Donald Trump may be gone, having left behind a pandemic that has killed nearly 500,000 Americans, due to his malicious incompetence. Still, his spirit of governing the people like you hate them and want them to die lives on in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus, Fox News. Just take a look at the GOP response to the crisis in Texas, which has been buried under blizzards so bad that “unseasonable” is a comical understatement. The ice and snow has caused the power grid in the state to collapse, leaving millions of Texans without power and heat in deadly conditions. Rather than deal with the problems with maturity and grace, however, Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and his allies are taking a page directly from Trump’s coronavirus response playbook by abandoning people while exploiting the situation to push a far-right, authoritarian agenda that will only make the problems much worse.

Just as Trump’s response to the pandemic suggested he was rooting for the coronavirus, Abbott and company are using this natural disaster […]