A good commander stands with his troops through thick and thin.
He doesn't just stand there with his mouth shut when their service is attacked and disparaged.
And yet, Eric Flores, the Trump-endorsed candidate in the Nov. 3 election for U.S. House D-34 who touts his military service in the Texas National Guard – albeit with no documentation of it produced so far – has done just that.
After a ceremony in 2018 where Captain Luis Avila — a severely wounded Army officer originally from neighboring Louisiana — sang “God Bless America," Trump took the perfunctory photo-op with the wheelchair-bound veteran, and then privately told then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.”
Flores remained silent and said nothing.
After the strike, Trump posted in his Truth Social: "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!"
In other words, according to Trump and Hegseth, the soldiers' death – including our own Chavelita – didn't count, effectively denying the soldiers' families military death benefits.
The same happened when Trump kicked 600,000 South Texans of their health insurance in Budget FY 2020.
In September 2020 the Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg published an article citing sources who claimed that Trump referred to the American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris as "losers" and "suckers." And Flores – who claims he was a military leader in his campaign literature – said nothing.
On July 17, an air base in Jordan came under attack by an Iranian missile and killed four soldiers at the base. One soldier, Isabella Gonzales, was killed as were Staff Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28, of Queens, Tyler Feehan, and Michael Swinton.
Chavelita Gonzales grew up in Carrollton, Texas, near Ft. Worth. She graduated from Hebron High School in the spring of 2025 and enlisted in the Army soon after. She finished basic training in December, joined an air defense unit in Germany, and shipped out to an air base in Jordan.
After the strike, Trump posted in his Truth Social: "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!"
Within a week, Peter Hegseth's Pentagon pulled all four of them off the Iran war's official list of the dead and filed them under a separate heading, "Overseas Operations." A spokesman blamed a "temporary data disruption." Then the story changed. The government now says they died during a ceasefire.
And Flores? Again, he said nothing.
And when the Trump Administration continues to deny and cut veterans' health benefits for those who served from South Texas, who will stand up to him and say "No!" Not Flores, you can rest assured.
And he says nothing of the MAGA republicans plans to gut Social Security and Medicaid which will hurt the low-income residents of D-34 disproportionately. If Flores is elected, we will have a congressman who will be nothing more than a rubber stamp for Trump and the MAGA agenda.
Voting for Rubber Stamp Eric is the same thing as voting for the Trump agenda for two more years. Hell no! Vote for Vicente Gonzalez.
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