When Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan got into trouble in the Republican primary last year, he called in el jefe, former Governor Rick Perry, who ran the state from 2000 to 2015. Right-wingers who saw the Texas government as a lever to make real God’s kingdom on earth were coming for the Beaumont representative’s seat; as Phelan’s campaign teetered and the institutional Republican Party abandoned him, he sought the aid of its hero of yore.Perry arrived on the short flight from Brenham to Beaumont in a glistening Dassault trijet and delivered an address in an airplane hangar surrounded by refinery smokestacks. Endorsement speeches are more commonly about the future and the character of the candidate, but Perry’s was equally a defense of his own legacy.…
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