This Texas County Voted Republican for the First Time in a Century. They Like What They See.

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — Homero Gonzalez winced at the mention of Elon Musk, and asked if I’d seen the photos of the billionaire wielding a chainsaw at a conservative conference last week.

Musk’s mass firings and budget cuts meant some Republican lawmakers were getting booed at town halls in their districts. Gonzalez worried that the flamboyance of President Donald Trump’s chief henchman might be drawing the wrong kind of attention. But the cutting? He was all for it.

“It’s hard,” Gonzalez said, but “we need it.”

We were speaking at the Starr County Fair in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, where I’d come to visit with some of Trump’s newest converts — voters who turned this county red in November for the first time in more than 100 years and helped Trump win the popular vote for the first time. The way they welcomed the disemboweling of the federal bureaucracy was in sharp contrast to what some have suggested is an emerging backlash to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.

Of the dozens of people I spoke with at the fairgrounds and around Rio Grande City — most of them Republicans or right-leaning independents, but also some who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 before flipping to Trump — I found a handful were indifferent to the cuts. But more often than not, they saw Musk’s enterprise as a necessary rebalancing of a system they believed wasn’t working for them.

“There’s a lot of people who take advantage, they abuse the system,” Gonzalez told me.

It was drizzling at the fair, with temperatures just above freezing. Gonzalez, who works in the oil industry, sat by his son in a tent where their friend Roman Del Bosque groomed a miniature Hereford. Getting fired, he said, was something people in this county, one of the most impoverished in the United States, knew all about. “It sucks,” he said. But Del Bosque, a freight driver, also thought it was necessary.

The cow urinated. DOGE, Del Bosque said, is eliminating “the B.S.”

In Washington, Republicans were beginning to show some anxiety about opposition to Musk’s tear through federal agencies. The cuts came up at sometimes-hostile town halls Republican House members held last week in states like California, Georgia, Oklahoma, Oregon and Wisconsin. Some congressional Republicans, nervous about the speed and severity of the cuts, have privately raised concerns with the White House. They have reason for caution, after a series of unfavorable polls.

But the calculation I found among Trump’s voters here was different. There was no buyer’s remorse, no defensiveness. If anything, it was a project they approached with a sense of obligation, or reverence, or glee.

“I don’t qualify for Medicaid, so fine with me,” Nelda Cruz, a clerk at a local utility, said when I asked about Republican spending proposals that could require billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid. “Now they’re going to feel how I feel.”

She said, “The nation needed this. A good shakeup. And all the people it is riling up, it’s because it’s hurting them.”

The owner of a downtown insurance company with a sign outside advertising, “Obamacare: Enroll Here,” asked me if it was true that “reptile people” had been discovered taking Social Security benefits (it’s not), and similarly told me that either way, America “needed a shaking up.”

Even if it might hurt them. Texas is home to some 130,000 civilian federal employees, not too far off from the more than 144,000 living in Virginia. More than a quarter of Starr County’s population lives in poverty. But as I walked around town and the fairgrounds — all riding boots and camo jackets, parents ducking out of the rain and ribbon-carrying children eating gushers and potato swirls — people suggested to me that Musk’s crusade was not only a pragmatic pursuit, but a righteous one.

Their enthusiasm for it reflected a countervailing force in the GOP to those worried about the consequences of DOGE and the House budget blueprint. The Trump supporters here had not necessarily expected such an aggressive effort to dismantle government. But they were embracing the idea now — part fiscal conservativism, part ruthlessness — almost as a new tenet of MAGA orthodoxy.

And if there are negative consequences for federal programs, or for the employees losing their jobs? Gonzalez’s son, Matthew, who recently left work as a hunting guide to take a job with a fiberoptics company in San Antonio, told me he trusted Musk was “doing what’s good for the American people.”

His dad, Homero, shrugged. He suspected many of the employees Musk was targeting were hired during Biden’s administration, anyway. Musk, he said, is “helping out in ways that are good for us.”

Starr County, a smattering of border towns, ranches and farmland named for a former secretary of the treasury of the Republic of Texas, is the most Latino county in the contiguous United States, at 97 percent. Trump’s performance in the election in November reflected his improvement with Latino voters across the country. Here, his support was motivated largely by frustration with rising prices and Biden’s immigration policies, among other factors — not the size of the federal bureaucracy.

In fact, the only thing about Trump’s first month in office that I found near universal opposition to was the administration’s detainment, briefly, of migrants at Guantánamo Bay. But not because of any sympathy for the migrants. It’s because the Texas land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has offered Trump 1,400 acres of land just outside Rio Grande City, the county seat, to build a deportation facility. Republicans and even some Democrats want the economic benefits associated with new construction — and a new federal operation — to be located in Starr County, instead.

As for the economy, a month into Trump’s term, his supporters here were giving him a pass.

Down a line of pig pens, John Lopez, a pipeline consultant, told me he was thinking about starting a business building “barndominiums,” a kind of home, and was warned by friends in the steel business to put in building supply orders now, on the fear tariffs could cause prices to skyrocket.

Prices at the grocery store aren’t any better now than before, either. He said he paid $5 for an avocado recently.

But that wasn’t on Trump, he said. “It’s not going to happen on Day One.”

When I mentioned that Trump had promised to bring inflation down “starting on Day One,” before acknowledging last week, while dismissing responsibility, that “inflation is back,” his friend, Jorge Gonzalez II, echoed, “Day One,” and laughed.

“I know he said that,” said Gonzalez, an agriculture science teacher.

That, he said, was part of Trump’s “asshole-ness, arrogance.” Gonzalez said he didn’t know if Trump could fix the economy. But he said, “I know Biden can’t.”

On top of that, he volunteered, “I am liking the DOGE thing. … They’re tightening stuff up.”

Several people here saw the possibility, however uncertain, of money in it — and not just from the construction of a potential detention facility. We were standing amid stacks of feed. Young children were preparing to show goats in a small ring. Rene Salinas, who was feeding his daughter’s rabbit, told me he wanted to see gas prices go down, but he liked what he’d just seen in the news about Musk’s proposal to send out “DOGE dividend” checks.

“I was just reading right now that he’s going to give us some money back,” he said.

But that was a side benefit. Even if the checks don’t materialize, what they saw in DOGE was a more enduring benefit.

“It’s going to hurt,” said Luis Ayala, who was selling spicy candy in an exhibition hall and who, at 35, voted for the first time last year for Trump. He worries about what will happen to his mother, who is 55, if cuts to entitlement programs benefiting seniors are enacted.

“It’s going to suck,” he said.

But it all was necessary, he said. “If everything turns out good, my kids or the kids of my kids, have a better U.S.”

No one I spoke with had been laid off or had services cut yet. A border patrol agent who had come to the fair with his daughter and her sheep said to me, “It’s not affecting me.”

“It would suck, if it was me,” he said, but added, “There are a lot of people who don’t do shit.”

The political ramifications of Musk’s meat axe are hard to measure. Yes, his approval ratings are underwater. A majority of Americans disapprove of agency shutdowns and mass layoffs, and perhaps most worrisome for Musk — answering to a president who is known more for shifting blame than any loyalty to people who become political problems — Trump’s approval ratings have slipped.

It’s possible that in DOGE’s work and in the budget cuts Republicans are pursuing, Democrats will find a rallying cry reminiscent of the one Republicans seized in 2009, when they capitalized on anger about then-President Barack Obama’s health care legislation in the run-up to the midterms. That frustration started showing up at town halls, not unlike the ones Republicans saw last week.

But that was a long time ago, in a less polarized political environment. In November, abortion rights were supposed to be a galvanizing force for Democrats, and they weren’t enough to keep Trump or Republicans from steamrolling them. Initial polls surrounding the riot at the Capitol in 2021 were bad for Trump, too. They softened over time.

Last week’s town halls were events that drew the discontented, and the politically active. Left-leaning voters I spoke with here were hopeful the effects of cutbacks might eventually prove politically persuasive and increase opposition to Trump. But they weren’t convinced the message is breaking through. They said things like, “It’s too late,” or, “Everybody fell for it,” or “We just got to wait four years.”

“It’s hard for me to see it,” Juan Garcia, a high school agriculture science teacher, told me. “Just to chop everything at its root.”

It isn’t just in Starr County that Trump’s critics are uncertain about the fallout. On my way out of Texas, I drove along the border to Laredo, where the district’s embattled Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar was riding in the annual Anheuser-Busch Washington’s Birthday Parade.

Cuellar, a conservative Democrat, easily carried some areas that Kamala Harris lost, like Starr County, despite being indicted on conspiracy and bribery charges last year — accusations he has denied. After Trump was elected, he thought about joining a DOGE-supporting caucus of lawmakers in Congress. (When we met, he told me he is “still looking at it” but ultimately, “I probably don’t.”)

In Starr County, Cuellar said, Trump’s immigration policies are popular and afforded him a degree of goodwill — and, perhaps, latitude. What most people there were seeing from DOGE was “cut waste, cut abuse, all that, too much spending.”

But compared to the $2 trillion in budget cuts that House Republicans are looking for, DOGE is just scratching the surface. He predicted public sentiment would change “if you start talking about cutting Medicaid, hospitals, other things.” He said, “If they start cutting into those areas, then I think there might be some buyer’s remorse.”

Just not yet. And there’s hardly unanimity that the situation could change. Trump didn’t cloak his agenda when he ran for president, after all. And he not only won, but he expanded his margins.

Along the parade route in Laredo, I ran into Teresa Medford, the owner of a bar, whose granddaughters were watching, bundled, from the bed of a pickup truck.

“All those people have been working all their lives, and he comes in. … It’s sad,” Medford, a Democrat, said of the fired federal workers.

The protests were encouraging. Democrats were at least voicing opposition, she said. But it wasn’t doing much.

“They are trying,” she said, “but he blocks everything.”

Cuellar was shaking hands. A woman yelled out to him, “We love you!” Down the street, Elsa Garcia, who works for the local school district, told me she expected Musk’s budget cutting to be bad, “but we didn’t know it was going to be this drastic,” while Darren Garza, a clinical psychologist visiting from San Antonio, wondered, even if the cuts did eventually hit home, would it even matter?

One problem, he said, was the degree of “misinformation out there, too, and a lot of confusion about what’s going on.” They might not know what’s coming, he said. And he wasn’t certain that even people affected by a gutting of services, if it arrives, would turn on the GOP.

It was indicative of “blind faith,” Garza told me. “People want to jump on that bandwagon and go along for the ride.”