Jul 9, 2025
Gov. Greg Abbott Holds BIZARRE Press Conference About Texas Flooding
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas gave a strange football analogy to avert taking responsibility for Texas flash flooding deaths.
- 13 minutes
Happened? Yeah, it was gross negligence.
Okay, now, this happened
in the dead pool is enormous.
Are you going to ask for an investigation?
Who is to blame here?
You ask? I'm going to use your words.
[00:00:16]
Who's to blame? No, this.
That's the word choice of losers.
That's my governor.
So in the wake of the catastrophic Texas
flooding that killed over 120 people,
[00:00:32]
including 27 young campers,
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas
made it clear that he is not interested
in assigning blame to any person or agency
for the massive death toll.
And to make his point,
he used this very bizarre
and I think, unnecessary football analogy.
[00:00:50]
Let me explain one thing about Texas
and that is Texas.
Every square inch of our state
cares about football.
You could be in hunt, Texas.
Huntsville, Texas.
Houston, Texas. Any size community.
They care about football. High school.
[00:01:06]
Friday night lights.
College football or pro and know this.
Every football team makes mistakes.
The losing teams are the ones
that try to point out who's to blame.
The championship teams
are the ones that say,
don't worry about it, man, we got this.
[00:01:23]
We're going to make sure that we go score
again and we're going to win this game.
The way winners talk
is not to point fingers.
They talk about solutions.
What Texas is all about is solution.
I'm exhausted.
[00:01:38]
That metaphor went on
for way longer than it needed to.
But as weird as that metaphor was,
Abbott did say the Texas legislature
would be investigating the flash floods
and trying to figure out how similar
tragedies can be prevented in the future.
Before we talk about whether there
is actually a culprit to blame was,
[00:01:56]
as a non-texan,
I want to get your initial thoughts
on what my governor just had to say.
What do you think?
Well, I may not be a Texan,
but I was a former football player.
High school to be exact.
I played cornerback, varsity.
Yeah, I had my varsity letters
in football.
[00:02:11]
Yeah, I'm just saying. No big deal.
No biggie.
No, but seriously,
to to get at what he said.
In football, we don't point fingers.
He's actually exactly wrong about that.
He actually couldn't be more wrong
about what he just said.
[00:02:28]
Because win or lose in football,
the next day that you show up to practice
or work or whatever you're calling it,
whether it's high school,
college or the pro level, you have what we
call film session, where win or lose those
[00:02:44]
plays where you were not at your best.
You, we pointed out in front of the
entire team and be like, look, Lambray,
you messed that up right there.
Next time you're going to do way better.
And famously actually Bill Belichick in
New England Patriots, the most winningest
[00:03:00]
coach in the history of football,
probably the greatest football coach ever.
Famously, would even rip
Tom Brady in film sessions.
That was like part of the culture.
Nobody was above, the film sessions.
Everybody had to do their jobs.
And even Tom Brady was held
to account at these film sessions.
[00:03:19]
So that's the difference between
actual people who played football
and who actually hold this ethos
and this idiot Greg Abbott is that.
No, actually, you should be taking account
and actually holding yourself
and those around you accountable for
this awfully grave mistake that was made.
[00:03:37]
Yeah. Okay.
So I was wondering about that.
I'm not an athlete.
I've never been an athlete.
But I did just watch Ted Lasso
and I was like,
that's not what they do on Ted Lasso.
That's not what they do in any sport.
I mean, Abbott,
he's he's right about one thing.
Like football is like a weird
big deal here in Texas.
[00:03:53]
I don't get it.
But I don't like,
consider myself a real Texan.
Like Friday Night
lights like that is real.
But like, in high school, I went to every
varsity game in high school because it
was just the thing to do on Friday nights.
I don't think I ever paid attention
to the game, but I was there
and it was a good time, you know?
[00:04:09]
But he is wrong about, like,
everything else that he did say.
So naturally, there has been
a lot of discussion and debate
about how 120 people could be killed in
a flash flooding event, and many Democrats
have pointed the finger at Donald Trump,
in part because the Trump administration
has proposed a 25% cut to the National
[00:04:29]
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
current annual budget of $6.1 billion.
NOAA is the agency which oversees
the National Weather Service.
To be fair, though, those cuts
would not take effect in October.
[00:04:44]
Well, they go into effect
in October of this year, so they wouldn't
have contributed to this particular case.
However, that's not to say that reduced
resources won't impact natural disaster
forecasting in the future.
It is true, though,
that the staffing levels of the NWS
[00:05:00]
have already been reduced thanks to Doge.
So in total, the NWS lost 600
of its approximately 4200 staff,
causing several offices across the country
to operate without the necessary staffing.
However, climate experts opinions
on whether the staffing cuts impacted the
[00:05:19]
response in Texas are a little bit mixed.
Some said that the NWS forecast
and flood warnings last week
were adequate, as as adequate
as they could have expected to be.
And then there is the lack of emergency
warning system along the Guadalupe River,
[00:05:35]
which local officials
have been talking about for years.
So since 2016, the topic of a flood
warning system for Kerr County
has come up at 20 different
county commissioners meetings.
In March of 2016, then Commissioner
Tom Moser noted other Texas locations had
[00:05:52]
the state of the art flood warning sirens,
but they weren't used locally.
Even though this is probably one of the
highest flood prone regions in the entire
state, according to the meeting minutes.
But the county was not able to secure FEMA
grant funding to implement the system.
[00:06:11]
So it seems like there is a multitude
of factors that contributed
to the very high death toll,
and it seems to just keep climbing.
It is hard to assign blame
on any one person or policy, though,
so Republicans are accusing Democrats of
using a tragedy to score political points,
[00:06:28]
which is something they definitely
wouldn't know anything about.
But similar to Greg Abbott,
Senator Ted Cruz, he scolded anyone trying
to blame their political opponents
for a natural disaster.
By the way, this is the same guy who
blamed Democrats for the Los Angeles fires
[00:06:45]
and then threatened to withhold disaster
aid from California, but I'm sure that has
nothing to do with this right here.
Also, white House spokesperson
Caroline Leavitt agreed with Ted Cruz.
Take a look.
And many Democrat elected officials are
trying to turn this into a political game.
[00:07:03]
And it is not. This is a national tragedy.
Tragedy.
Do you think those comments
are depraved and despicable,
especially when so many Americans
are mourning the loss of their children.
Okay, but one person who had absolutely no
issue bucking responsibility and pointing
[00:07:21]
the finger was President Donald Trump.
Less than 24 hours
before leave his comments, Trump said that
while he didn't necessarily want to blame
Joe Biden for the flood, he said this.
Oh my God.
If you look at that water situation,
that was really the Biden setup.
[00:07:38]
What?
You know, I don't
even know what that means.
I don't know what that means. Okay.
But before I get your thoughts on this,
I just.
Need to mention this.
Right before the show reporting came out
that if anyone is to blame
for the slow emergency response,
it might actually be Kristi Noem
[00:07:56]
as the Homeland Security secretary.
She oversees FEMA, and she recently
enacted a rule that any contract or grant
over $100,000 requires her personal sign
off before the funds can be released.
So it was meant to be
a cost cutting measure that she was
[00:08:12]
implementing for the department.
But it's obviously not the most efficient.
It cuts a lot of the autonomy
that the department would have.
So when FEMA would have started
to act like sending help and resources
and aid to the affected area, they quickly
realized that they were unable to do so.
[00:08:28]
They were kneecapped
and they just couldn't do so
without getting Kristi Noem's approval.
So, I want to go back to that Trump quote,
because I read it and I was like,
what if you look at that water situation,
that was really the Biden setup was,
what do you what do you make of that?
[00:08:43]
Because I, I got nothing
I don't know what that is.
What water situation,
what Biden's setup did.
It's so nonsensical.
And the thing is like this river is,
you know,
it flows through the Texas hill country.
It's a very popular tourist destination,
especially this time of year.
[00:09:00]
It's already so hot here in Texas.
That is where you go to cool off.
You go to the hill country, there's trees,
there's shade, and you float the rivers.
And it's a very nice time.
But the thing is, and this is, I think
this is a problem across a lot of Texas.
They don't want to spend a lot of money
on preventative measures.
[00:09:18]
Right.
And as you saw from from those meeting
minutes in Kerr County, you know,
they they didn't spend the money
on getting those those sirens
for the flood warning system,
even though that is an area
that was very, very prone to flooding.
I know here in Houston
and in the Galveston area, there's a lot
[00:09:34]
of concern about the Galveston Seawall,
which protects a lot of the inland,
places, and the island of Galveston
from hurricanes and from storm surges
and things like that.
And it's also kind of like it's a it's
a big problem because here in Houston,
we have the Houston Ship Channel,
which is like a lot of oil refineries
[00:09:52]
and things like that.
So but they really just they don't invest
money on these preventative measures.
Because if a big hurricane did come,
which is not out of the question
and have a direct hit on Houston
and the ship channel,
which is not out of the question, it would
be a disaster not just for Houston, not
[00:10:08]
just for Texas, but for the whole country.
You know, when I hear read
that Trump statement, it honestly reminds
me of Ron Burgundy from one
of the greatest movies ever, anchorman.
And the fact that he's kind
of just programed
to read whatever is on that teleprompter.
[00:10:24]
Trump is programed to blame literally
anything and everything on Joe Biden.
It just doesn't matter what the situation
is, what the topic is, if it
has a potential to make him look bad,
he's going to reflexively blame Biden, as
if Biden and his administration built up
[00:10:43]
the infrastructure in this town in Texas.
Like as if Joe Biden
had anything to do with this.
And it's even it's made even more rich
by his press secretary
going up there and saying, you shouldn't
be blaming people for political points.
And then Trump does exactly that.
[00:11:00]
Like, it's amazing that though that clip
came right before, well, oh, that's cheap.
That's just like the Democrats
blah blah blah scoring cheap points.
Oh that's disgusting.
People in mourning
and in Trump's like blame Biden.
For the water situation.
For that water situation.
[00:11:16]
That's a whole Biden setup.
- I feel like in.
- His mind.
Like.
Donald Trump, like in Trump's mind, Biden
is just out there like, I don't know.
I don't know what he thinks is happening.
I don't know what like if Joe Biden out
there like digging canals in Texas, like I
[00:11:32]
don't know what he thinks is happening.
I don't think.
I think he I think he knows
that whatever comes out of his mouth,
his biggest fans find plausible.
And so, like, if he can get just
those people on board with him,
then it's worth it to do, even if it's
the most blatant and ridiculous lie.
[00:11:50]
I mean, no, you're absolutely right.
I remember during the polar vortex
in Texas, this is like common in my mind
because I lived through it.
But, you know, for the rest of you guys,
if you don't live here, in 2021,
there was a big freeze that hit Texas
and our our electric grid froze over.
[00:12:08]
Everything was a disaster.
And Texans died because they froze
to death in their homes,
while our surrounding states who were also
hit with similar freezing temperatures.
They were just fine
because of their electricity.
But I remember our governor and Trump,
they were on the news talking about like,
[00:12:26]
windmills, you know.
And they're like,
oh, it's the windmills fault.
The windmills are faulty.
And that's why all this is happening.
And also it's only affecting Texans.
And also there are windmills in like
Nordic countries that are doing just fine
and are going through the winters
and they're not causing people
[00:12:43]
to freeze to death in their homes.
But they said that and so many Republicans
and people who are watching Fox News,
they were just like,
oh, it was the windmills.
We got to get rid of the windmills.
And that was the narrative
that flowed all the way across Texas.
And it was like an active effort
on behalf of like other people.
[00:13:01]
To be like that doesn't make any sense.
And if you just think about it
for two seconds,
you would know it doesn't make any sense.
Every time you ring the bell below,
an angel gets his wings.
Totally not true, but it does
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