Donald Trump vs. Will Hurd in 2024? A Black Texas Republican fights racism and the Big Lie

In his new book, then-CIA officer Will Hurd describes participating in a 2008 CIA briefing in Kabul, Afghanistan, for members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. He overheard several of them pressing for time to go rug shopping. A congressman then asked Hurd why the Taliban wouldn’t coordinate with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He replied that one was Sunni and one was Shiite. What’s the difference? another lawmaker asked.

Hurd assumed he was about to make a joke. He was not. He really didn’t know the history of the long-running sectarian conflict.

“This should have been easy stuff for these Washington, D.C., intelligence ‘experts,’ ” Hurd writes. They were, after all, deciding how to spend billions in taxpayer money and whether to send U.S. troops to war zones.

By the next year, Hurd was home in Texas running for Congress. He lost that first House race, won a few years later, and took his oath of office in January 2015. Six months later, Donald Trump declared his presidential candidacy and ushered in the age of "experts." Mainly Trump himself because, as he puts it, "I know what I'm doing," and people with no experience for their jobs.

Shock value and wacko conspiracies

Brains and bipartisanship might seem like a great recipe for political success. But not right now.

The GOP is still the party of Trump, the Big Lie that he won 2020 and the Big Delusion that he will be reinstated as president for life. It's the unhinged party of Ginni Thomas, who showered Trump's chief of staff with texts that promoted wacko conspiracy theories and prophesied apocalyptic doom if Joe Biden took office. The high court justices, including Thomas' husband, have been ruling on election challenges from Trump and his allies for over a year and at the time of the texts, they were talking about asking it to invalidate the election.

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It's the shock-value party pioneered by former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, now a possible candidate for the late Rep. Don Young’s seat. "We need people who have cojones," she told Sean Hannity. "We need people like Donald Trump who has nothing to lose, like me ... no more of this vanilla milquetoast namby-pamby ... stuff that’s been going on.”

OK then.

That famous Will and Beto road trip

The gulf between the Trump-Thomas-Palin party and the GOP that could be is underscored this week by the release of Hurd’s “American Reboot: An Idealist’s Guide To Getting Big Things Done” – like creating a U.S. "brain gain" through immigration and heading off China's drive to replace America as the world technology leader. You don't write a book like this unless you're contemplating another chapter in politics and Hurd, 44, is no exception.

He's the perfect candidate, at least for idealists: a former undercover CIA officer and cybersecurity executive, half white and half Black, three-time winner in a majority Hispanic House district along the Texas border that’s half Democratic and half Republican. He was seen by many as the future of the GOP – and then he retired from Congress.

Was it too hard to be in the party of Trump? "I would have won my election in a landslide. My life does not revolve around Donald Trump," Hurd said in an interview.

When I asked whether he'd wait for a post-Trump era to reenter politics, his answer left the door open to a 2024 presidential bid. "What he does or doesn’t do does not decide what I do or don’t do," Hurd said, later adding: "If the right opportunity presents itself, it’s hard for me to say no to serve my country."

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Hurd may be best known for a bit of bipartisan theater – his 1,600-mile drive from Texas to Capitol Hill with fellow Congressman Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic liberal now running for governor, in 2017. When bad weather canceled their flights, they rented a car, turned on a video livestream and started debating issues in a marathon town hall meeting with call-in questions from anyone listening. It was a charming road trip that won the pair a civility in public life award from Allegheny College.

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Not surprisingly, given his 50-50 district and his success, Hurd believes the GOP should "look like America" and voting should be expanded, not restricted. In his book and a 2019 USA TODAY column, he wrote about his father's lessons on coping with racism at a time when interracial marriage was not "widely accepted" in Texas (PMA, or positive mental attitude, was key).

The lessons of 2020, he told me, are "don't be a socialist" (for Democrats) and "don't be a jerk" (for Republicans).

Hurd's book traces his journey from bullied child with crooked teeth, to president of the Texas A&M student body when a bonfire killed 12 students, to daring clandestine CIA officer, to bipartisan legislative partner and, at the end of his House tenure, increasingly breaking from his president.

During Trump's term, Hurd's votes aligned with the president's positions 95% of the time in 2017-18 and 65% in 2019-20. He criticized Trump on racial issues and was among the few Republicans to back the Equality Act extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ Americans. He wrote a 2017 USA TODAY column calling for a smart cyber border wall instead of Trump's "third century" physical wall and co-wrote a bipartisan immigration bill that almost passed.

The Ukraine impeachment vote

Like the rest of his House GOP colleagues, Hurd voted no on both articles of impeachment in 2019. When Trump tied military aid to getting political dirt on Biden in a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Hurd said, he did not break the law. That's a standard many experts say does not apply, but he told me it is his standard.

Hurd said he didn't vote for Biden or Trump in 2020. After the election, he condemned Trump for "undermining our political process & questioning the legality of the voices of countless Americans."

He was out of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, but told me he would have supported the second impeachment because "I think that the president incited violence, and I also think he tried to instruct the Georgia secretary of state to violate the law by fabricating votes."

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These are not popular sentiments in the GOP today. Trump's critics are gone or leaving, and Rep. Liz Cheney is an outcast. (In fact, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy scheduled a huge fundraiser for her Trump-backed challenger a day after Hurd's book came out.) The Trumpy in crowd, meanwhile, includes Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert, and the top leaders in Hurd's home state.

Hurd doesn't deny today's GOP realities (one of his chapters is called "Don't Be an Asshole, Racist, Misogynist, or Homophobe") yet he sees a viable centrist faction in his party. I don't, but I hope he's right or will be soon. I almost certainly wouldn't vote for him for president. Still, the return of an inclusive, fact-based Republican Party would be a huge relief for those of us who fear for our country.

Jill Lawrence is a columnist for USA TODAY and author of "The Art of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke Through Gridlock." Follow her on Twitter: @JillDLawrence

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Can a Black Texan reboot Trump's GOP and America? Will Hurd is trying.