Leadership Quote by Rick Perry

There’s a whole political ecosystem crammed into that imperative: “Tell the trial lawyers to get out of your state.” Perry isn’t just criticizing a profession; he’s casting a villain and drafting the listener as enforcer. The verb “tell” is a wink at executive swagger, the kind that implies problems can be solved by force of will and a firm phone call. “Get out” turns a policy dispute into a border skirmish, redefining regulation and litigation as an invading army rather than a constitutional right.

The subtext is classic tort-reform messaging from the pro-business Republican playbook of the 1990s and 2000s, when Texas sold itself as a low-regulation haven. “Trial lawyers” is partisan code: it summons the stereotype of ambulance chasers, links to Democratic donor networks, and suggests predation on “businessmen and women,” a phrase that deliberately humanizes employers while flattening plaintiffs into faceless opportunists. Notice who’s missing: injured workers, consumers, patients. Their claims are pre-framed as “costing” rather than compensating.

The line also does rhetorical double duty by shifting blame. If wages stagnate, if insurance is expensive, if companies hesitate to expand, Perry offers a simple culprit with a clean solution: stop the lawsuits. That’s why it works politically. It turns messy tradeoffs about accountability into a morality play about outsiders extracting value from “your state,” and it invites voters to identify with business as the default public interest.