The most frustrating modern sin is self-destructiveness. It is hard to help people who are bent on actively harming themselves — or at least refusing to help themselves — and then persistently shift the costs of doing so to their friends, family, co-workers, and allies. For those of us who wish to see the Republican Party succeed, the self-destructive streak in the party has long been a great source of frustration, and never more so than in watching people line up to help the Democrats by renominating Donald Trump.

Sadly, that self-destructiveness has been abetted by any number of people within the party who ought to know better, and probably do know better. Texas governor Greg Abbott became the latest of these, joining a line of depressingly foolish endorsements of Trump by Steve Daines, Mike Johnson, Bobby Jindal, Lee Zeldin, Lindsey Graham, John James, Brian Mast, and Pete Sessions. Politicians will often disappoint when making endorsements: I’m old enough to remember Rudy Giuliani endorsing Mario Cuomo for reelection in 1994, even while Giuliani was in the midst of a revolution in conservative urban governance that changed the face of New York City for decades. There are frequently any number of motives at work in these.

Consider Abbott. Why is he doing this? I can’t offer an answer, only some theories.

For a variety of reasons with which any modestly informed observer is familiar, only an idiot or a fool would think that Trump is the best general-election candidate in the field, or would be the best president in the field for the party, its goals, or the nation it seeks to serve. Nothing in his record suggests that Greg Abbott is an idiot or a fool, in general or in this specific way. Thus we must look for an alternate explanation for his subordinating those concerns. Four offer themselves, none of which is necessarily exclusive of the others:

1. Abbott hopes to benefit in some personal or political way from the endorsement. Trump’s winning the nomination would definitely harm Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley as 2028 contenders, and Abbott (who will be 71 in 2028) may yet aspire to a presidential run. If Trump were to win (unlikely, but hardly impossible given the Democrats’ own self-destructive insistence on running a Biden-Harris ticket again), Abbott would make an appealing candidate for attorney general, itself a fine way to cap his career if you ignore what sort of job it would be under a 79-year-old Trump bent on using the law solely to settle scores. Abbott may also just be protecting his own flank from a MAGA primary challenge (e.g., by state attorney general Ken Paxton) if he seeks a third term in 2026.
2. Abbott calculates that the race is over before anyone has voted, to an extent that nobody will hold it against him for turning to the general election’s “suck it up behind the ham sandwich we already nominated” theme. This seems a bad bet. True, any objective observer of this primary must acknowledge that Trump remains a heavy favorite right now. But assuming that he is just going to waltz through the primary winning every contest by large margins is undeniably still a gamble. Chris Christie in 2016 thought nobody would remember his 2016 Trump endorsement, but it haunts him to this day with the very voters he needs.
3. Abbott believes — as the primary endorsers of Mitt Romney in 2012, Gerald Ford in 1976, and other such poll front-runners have argued in the past, usually against conservatives — that primaries are too divisive and we should avoid having them whenever possible. This was the theme of the Texas establishment when Ted Cruz challenged David Dewhurst in the 2012 senate primary. Establishment Democrats made this argument against Barack Obama’s challenging heir apparent Hillary Clinton in 2008.
4. Abbott is concerned that the Texas GOP has its own problems that require him to take this step for reasons of local unity. That may not be a miscalculation. Two recent knock-down fights have illustrated the fissures within the state party. One came when the GOP-controlled Texas House impeached Paxton for his well-known corruption, and 16 of 18 Republicans in the Texas Senate got him acquitted in September. Another came last week when the Texas House rejected Abbott’s school-choice proposals. The splits within the party are complex. Unlike in some other states, the Paxton supporters were actually the conservatives. The Texas House really does have some long-standing issues with moderate Republicans making common cause with Democrats against conservatives, and added to that was the opposition of many rural Texas legislators to school choice. Texas governors tend to see themselves as heads of state, and in the climate in Austin, Abbott may genuinely feel that the state party needs to paper over its divisions by trying to end the presidential primary before it reaches his state on Super Tuesday, when it would drive higher primary turnout.

You may insert your own estimation of which of these angles is Abbott’s primary motivation. But I do not think he is either idiot enough or fool enough to be doing it without an angle.