you to do something stranger than it sounds. It asks you to rank the agreement ahead of the people who wrote it, and to call that Texas loyalty. Put that way, nobody would print it on a sign. The slogan survives only because most of us were raised not to hear what it actually says.

The reply I always get is that Texas is stronger inside the union, that the two “firsts” are really one. If that were true, the word would never have to come out at all. Washington would have closed the border Texas asked it to close, instead of cutting the wire Texas strung. They collide because they are two, and a candidate who feels that coming and still will not choose is telling both crowds what they want to hear, hoping the collision holds off until after the election.

Here is what the people borrowing the phrase have not carried all the way through to its logical conclusion. “Texas First” is a bumper sticker until Texas can act first, and today it cannot. On the border, on immigration, on the money, on the court that has the last word over all of it, Texas asks and Washington answers. A people that has to ask permission to put itself first has already been put somewhere else, usually last. The one thing that turns “Texas First” from a slogan into a fact is Texas governing Texas. There is a word for that. It is independence, and it is the word the borrowers of the phrase are least willing to say.

I do not doubt that these candidates love Texas. Most of them do, and I take them at their word on it. Loving Texas was never the hard part. The hard part is the choosing, and “America First and Texas First” is what a person reaches for when they want the warmth of putting Texas first without the cost of it. The cost is a decision and is kept when Washington comes to collect.

So put the question to every candidate who reaches for both at once. Which one is first? Make him or her answer it. A person who means to represent Texans can at least tell Texans where they will stand on the day it counts.