New York Times columnist Tom Friedman pleaded for Americans to send an unmistakable message in the 2020 election, one that would include Texas going blue in a landslide victory for Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Only that magnitude of victory, he said, would be enough to “break the fever” and enable the Republican Party to throw off the “cult of personality” around President Donald Trump.

Speaking with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the Times columnist said “the only thing that can save us” is an overwhelming majority of American voters backing Biden to preserve the future of the country’s democracy.

“Anderson, if you were my genie and you said ‘Tom, you get one wish, what would it be that would be the greatest thing for America?’ The greatest thing for America would be is if Joe Biden win Texas,” Friedman said. “It would break this fever in the Republican Party. It would blow that party up.”

Texas, while changing demographically for decades, has emerged as a real battleground state in 2020, with Trump narrowly leading Biden by roughly two percentage points, according to the RealClearPolitics average. What’s more, the early vote in Texas has seen massive turnout so far, and has already surpassed the entire 2016 vote total.

Winning Texas would push Biden’s electoral college victory to more than 200 points, and, Friedman projected, could lead to the formation of a “national unity” government of progressives, liberals, and a few moderate Republicans.

he sane moderate Republicans, I think, would reemerge. I could see them and Biden forming a national unity government that would include everyone from AOC to a few Republicans on the other.

“The Trumpers, Donald Jr. and Donald Sr. and the whole clown car could go on Fox and do their thing and start their own network, whatever they want,” he said. “It’ll force the reckoning, if they lose Texas. That would be such a shock to the system that it would be the same kind of shock that two wins that Obama gave them that they were supposed to force a reckoning.”

“Trump just derailed that whole rethink of Republicanism,” Friedman went on, “and turned it into the cult of Trump, which has been so unhealthy for the conservative movement, for conservative ideas. And so unhealthy for the country.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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