Is Dan Crenshaw in trouble?

Dan Crenshaw’s rise to political fame was an unlikely one. As a political newcomer running to replace longtime Congressman Ted Poe in 2018, he squeaked his way into second place in a crowded GOP primary by a mere 155 votes, forcing a runoff, and then winning his party’s nomination and claiming the seat. Then, famously, he appeared on Saturday Night Live just after he won the election to magnanimously accept an apology from Pete Davidson, who a week earlier had made fun of the eyepatch the representative has worn since sustaining injuries as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan. That’s more national attention than most newly elected members of Congress can reasonably hope for, and Crenshaw rode the wave to become a young GOP superstar. But, as he learned this week, not every political foe is as easy to vanquish as Davidson, and there’s always someone younger ready to claim your spot. In this case, a child who stood maybe four feet tall. On Monday, Crenshaw attended a biweekly tea party meeting at the Citizens Grill in Conroe, thirty minutes north of Houston. There, a girl identified by others in the video of the encounter as a ten-year-old, quoted a remark that Crenshaw had made in 2020 about “hero archetypes” on a podcast hosted by fellow Navy SEAL Jocko Willink.

Discussing an idea he expounds on at length in his book, Fortitude, American Resilience in the Age of Outrage, Crenshaw had told the host, “We have societal hero archetypes that we look up to. Jesus is a hero archetype, Superman is a hero archetype. Real characters too, you know, I could name a thousand. Rosa Parks, Ronald Reagan, all of these people embody certain attributes that the American people think, ‘This is good.’” The girl (who we anticipate will be speaking at CPAC next year) read the quote aloud to Crenshaw, accusing him of having “lied about being a Christian” and having heretically described Jesus as akin to the fictional Superman. Crenshaw, testily, responded, “Put a period after ‘Jesus’ and don’t question my faith,” resulting in an onslaught of boos and heckling from the crowd. Theologians can attempt to parse whether Crenshaw was indeed questioning the historicity of Jesus on the podcast, and linguists whether he employed an imprecise simile. What the exchange undoubtedly highlights politically, however, is that the folks who should be the most fervent members of Crenshaw’s base—conservatives who are active enough in the party to attend biweekly meetings—are instead ones quick to shout at him. It doesn’t appear to be a fluke, either: at a GOP candidate forum last week, two Republicans running in Crenshaw’s district in the 2022 primary both received massive applause when they announced that they were challenging Crenshaw.