When I left the Turner Corner Shoppe & Stoppe after the storm last night, I expected the post I’d be writing this morning would be about Turner Falls recovering from the worst severe weather event to hit Northeast Texas in a century. I expected it would be a story about a small town — the president’s hometown — coming together after a tragedy during a time of unprecedented national discord. Because the scene last night? Was pretty freaking apocalyptic.

I did not expect to be writing about the death of the president of the United States.

I definitely did not expect to be one of the last people to see him alive.

To say that President Rudolfo “Rudy” Ruiz was a “divisive” figure — which is how he’s being posthumously described in the national press this morning — is both under- and overstatement. He started his political career as an agent of right-wing chaos in Congress, a “young buck” Tea Partier who seized and maintained power through President Barack Obama’s second term and into the Trump Administration. When Ruiz booted incumbent Texas Senator John Cornyn in the ‘18 midterms, he was hailed (and derided) as the future of the American right. He liked to say that his ascendance to the White House in the wake of President Donald Trump’s death from COVID complications in early 2020 was a case of “when God closes a door, he opens a window.”

Ruiz was divisive in that he solidified the distinction between the “two Americas,” as they’ve come to be known in cable news parlance — between adherents of the far-right LibertyNow! contingent, presently the dominant strain of the GOP, and basically everyone else. But he was also a uniting figure for the right in a moment of crisis post-Trump, securing a quick series of conservative wins (most notably the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sarah Palin) in just over two years as commander-in-chief.

No matter what side you’re on, he was definitely a force for … something.

We don’t know much about what happened last night beyond reports that the president was aboard a small plane that crashed 11 miles southwest of Turner Falls just before midnight. He made his final public appearance on a YouTube/PatriotWire feed broadcast from a July 4th rally at the Turner Corner Shoppe & Stoppe just south of the courthouse square on Highway 37.

So far the timeline looks something like this:

• Tuesday, July 4, 2:45 p.m.: Ruiz’s controversial “advisor,” Pastor Kathy Donaldson, announces a “special guest” event on the New Life Church of Turner Falls’s YouTube/PatriotWire channel, inviting LibertyNow! supporters to cancel their Independence Day festivities and convene at the Turner Corner Shoppe & Stoppe as soon as possible. (Can confirm: this is what had me bailing on my family cookout, or more accurately, had my family moving their cookout to Turner Corner.)

• Tuesday, July 4, 5:24 p.m.: Air Force One makes an unscheduled landing at the Tyler Pounds Regional Airport.

• Tuesday, July 4, 7:40 p.m.: President Ruiz spends approximately 45 minutes kissing babies and shaking hands with voters at a New Life-sponsored rally in the parking lot of the Turner Corner strip mall center. (Can confirm: he arrived in an impressive caravan of black SUVs. And, full disclosure, I was wearing my now-defunct HazMedia press badge at the event.)

• Tuesday, July 4, 8:30 p.m.: The National Weather Service issues a tornado warning for Northeast Texas/Gallum County (Turner Falls) area. (Surely you don’t need me to confirm this, but we live in ~ unprecedented times ~. So yeah, the the thing the NWS said was going to happen … did happen.)

• Tuesday, July 4, 8:44 p.m.: First reports of funnel clouds touching down within 8 miles of Turner Falls. (ibid.: NWS is not lying.) (I think I’m not using ibid correctly.)

• Tuesday, July 4, 8:55 p.m.: At least one twister touches down at Turner Corner, cutting off a live broadcast on the New Life channel featuring Pastor Donaldson and the president inside a local dance studio. (Can confirm: I took shelter in the Dress Barn with a couple hundred other people, but I didn’t have cell service until later, so I wasn’t able to watch the broadcast.)

• Tuesday, July 4, 9:30 p.m.: Pastor Donaldson and President Ruiz resume broadcasting from the Turner Corner parking lot in the aftermath of the storm. (Can confirm: I watched them try out a few different spots to find the right background. The Secret Service was in an entire tizzy about this.)

• Tuesday, July 4, 9:37 p.m.: President Ruiz signs off of the Turner Corner parking lot broadcast with what is presumed to be his last public message to the people of the United States: “God bless America, y’all.”

What happened between 9:37 p.m. and the president’s death is unclear. A few dozen #FreezeRuiz protesters marched into Turner Corner around the time Ruiz signed off and the Secret Service ushered the president back into Missy’s Dance ‘n Time. I assume he ducked out through the back of the strip mall in the post-twister scrum. I stuck around for another hour or so in case things got hot between the #FreezeRuiz protesters and the New Life Gospel Squad (an SPLC-designated “armed hate group,” for those who are just joining us). But protesters dispersed fairly quickly; I think it’s pretty safe to assume they didn’t have Harrow exemption papers allowing them to assemble without notice in the president’s literal hometown.

I mostly bring up the #FreezeRuiz thing because we are less than 10 hours into this news cycle and conspiracy theorists are already suggesting that the plane crash was a cleverly orchestrated #resistance assassination plot/government takeover. This seems unlikely for a host of reasons, chief among them the fact that such a plot would have involved the ability to anticipate two famously unpredictable phenomena: the weather and Rudy Ruiz.

Early indications are that the plane Ruiz was on crashed due to the severe weather system moving through the area, and that feels right to me, but it’s not been confirmed who plane belonged to, or why the president was not aboard Air Force One. I have a pretty strong guess as to who might have owned the craft, but I’m not trying to get sued for libel during my second-ever week as a freelancer.

The White House has confirmed that Justice Palin swore in Ashleigh P. Grantham Jr. as president at his family home in West Virginia around 2 a.m., and Grantham is expected to give a live statement at 10 a.m. ET today. (Between y’all and me, some WH pool reporters are telling me they’re pretty frustrated with what little they’re getting out of the now-former Ruiz Administration/current Grantham Administration.)

So, yeah. We don’t know much. But what I do know is that if you ask folks here in Turner Falls — and of course I am asking them — they mostly remember this kid (Ruiz is in the front):

“Most of us never stopped calling him ‘Rudy,’ even after he won,” said Vicki Collins, who was briefly married to Ruiz’s father, Carlos, in the 1990s and whose family has owned the Hair Company on Main Street since 1960. When I stopped by the salon this morning, Collins reminded me that the president’s claim to (local) fame, before he was the Turner Falls Tigers star quarterback, before he took the Aggies to the Rose Bowl, before he was the original hero of 40 Days for Life, and before he was the LibertyNow! post-Tea Party poster boy, was simply that he had the loudest and most “infectious” laugh at her salon — and used it to cajole unkempt passers-by to come in for a clip and a shave.

“He’d stand out front and razz whoever,” Collins remembered. “As long as it got them in the door for a service.”

I can imagine all the ways in which that experience prepared young Rudolfo Ruiz to become the president of a nation that was half-desperate to hear what he had to say, and half-horrified by it.

I’ll stay on the story here in the coming days. (And if anyone’s looking for a stringer on the ground … y’all know how to find me.)

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