Field Report: Chris Beck fundraiser

Chris Beck is the Democratic candidate for Oregon's Second Congressional District. It is a bright-red district.

Beck is out meeting voters, telling his story, and raising money.

He did a good job at a Saturday event.

Beck's uphill battle is not uncommon. There are 131 districts with a Republican skew of 10 points or greater; this district is given an R+14 rating by the Cook Political Report.

Disclosure: I attended the fundraiser both as a voter and as an opinion journalist expecting to write a report on the event. I expect to vote for Beck in November. Moreover, we talked by phone after the meeting when I—in my role as an opinionated campaign know-it-all—gave him observations on what I thought he did right and what he should change. I am not impartial; I donated $500.

The event took place on the lovely patio of a couple in an East Medford neighborhood. About 35 people attended. Most attendees were about my age (in their 70s). That is not surprising for an invitation-only RSVP event hosted by people also in their 70s, as people naturally invite their own network of friends.

Beck began by establishing his bona fides as a politically-engaged person going back to his childhood. His parents knew former governor Tom McCall well. Beck grew up in Portland and was a three-term state representative representing a Portland district, so within one minute of speaking, he began establishing his in-district connections. He now lives in the Second Congressional District. His father was from Central Oregon, and they vacationed, hunted, fished, and spent time "east of the mountains"—the part of the district that is Mountain-West in geography and politics, rather than "west of the mountains," which is wetter, more urbanized, and more Democratic.

Because this was a Democratic group, he described his six years working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as time he "worked in the Obama administration."

Then he delivered what I think is his simple value proposition—one that gives him a small but real shot at winning in this district. He would be a Democratic check on President Trump. He may have read and absorbed what I wrote two weeks ago, that winning a campaign like this requires self-discipline from the candidate to keep the focus on the main thing: Donald Trump. 

Who Chris Beck is is secondary. If anything, the unique qualities of a Democratic candidate in a bright-red district is a distraction from the main point. This election must not be a head-to-head comparison of personalities. The question is whether to elect a Republican, who will vote to let Trump have his way on everything, no matter how corrupt and dangerous, or whether one will be part of a majority that says NO to Trump. The Democrat would restore checks and balances. Just be a reasonable, acceptable person—and Beck is.

Trump supporters will vote for Cliff Bentz, the Republican incumbent. Beck's campaign goal is to give a simple clear choice to people who want a change from the status quo because they think Trump is on the wrong track. There is a majority there.

Beck spent just the right amount of time—maybe three minutes—establishing himself as an intelligent, well-spoken, competent adult with a qualifying backstory. Then he began listing the things that a majority of Americans find uncomfortable or dangerous about Trump. Cliff Bentz is a cipher who votes with the GOP majority to enable Trump. He brings nothing interesting to the table to engage voter interest. He is a red dot on the graph.

Beck listed the things Trump did that make him unpopular and Bentz complicit:

--  Trying to overturn the 2020 election

--  Supporting the health insurance changes that make coverage unaffordable for many working people, which could bankrupt district hospitals due to uncollectible bills

--  Purging federal agencies

--  Attacking vote-by-mail systems

--  Disregarding the problem of affordable housing

--  Overseeing inflation and high gasoline prices

--  Iran. Beck said, "The Iran War we just lost. We are pretending we didn't, but we did."

--  Covering up the Epstein scandal

Beck then executed an essential element of every fundraising event: He explained his strategy and mechanism to win, giving hope to donors that their contributions have a purpose. Democrats are energized, he said, and non-affiliated voters are unhappy with the status quo. He will have social media. He will have field workers. He will knock on doors and remind Democratic-leaning voters to turn out. 

The candidate's speech and Q&A lasted about an hour and a quarter, after which the event segued into one-on-one visits with attendees.

I have attended or hosted well over a hundred events of this kind in the past 55 years. The Anna Karenina rule is in effect: All happy fundraisers are alike; every unhappy fundraiser is unhappy in its own way. This was a happy one. This is how they look when the candidate does well.

Can Beck win? If Trump continues to frighten and offend people with his corruption and a deteriorating economy, and the public's restless desire for change persists, then yes he can.

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Weathervane

My sister bought this garden art weathervane and named it "Lindsey Graham."

Maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum. (Of the dead, say nothing but good.)

Maybe Graham was a master manipulator playing the long game.

Lindsey Graham humiliated himself in his final decade of life. He gave support and legitimacy to Donald Trump. He is getting remembered in many other venues with comments like this:

Lindsey Graham was a spineless sellout, a treasonous political hack, a consummate conscienceless opportunist, a prime architect of the revolting thing that the Republican Party has rolled over and become.

This is harsh, but it isn't wrong, based on the public record. Graham could have used his reputation, and the memory of his friendship with John McCain, to be a public rebuke of Trump. Graham could have been a symbol of resistance to the GOP abandoning honorable character as an essential virtue for a leader. Graham went the other way. He became famous as a weathervane who switched to become a sycophant of Trump. He became a prime example of a hypocritical, unprincipled Trump enabler.

I am trying to think if there is any shred of good in this. Maybe there is. 

I suspect Graham had contempt for Trump. I suspect Graham saw himself as an undercover agent working covertly, an inside-man steering Trump away from his worst instincts. In this view of Graham, this was self-sacrifice and honor, worthy of a true friend of John McCain. Graham knew he was damaging his own legacy, becoming the butt of jokes, but did it anyway. He did it for his country. John McCain would be proud of him.

I watched Lindsey Graham for three decades. First as a senator who was a frequent guest on the Sunday shows, then up close as a presidential candidate campaigning in New Hampshire and South Carolina in 2015. Graham displayed hero-worship of McCain. It was a bit silly, like puppy love, but McCain had a heroic past as a prisoner of war who refused early release from confinement and torture out of solidarity with other Americans. It isn't silly to look up to a man of high character.

Graham's presidential campaign fizzled. He could only find a crowd if he joined one by stepping into a busy ice cream shop.

Lindsey Graham was a sincere foreign policy hawk. He was a proud member of the Army Reserves. The military is his tribe and identity. He wanted an America that engaged with European allies. He opposes Russia's effort to expand into Europe. He wants a military staffed by professions promoted by merit, and motivated by non-partisn, non-political patriotism. 

Trump's instincts were the opposite, and Graham knew that. Trump believes large powers have every right and need to dominate their sphere of influence. That means Russia absorbs Ukraine.

Graham died having returned from Ukraine where he met with Ukraine President Vladimir Zelenskyy. Graham understood that the mechanism for having any influence on Trump was to present himself as an unwavering Trump supporter. Every Democrat who sneered at Graham was proof for Trump to see that Graham would give up every shred of dignity for Trump. Trump loves a loyal flatterer. That is the ticket to being able to tell Trump that the route to popularity at home was to support Zelenskyy, not Putin.

Does Trump listen? Maybe a little. Maybe it created the muddle of our on-again-off-again policy toward Russia and Ukraine, a muddle that would not have existed if Trump followed his own instincts. I want Ukraine to survive. Maybe Graham did some good. After all, Trump has not openly announced that he wants Russia to crush Ukraine, and then Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Then Poland. 

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Easy Sunday: I am trying to grow great grapes.

You may want to skip this post. It is about my vineyard, not politics.

And it is about something pretty mundane: pulling grape leaves off of vines to expose grapes to the sun. 

The task is for a good purpose: to make superior grapes.

On Saturday my nephew and I got updated vine management advice from Adelberto Paz from Valley View Vineyards. We were plugging away at the job of removing selected leaves from the east side of Pinot Noir plants. He said we needed to pick up the pace and start on the Cabernet Sauvignons soon. 

I am hoping Valley View Vineyards will buy my grapes this year, the first real harvest year at scale. I am growing them under their advice to meet their standards, but they are under no obligation to buy them. And given the hazards and uncertainties of farming, I cannot guarantee that I will have them to sell. There is a wine-grape crisis underway. Tariffs have badly damaged our export markets, and there has been a downturn in domestic wine consumption. Alcohol suddenly became less popular. Instead of being, maybe, a little bit good for you, people have decided that red wine is, maybe, a little bit bad for you. Markets change. Then sometimes they change back. People have been drinking wine for thousands of years, and people like how it makes them feel and how it lubricates sociability: cheers! Supply and demand will balance out, but maybe not this year.

My best shot at selling my grapes is to grow spectacularly good ones.

Last year the Cabernets were the weakest of the three varieties. Still small plants. Few grapes. The Cabernets are the  most commercially viable of the three varieties this year: I have a heavy set of good-looking grape clusters. Cabernet Sauvignon vines blossom, ripen, and are picked later in the year than Malbecs and Pinot Noir grapes. My Cabernets hadn't blossomed yet when the April frost came that hurt the earlier varieties in my and many other local vineyards.  

The rows are in a north-south direction. Leaves that cover the grapes on the east side of the plants get pulled off so that they are exposed to the morning sun. Leaf-pulling reduces the chance of mildew that might grow from dew that lingers on grapes amidst dense foliage. Exposed grapes also means that the spray program against powdery mildew is more effective. The sun also sweetens grapes and improves flavor. We let the leaves grow on the west side of the plant where they would otherwise get the hot afternoon sun in the hot dry summer days of the Medford-area climate. Direct sun is a mixed blessing. 

Here is what the Cabernet vines look like before the leaf-pulling job that we are starting now:

Here is what that vine looks like after those leaves are removed:

Take 14 seconds to view this video to see how an experienced vineyard worker pulls leaves. He is amazingly fast. He won't be replaced by artificial intelligence anytime soon.

Click here: https://youtu.be/QHwpfQ99x-A

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Constitutions: Our North American neighbors.

   "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

               The Declaration of Independence, 1776 

American schoolchildren learn that the Founding Fathers were great men of unsurpassed wisdom, and that the Constitution is a near-sacred document. 

We grow up to learn there were problems with it, problems that persist. 

Posts the past two days have looked at what may come to be understood as America's "third founding." There was the first one in the 1770s and 1780s.  There was the second one when the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments established equality as a value along with life and liberty. This third founding did not require formal constitutional amendments. It is taking place now through new practices and norms. We have a strong executive who does as he pleases, rewarding friends, punishing opponents, using Congress as a force multiplier -- a squad of synophants and applauders -- not as a check and balance. We have a unitary executive immune from prosecution for breaking the law. 

The U.S. has never been stuck with the old way of doing things. There have always been options on how to organize a government. Erich Almasy makes that point with today's guest post by describing the U.S. in the context of our two North American neighbors. Almasy is a college classmate who had a long career in business consulting and management. The photo shows him wearing class reunion gear from the 55th reunion in front of racing boats: shells. He rowed in college.

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

SPQR (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus)

(The Senate and People of Rome, i.e. the Roman Republic)

 

The Roman Republic lasted over 480 years, from 509 to 27 BCE*. Ours is now at 250 years. I have had the luxury over the past thirty years of living in all three republics that comprise North America: Canada, the United States of America, and the United States of México. I have lived in each of these distinct cultures, each with a different approach to governance and social welfare. Here are some thoughts about what I have witnessed.

 

Form of Government

The United States was founded in 1776 as a breakaway set of thirteen colonies of Great Britain. It chose a form of democratic republic with a President, a bicameral (two houses) legislature, and a judiciary headed by a Supreme Court. All members of each branch, except the judiciary, are elected either by direct election via congressional districts or through an Electoral College. Canada, colonized by both France and England, became the Dominion of Canada, a self-governing entity within the British Empire, in 1867. Canada is a constitutional monarchy, with the English monarch as the ceremonial head of state, a lower house elected from electoral districts (ridings), an appointed upper house, and an appointed Supreme Court. The Prime Minister is considered the Head of Government and is elected by the Members of Parliament (the lower house). México became a democratic republic after its independence from Spain in 1821. However, until the 1920s, it had two emperors, was invaded by the United States and France, and had one President (Porfirio Díaz) who served for 31 years. México has three branches, including a President who serves a single six-year term; a bicameral legislature with a Chamber of Deputies elected every three years and a Senate elected every six years. As of 2025, México’s Supreme Court justices are elected to staggered 12-year terms.

 

Citizenship and Voting

The United States originally granted citizenship only to White men. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted citizenship to anyone born within the United States. Canada and México also honor jus soli (right of the soil) for any child born within their territories. Women in the United States got the right to vote after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Women in Canada got the right to vote at different times: as early as 1916 in Manitoba and as late as 1940 in Quebec. Asian and Indigenous Canadians had to wait until 1948 and 1960, respectively, to vote in federal elections. Women in México got the right to vote in 1953. México’s political parties are required by the Constitution to offer gender equality with a 50/50 split in legislative and executive positions at all levels of government. Women in both México and Canada are also legally guaranteed equal pay for equal work. Both Canada and México have established paths of roughly 5 to 7 years toward citizenship for immigrants. Grandchildren of both Mexican and Canadian citizens are also eligible for direct citizenship via jus sanguinis (right of blood).

 

Health Care and Social Security

In the United States, health care is paid for individually until age 65 federally or based on income level, according to state mandates. Two federal government systems established in 1965, Medicare and Medicaid, support older and poorer citizens. In 1947, Tommy Douglas (actor Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather), the Premier of the province of Saskatchewan, created a universal hospital plan that, in 1957, became Canada’s national health program, Medicare. This provides free health care to all citizens and permanent residents of Canada. México is finalizing a national public health system for all citizens to be completed by 2027. It also has extensive private hospitals for those with higher incomes. All three countries have Social Security systems funded by employees and employers, with retirement benefits available after age 60 or 62.

 

When living in Canada, I used to tease Canadians that their system depended on a benevolent Prime Minister because he or she appointed the Supreme Court and the Senators, and ran Parliament. So far, I guess they’ve been lucky, smart, or both. In theory, the United States has coequal branches of government with distinct roles that provide checks and balances to prevent the consolidation of power in the Executive. Neither the Founders nor I ever anticipated a party and President that would usurp power as we are seeing today. For 71 years, from 1929 to 2000, México essentially had a single party, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). That monopoly was broken in the new century, and while parties tend to dominate for years, there is still competition. And a female Jewish President!

 

*While the Republic of San Marino has been around for over 1,700 years and the Venetian Republic lasted 1,100 years, Rome was by far the largest republic in history. So far!

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Guest Post Response: "Peter made a compelling, if infuriating, argument."

Here was yesterday's audacious idea:

In 20 years the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be celebrated the way we celebrate the Boston Tea Party.

The Capitol rioters were advancing a new constitutional system for America: serial dictatorship.

The Boston Tea Party was citizen direct action. It was illegal and destructive. But Americans celebrate it because it was part of a process of forming a new government. We won the war, so we write the history and celebrate the milestones. 

President Trump, by his willful and energetic flouting of laws, and his contempt and disregard of the checks and balances written into the Constitution -- and by his getting away with most of it -- is creating a new de facto system of government. The president is a strongman, a dictator, the CEO, limited only by impeachment and conviction, an impossible burden in a two-party environment, unless the president really, really screws up. This new form of government is settling into place. It was ratified by Trump's election in 2024. A majority of voters are OK with an elected strongman. After all, Congress is worthless and someone needs to take charge.

I am unhappy about this, but it is what is happening.

John Shutkin is a college classmate. He is a retired corporate attorney with experience both at Big Law firms and as in-house general counsel for two large accounting firms. He jokes that the photo shows him to be an "old timer."

Shutkin is holding up the time-keeping device at a 55th college reunion panel 

Guest Post by John Shutkin

My college classmate and friend Peter Sage is one of the most open-minded people I know. And I say that as 95-percent a compliment. After all, as a litigator for many years, I am used to starting legal analyses with the phrase, “On the one hand….,” so I have enormous professional respect for such a viewpoint. My reservation is only because, in my view, open-mindedness should be waived on occasion, especially in extraordinary times. Sometimes there are simply black-and-white issues and, as to those issues, to be blunt, I am right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. And yes; I’m still open-minded enough to know there are people who feel the same way who are on the opposite side of the issue. But they’re wrong.

Which brings me to Peter’s latest post, “What if school children are taught that the January 6 rioters were heroes?” Of course, Peter gives away the game as to where his heart really lies by using the term “rioters,” rather than a more neutral word like “participants,” but I do appreciate his forcing us to think about this issue and making some compelling, if infuriating, arguments. And certainly there are good examples, like the Boston Tea Party which he cites, where “heroes” and “rioters” depended mainly on which side of the Pond one lived on. And, indeed, even in 1773, there were plenty of Loyalists in the Colonies who had strong criticism of the Tea Party “participants.”

Moreover, I am well aware of the observation (misattributed to Churchill, but still valid) that “History is written by the victors.” And, more specifically as to January 6th, we are already seeing clear evidence of Trump and his MAGA followers, both in the federal and red-state governments, trying to re-write history into their fever dream of European white male Christian heroism. Here’s the most recent example: CNN.

And Peter is also correct in noting that Trump has proved that the US Constitution allows for this country to have an elected dictator as president who is both willing and capable of such an historical re-write. Simply put, the Founding Fathers never believed that a megalomaniacal President, an enabling Supreme Court and a feckless Congress would allow it. Jennifer Rubin aptly noted this exact point in her recent column, “Founders Maybe Weren’t Geniuses,” channeling Larry David’s equal parts hilarious and terrifying episode of “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness”: Contrarian News.  

As Larry delicately put it in his tag line. “We’re f*cked.” And, of course, Trump’s pardoning of all the January 6 rioters (for that is what they were) and his equally odious effort to create a $1.776 billion slush fund (note the non-coincidental amount) for them underscores that this is precisely what he is trying to do with regard to that horrific, treasonous event.

Finally, if one wants analysis of this phenomenon that is substantially older and viewed with more gravitas than Larry, one can always look to “1984.” As Orwell famously concluded: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

In short, full credit to Peter for acknowledging what we are currently seeing, no matter how much we in the fact-based universe know that it is both entirely wrong and incredibly dangerous. To put it in Larry’s vernacular, “It’s total bullsh*t.”

As for me, I am much more closed-minded than Peter, but I like to consider myself at least an optimistic realist rather than a despondent cynic. As such, I look for inspiration in MLK’s famous declaration, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And I’d like to think that that arc begins on November 3 of this year (Election Day) and starts to truly soar on January 20, 2029.

Otherwise, we’re f*cked.

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Here's a twist: What if schoolchildren are taught that the Jan 6 rioters were heroes?

My Independence Day post sparked an audacious idea:

In 20 years the January 6 attack on the Capitol will be celebrated the way we celebrate the Boston Tea Party.

Sure it was illegal and destroyed property, but it was the voice of the people, and it helped us create new, better government. They were patriots!

1976: Celebrating Heroes

2046: Celebrating Heroes

My July 4 post described an exhibit I worked on 50 years ago for the Boston Bicentennial. Our goal was engagement and relevance. We asked exhibit visitors, "What would YOU do?" The exhibit confronted visitors with current day choices that were parallel to the events of the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord. We had filmed scenes of those key Revolutionary War milestones, doing so in a way that made them recognizable as versions of current news. 

The Boston Massacre looked suspiciously like an anti-busing demonstration that got out of hand. The Boston Tea Party looked suspiciously like an anti-tax demonstration that turned violent and destroyed property. Lexington and Concord involved caches of weapons intended to be used against the government.

Visitors were startled to realize that maybe -- just maybe -- the issues were complicated and they did not sympathize completely with the patriots and Minutemen militia.

Acts of lawlessness and violence have been important milestones in the creation of the government of the United States. There was the Revolution itself. Suppression of the Whisky Rebellion established that the federal government would maintain order against rural anti-tax rebellions. The Civil War led to a second set of constitutional amendments to establish Black equality and equal protection of the law. The civil rights demonstrations led by Martin Luther King, Jr. were noteworthy for their effort to avoid violence, but they took place at a time of riots and arson in Watts, Detroit, and other cities. Cities in flames were a message to Americans that the legal and financial condition of Black Americans had become untenable.

Mass demonstrations are messages to government. Sometimes they get hijacked and backfire. The George Floyd demonstrations are an example. They started out making a point about discriminatory policing, but were hijacked by thrill-seeking vandals. Some cities failed suppress this violence in astonishing acts of political malpractice, with the result that the message was reversed. That happens.

President Trump is the most consequential president of my lifetime. His audacity and willfulness are changing the American form of government by demonstrating the structural weakness of the Constitution. There are no effective checks and balances against an executive who chooses to ignore them. American presidents were not restrained by laws. They restrained themselves by obeying norms and expectations and patterns of practice. They nibbled at the edges of their power but never blasted through them. Trump does exactly that. He does what he wants and dares others to stop him. He doesn't try to be "fair." He picks winners and losers to increase his power and influence. This week he allocated FEMA disaster money to red states and denied it to blue states, and said openly that he is doing this because he can, and he proudly favors states that voted for him, so take note.

Trump proved that the USA has always had a Constitution that allowed an elected dictatorship, if a president chose to act as one. Trump is an American strongman. Congress and the courts have only a single power -- impeachment and conviction -- and in a country with a well-disciplined political party system, getting a two-thirds majority of the Senate to convict would require an extraordinary failure of governance. But that is the new operating system for America, and Americans are beginning to realize it: The president leads freely until he screws up very, very badly. 

Americans may well settle into this new arrangement and decide that they are OK with it. Trump is currently unpopular, but an economic upturn could change that. His gerrymandering, and the fecklessness and division of Democrats, may preserve his majorities, but in any case he is conviction-proof in the Senate. There is little appetite in America to restore Congress to centrality of policy. Congress has an approval rating of less than 15 percent. The president leads; Congress is a Greek chorus, applauding or cheering. 

If this new form of serial dictatorship is confirmed by one or two more elections in which we elect a Trumpish successor, then it will have been established as the new form of government structure and practice. Voters in 2024 took a giant step toward sanctioning this form of government when they elected Trump notwithstanding the January 6 events.

The January 6 attack on the Capitol turns from transgressive into heroic when the event is interpreted as a necessary growing pain of political change. It becomes a Boston Tea Party event. It makes the point that the voice of the people tried to keep a strong president in office.  Presidents will be understood to embody the will of the people, replacing the out-of-date notion that the will of the people is represented by the mishmash of competing ambitions described in the Constitution. Historians and political scientists and opinion journalists will confirm the new reality, perhaps reluctantly, but more likely understanding that the change was underway and Trump just made it visible.

The Boston Tea Party is understood as a heroic act by patriots because the Revolution was successful. History is written by the victors. The official White House website on January 6 expresses this point of view already.

Will this predicted future happen? It might well. Americans care about peace and prosperity, not democratic process. "It's the economy, stupid."

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No empathy.

"It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder."

Attributed to diplomat Charles Talleyrand, commenting on Napoleon's execution of a French aristocrat. 

We assassinated Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Iranians closed ranks around their country and its leaders. 

No surprise there.

We watched the funeral this week. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians in the streets of Tehran, mourning a man we killed. 

This funeral and demonstration were even larger than the mass funeral for the 165 girls killed in the southern city of Minab.

Ayatollah Khamenei was 86 years old. He had run a repressive, corrupt, unpopular government for decades. Iranians, especially young ones, wanted him gone. Civic discontent was on the rise. The Iranian Revolution had worn out its welcome, and its leader was in poor health.

Did anyone in the Situation Room put themselves into the minds of Iranians? Did anyone think of our own history, how Americans reacted to assassinations and foreign attacks?

If President Trump died tomorrow of a heart attack, I would not be angry. I would probably feel some sense of relief, and then worry. What kind of government comes next? But a death from natural causes doesn't raise the specter of a national need to settle a score or take revenge. The death of a leader by assassination, however, creates a victim and maybe a martyr. Along with the funeral you get a moral structure. They attacked us.  Someone else interposed themselves into our home, our business. You get a funeral that becomes a referendum on the murderer. 

The grievance against Khamenei, real and earned over 40 years, got shoved aside by something bigger and simpler: We stole from them. We took something that was theirs. We insulted them. Abas Aslani, a senior research fellow at Tehran's Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera that the U.S. and Israel wanted regime change, but "what actually happened created a rally around the flag" — that "the government did not fall but became stronger." 

Well, of course. We know this mechanism from our own history. Abraham Lincoln morphed from controversial into a martyr. In my lifetime, and Trump's, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. They are named in monuments, airports, cultural centers, sports stadia, and national holidays. What irony. Trump seeks that kind of recognition for himself while giving a feeble and unpopular enemy a shortcut mechanism for martyrdom.

In late 1941, isolationist sentiment had kept our country out of a war for two years. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended that. The insult! The injury! Japan had no right! Public opinion coalesced behind our joining the war.

It happened again in 2001. President George W. Bush, drifting through his first year, elected by the thinnest of margins, saw his approval rating jump above 90 percent within days of the World Trade Center towers falling. That's what an attack does to a fractured public: It closes ranks. There was a stronger sense of "we." There was also a hardened sense of "they," Muslims weren't just unusual to most Americans. They became dangerous, an enemy. 

An assassination by the U.S. fit a well-learned template for Iranians. In 1953, the CIA helped topple Mohammad Mossadegh, a democratically elected prime minister, and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi the Shah. It bought us 26 years of a friendly autocrat, then delivered 1979 — the hostage crisis, the Islamic Republic, decades of enmity. Every Iranian schoolchild learns that story, the founding grievance of the regime. We just did it again.

This White House thinks in leverage, not empathy: Find the pressure point, apply it, expect compliance. It is happening again this morning as I write, with renewed bombing. Our tools are bombs and missiles, and from that we will change minds. That may be effective in forcing militaries to change. It is tone-deaf when it comes to persuading public opinion to align with us. Didn't we learn in Vietnam that we don't win the "hearts and minds" by bombing them? Apparently not.

Trump thinks like a predator. He knows what he wants: The target is prey to be eaten, not persuaded. He negotiates by force; it is zero sum. Their loss is our gain. 

Our tool is pain, and we deliver it: Double the tariff! No, triple it! Then maybe Canada will decide it wants to join the U.S. as the 51st state.

It hardened Canadian opinion against the U.S.

Talleyrand's line was about the execution of a duke, not an ayatollah, but it fits. Killing Khamenei was strategically self-defeating. We have watched this reflex in our own mirror, in the assassinations, in 1941, in Vietnam, and in 2001. The Iranian crowds are not chanting "thank God our monster is dead." They are chanting "Kill Trump."

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