One Foot Out the Door: TEXIT in the Trump Reprieve

Daniel Miller settles in with a fresh cup for another midweek Q&A, and the through-line of the night is a movement that refuses to stand down just because Washington changed hands. The opposition predicted a Trump win would kill TEXIT. Daniel counts exactly one supporter lost to that thinking, against a steady pile of new registrations. His read is blunt. The wrecking ball that Trump and Elon Musk are taking to the federal bureaucracy is temporary, the popular-vote margin was closer than anyone should be comfortable with, and federal judges and agencies are already throwing up roadblocks. Texans, he argues, are treating this as a reprieve, a window to organize counties and get as close to independence as possible before the next swing. He points to a University of Houston Hobby School survey: only 19 percent of Texans trust the federal government to do the right thing, and a clear majority say the country is on the wrong track. Those numbers, he notes, are not softening.

The heaviest segment is structural. Asked which federal departments an independent Texas would need to build, Daniel walks through months of work mapping every federal function to an existing Texas analog. The Texas Military Department and its three branches stand in for Defense. The comptroller handles Treasury. The General Land Office and TCEQ cover Interior and environment. The Railroad Commission already runs energy and oil and gas. Education, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, and Housing all have state-level counterparts. His point is that the gap between statehood and a self-governing nation is small, and that after a successful referendum Texans get to scale these agencies up or down on their own terms.

He also explains why TEXIT deliberately avoids locking in post-independence policy, using Scotland as the cautionary tale. When the SNP let the opposition bait it into publishing a governing manifesto, the referendum stopped being about independence and became a vote on the SNP. On critics who call independence illegal or economically impossible, Daniel is unsparing: show him the law, read Article 1 Section 10 and the Tenth Amendment, and stop burning hours fighting anonymous accounts when persuadable Texans are waiting to be reached.