OPINION | Why I root for Texas Rep. Gene Wu
Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, raises his fist as he returns to the House Chamber at the Capitol, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025, in Austin, Texas. (Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP)Donald Trump
I’m heading back to Canada to be among the sane at the Edmonton Fringe Festival. NOT Edinburgh in Scotland, Edmonton in Alberta, the largest fringe festival in North America.
I’m telling my story, “Emil Amok: 69.” A sex show? Come see it if you’re near.
Meanwhile, CFDT34, the man holding office knows you forget everything. So I continue to call him CFDT34, for convicted felon Donald Trump, 34 counts, the first felon elected president of the United States.
He’s No. 1.
He knows you’ve forgotten that, like you’ve forgotten how he promised to lower food and housing costs. Like you’ve forgotten how he would stop all the wars—especially the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Day One.
In the meantime, he’s started the war on innocent immigrants through ICE, and the war on Big Law, universities, science and everything America was built on the last 249 years.
You know, freedom.
But you may have forgotten that and that makes him happy.
He’s more concerned you haven’t forgotten something else.
So let’s be blunt here.
Jeffrey Epstein, the dead pedophile, who called Donald Trump his best friend for a 10-year period, is the scourge in Trump’s side. That 10-year period is the time Epstein was involved in the raping of young teenagers, ages 14-18 – 18 being the age he would no longer see their value.
At 18, people can exercise their free will as adults. They are legal. And for the pedophile the thrill is gone.
That’s because pedophilia is not about sex.
It’s all about power, and the abuse of it.
You can see how Donald Trump and Epstein are closely aligned. So much so that he has arranged for the convicted cohort of Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell to be moved from a hard-core federal prison to a country-club prison setting, effectively buying her silence. She wants Trump’s pardon and won’t talk. But the threat of it, makes Trump act nicely.
Trump’s much nicer to the convicted Ghislaine Maxwell than he is to anyone brown suspected of being an undocumented visa overstay. They are harrassed by masked ICE agents, undertrained but still empowered to act as the Trump version of the Gestapo.
That’s because Trump is about abuse of power and he will go after innocent people to haul into the immigration courts.
He doesn’t dare say boo to Ghislaine Maxwell because she knows the truth. And she’s using it to play Trump until she gets the pardon she really, really, wants. Maxwell is a multi-national citizen, the kind Trump would throw out of the country in a minute. Except she knows too much about the Epstein truth.
Donald Trump wants you to forget about all that.
And that makes it the most important issue of the day.
Because the right and the left are united on the Epstein issue.
Trump can’t stand that.
So Trump throws up distractions
Trump’s firing away hoping to divide and conquer our attention to the point where we just give in and take up quilting.
But these distractions are not minor.
Asking the Texas legislature to redraw the congressional district maps halfway into the Census period, ordinarily done every 10 years, because Trump needs five more votes in Congress?
That is as brazen a sign of corruption as when Trump asked the Georgia elections chief on January 2, 2021.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said in a taped call an obvious attempt to overturn the election which he lost.
It’s called “rigging.”
And Trump is into “rigging.”
And if it’s not “rigged” for him, things are “rigged” against him.
The recent low employment numbers which got the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief fired, that was all “rigged” Trump said.
Should we be surprised by the theme of corruption which runs throughout the Trump administration? Like asking for five more votes in Congress to get the winning margins they need to make our democracy look more like a democracy, even though we know Trump is trying to “rig” it all.
This is why if you haven’t paid attention to the Texas Democrats who have fled the state house to avoid a quorum you should.
Trump is trying to get the FBI involved to arrest the Texas Dems. Can he? FBI is a federal agency and any laws in question would be state laws. Texas has no jurisidiction in Illinois or New York, or wherever the 13 legisislators have sought refuge in the name of Democracy.
Gene Wu is the Democratic caucus chair, and the legislator who has been the chief spokesperson.
He is the face of a New America Trump can’t stand.
Why I root for Gene Wu
I lived in Houston, Texas in the 1970s, when Chinatown was a few blocks long and all the food was sweet and sour.
Now Chinatown is miles long, and Eugene Yuanzhi Wu, who wasn’t even born when I was “Emil For Real” on KLOL-FM in Houston, is a lawyer and 12-year veteran of the Texas legislature.
Back in the ‘70s, society didn’t know Asians in Texas like they do now. When I lived there, I was a Filipino who was invited more than once to LULAC meetings. League of United Latin American Citizens?
Wu is now the articulate leader of the Democrats on the run, speaking up for democracy.
“What we’re looking at is a governor who is conspiring with a disgraced president to use unconstitutional, illegal racial gerrymandering to destroy our communities. I have a duty to respond to that,” Wu said on CNN.
“This is not about my seat,” said Wu, knowing that the Texas governor would do all he can to remove him.
Wu said it’s not even about Democrats versus Republicans, but about minority communities that have elected representatives who are just like them.“This is about our communities,” he said. “Over time those communities have built up power. They built up their voice. They are able to defend themselves, and now that they’re able to stand up for themselves, Donald Trump looks to steal their power, steal their voice away for them.”
The fight may be decided in the courts, and if it goes to SCOTUS, which seems ready to give anything Trump wants, it may not end well.
But the fighting spirit to protect democracy from corruption is on.
And an Asian American born in China is leading the charge.
Who is American?
Of course, Wu is getting as he expected the racist charges about being Chinese American.
But it goes to the core of every Asian American issue we’ve fought for in America.
Trump is trying to change things. Going after naturalized citizens, challenging dual citizenship, and looking to overturn birthright citizenship.
It’s par for America going back to 1898 when Wong Kim Ark, a Chinese American born in San Francisco, won that battle for the 14th Amendment.
But that’s where Trump wants to bring us with his corrupt and unlawful actions. It’s a power grab to de-Americanize America.
And the fight continues next week with the trial to determine if Trump violated law by sending Marines to Los Angeles to aid ICE in raiding immigrant communities.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has already said he is ready to fight Trump on the power grab in Texas, by flipping five red seats in predominantly blue California.
This is where politics is now. Front-line litigious, as the fight isn’t over improving our lives as Americans, it’s about whether a president can undo all the hard-earned rights that define America. It’s Trump’s undoing of America and it’s fear and anxiety-producing for most every Filipino and Asian American.
And if that’s not enough, here comes a meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, but without Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
For what? To give Putin everything?
It’s maybe the biggest distraction of the week.
But worth it.
For Trump, the only thing he fears is the truth about Jeffrey Epstein.
It’s the one thing Trump can’t shake.
Just think, the weight of Epstein’s ghost on Trump is determining if the moral arc of America really bends toward justice.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst and comic stage performer. He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American issues for more than 30 years. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack. See him perform on his Canadian Fringe tour in Vancouver in September.
