Texas Republicans battle to out-Trump each other as the GOP slips further toward the fringe

It wasn't too long ago that the Republican Party was friendly to immigrants and people of color. While at Liberty University, Christian Collins was finishing up his graduate thesis on how the GOP's talking points about Hispanics impacts how the group views the Republican Party.

Now that thesis is a key piece in a Texas Primary election in a GOP that now pushes a kind of no-immigrant policy, the Daily Beast reported Wednesday.

"He neglected to make Hispanics feel included in his vision for America," Collins wrote of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. "Republicans obviously need to do something, because what they have been doing is not working."

In a short decade, everything changed in the GOP and now Collins is ignoring his own advice, trying to out-Trump his primary opponents. Once the far-right publication Breitbart posted excerpts of the thesis, Collins was thrust into defending the compassion of his youth.

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“It’s a national primary, despite the fact that it’s in a sleepy little part of East Texas,” University of Houston Professor Brandon Rottinghaus told the Daily Beast.

There isn't much of a difference between the leading GOP candidates, the report said. Candidates even boast about their experience working for leading Republican politicians in Texas like Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry.

"Perhaps the defining point of contention between the two [leading candidates] in the homestretch of the race involves not any pressing local issue or policy difference, but whether [Morgan] Luttrell deserves the toxic RINO label—a 'Republican In Name Only'—because he reportedly solicited a campaign contribution from Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the GOP’s few remaining Trump critics in office," the report noted.

Kinzinger has become a pariah after opposing Trump, voting for impeachment and serving on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Luttrell denied he reached out to Kinzinger, but Collins tells voters about it constantly, saying the Congressman is a "traitor to our country."

"He fought in a war for his country. Did you?" Luttrell has said. "No, you didn't."

Now it has become a campaign of the establishment against Trumpism. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) are the main sources of endorsements, not local leaders. Nothing could be more emblematic of the current state of the GOP.

“The issues are less important than the trust that people put in these candidates,” Rottinghaus explained. “Anything that undercuts the message that they’re true believers is troublesome for those candidates.”

Read the full report at the Daily Beast.