Big Brother is watching you

White House Office of Public Liaison to 3,000 conservative groups, in highlighted yellow:

"As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations."

There is a reason that so many Republican candidates went down with the Trump ship: Trump demands loyalty. They were afraid of Trump.

Wall Street Journal

My posts this week argued that Trump was on the ballot. Presumably electable Oregon Republicans like Christine Drazan, running for governor, and Brad Hicks, running for the state Senate, had big campaign treasuries behind them and lost anyway, because voters saw them as proxies for Trump. Which raises the question. Why didn’t they break free? Why not show a little independence? Why go down with the ship?

Because Trump is watching. He is alert to disloyalty, and he doesn’t nip it in the bud. He stomps on it. You are with him or you are a RINO, and whoever disagrees or disappoints gets the full force of his displeasure. The smart, indeed necessary, strategy is silence.

Oregon’s lone Republican congressman, Cliff Bentz, showed me and my fellow Rotarians how it’s done. He told us at a Rotary meeting that he disagrees with Trump on some things. Then he steadfastly refused to say which things. There was nothing disloyal to get back to House Speaker Mike Johnson or the president. In fact, a statement like that is worth more than gushing agreement.  Agreement doesn’t require loyalty, only alignment. Loyalty is agreeing in public when you disagree in private.

Now Trump sees a problem coming. Presidential aspirants will start staking out positions of their own. The Trump/MAGA coalition is held together largely by the walled garden of conservative media and thought leadership, and Fox News sits at its center. That is why Trump polices the edges of its apostasy. He complained when Fox interviewed Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. On election night he complained that Fox put Bill de Blasio on the air, then blamed the network for the losses. He threatens to switch his affection to the smaller rival, One America News Network.

The new rules are already showing.

-- JD Vance, on X, named the Iran war as the reason Republicans lost. Notice what he didn’t say. He called the war unpopular, not wrong. “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”

-- Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, term-limited and leaving office in January, told Laura Ingraham: “This midterm, no question, was a rebuke of the president and the Congress by Democrats, independents and some Republicans that crossed over.”

-- Texas Senator Ted Cruz, now the only Republican left in statewide office in Texas, called it a “blue tsunami” and a “Watergate-level repudiation.” Then he went to policy. Tariffs, he said, have made everything too expensive, and the Iran war has dragged on too long.

I suspect a great many defeated Republicans are feeling remorse about bad timing and lost opportunity. Before the election they lived by the rule that no public dissent from Trump was possible. Now there are new rules. Public dissent is possible, even necessary.

Those inside the conservative media walled garden were slow, or afraid, to pick up signals that were obvious to most Americans: that Trump’s war and tariffs had damaged the economy, and that his corrupt wealth-seeking had aligned him with his fellow billionaires at the expense of people like themselves.

The Trump era did not end on November 3, 2026. It ended in the weeks before, when voters decided that Trump was dangerous and that Trump-compliant politicians had to go. It would have taken courage to read that and act before the November 3 vote confirmed it. Most didn’t. They stayed compliant. And Republicans running anywhere without a Republican edge of 10 to 15 points lost.

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In praise of free will

American politics had a shock on Tuesday.

Americans discovered we aren’t stuck. Voters have agency. Voters took off their chains.

We have free will!

The election had a lesson for both parties: Old alignments aren’t frozen, and policy-making isn’t trapped between two sides dug into trench warfare. Texas, Kansas, Alaska, and even Mississippi are battleground states, if voters want them to be.

Fox News: Trump said the Democratic gains were Fox's fault.

The losing side in a tsunami election is the one most likely to adjust. Vice President JD Vance was quick out of the gate, breaking with Trump and calling for a new direction: End the Iran war, focus on the cost of living, change our relationship with Israel.

Republican candidates and officeholders also have new cautionary tales. The old ones were Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, and Adam Kinzinger, whose careers ended because they defied Trump. The new ones are Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Senate candidate Ken Paxton, and Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, who trails in a race still too close to call. Their ties to Trump sank them, and they are in red states. Republican politicians learned something new: Even in “Trump country,” voters will change their minds about Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s strategy once made sense. Keep the GOP coalition 100-percent compliant with Trump. It proved dangerous, indeed fatal, in any district with less than a 10-point Republican registration advantage.

There was a broad shift in voter behavior. Democratic House candidates who made the race a referendum on Trump -- and most did -- moved the balance their way.

The election will change Democrats, too. The 2024 election taught Democrats the peril of getting too far out in front of the average American on cultural issues like gender and affirmative action. Still, Democrats remained the party of well-educated coastal urbanites and it largely represented their sensibilities. Political consensus said that was the geography for Democrats. The only question was whether the Blue Wall line moved a point or two one way or the other.

That is different now. Voters left the trenches and their traditional party affiliation. Republicans voted for the Democrat. The field has opened up. Voters can vote for change. It can happen. It did happen. 

That changes what it means to be a Democrat, because Democrats now include representation from red-state America. Once again, Democrats will represent farmers and ranchers. They will represent cultural conservatives. Five years ago Democrats were furious with U.S Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) a moderate. Now they have elected representative from states almost as conservative as is West Virginia. They will need to adapt. Some Democrats won't want them to. Something new will emerge out of that conflict.

Readers in Oregon may think I am wrong about breaking free of closed-minded party-line thinking, at least among Democrats. How else could Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan have lost the governor’s race? How else could Republican Brad Hicks, with his extraordinary campaign advantages, have lost his state Senate race? Republicans fled Trump, but Democrats did not flee their party.

I think many Democrats wanted to, at least on the governor's race. There is substantial fatigue and dissatisfaction with Oregon’s Democratic leadership. Entrenched parties (and Texas and Oregon both experienced this) slide toward unpopular excesses. The interest groups that shape policy get too much of what they want. We saw it during Covid, when the teachers union, the OEA, made teacher health and safety, not student education, the state’s priority. That sows seeds of discontent.

So why did Drazan and Hicks lose so badly, if their campaign theme of restoring balance in Salem reflected what a critical mass of Oregon voters were thinking? Because Democrats and a critical mass of voters think Trump-compliant Republicans can not be trusted with power; Trump abuses power and Republicans let him do it. Trump looms larger in voters’ minds than Governor Tina Kotek or the Oregon Legislature. Kotek got reluctant votes. Better Kotek than a go-along Republican. Neither Drazan nor Hicks dared to break free of Trump, so they spent a fortune and lost decisively. They didn't read the room. 

Both major parties are going through a realignment. A week ago it didn’t seem possible. Now it seems inevitable. It is happening in real time. The 2026 election accelerates that process because voters see that they can make change. They can move the needle. We have government by the people. What a heady thought. 

We are free.

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Trump: "Pretend, please, that I am on the ballot. Just pretend."

The election was a referendum on the person at the center of our politics, Donald Trump.

Hicks' campaign got his opponent elected.

Denise Krause should send thank-you notes to Hicks' campaign donors. 

"Good news. After 13 long months the ads, the texts, the mailers, and the phone calls are finally going to end."

In Senate District 3, Democrat Denise Krause defeated Republican Brad Hicks by about 13 points, 54.9 to 42.1 percent. Clay Bearnson, the Independent and Green Party candidate, got 3.9 percent.

The Senate District 3 race was a natural experiment testing my theory of political marketing. The theory is that a candidate’s denoted message is less important and less persuasive than the meta-message, that unspoken, often-unintended brand expressed by tone, image, identity, and the form of a message.

Brad Hicks had near-infinite money to spend defining himself and his opponent. He ran so many ads that he certainly reached a point of sharply diminished returns. If a voter hears a single message, let's say 157 times in the six weeks before Election Day, is there any positive value in the iterations after the 100th or the 120th? Maybe. If one has infinite money, one gives it a try. Why not?

My suggestion to Hicks, offered openly in this blog as good advice, was for him to donate most of his campaign money to a couple of appealing local charities. I preferred Krause, but I had no worry that I might be helping Hicks with my advice. I knew his campaign would ignore it and would instead raise and spend money on ads pounding the idea that Denise Krause was a morally flawed Democratic rubber stamp and Portland-loving extremist who would join in the failed, job-killing policies of the Democratic majority. And moreover, they would claim Hicks is a friendly, nonjudgmental, unpretentious citizen of bipartisan nature eager to work cooperatively with the Democrats he had just trashed. 

And that is exactly what his campaign did. 

Great wealth blinds people. Surely more is better. What is advertising for if not to persuade? His campaign saw money’s power to deliver a message, but failed to see that its meta-message contradicted and overpowered the message. The natural experiment was a good one, because they had the capacity and will to run a full-on brute-force campaign. 

My theory and proposition was that the real brand Hicks communicated to voters contradicted his denoted message. The sheer size of the campaign marked him as part of an aggressive Republican army. The experiment would have been a cleaner test of my theory had Hicks stuck to nothing but friendly assertions of bipartisanship, two million dollars of it. Would voters have noticed the heavy GOP hand if the denoted message had been  solely positive? We don’t know. In fact, the Hicks campaign expressed disapproval and contempt for Democrats in the front half of its ads, so voters did not need to infer bare-knuckle partisanship. They absorbed the meta-message from the entire context.

His campaign showed Hicks to be a Republican scrapper at the worst possible time, the year voters rejected the Trump-led GOP. Hicks never broke with Trump. A few words of public disagreement with Trump might have changed everything, but he is a loyal Republican, as voters saw clearly in the meta-message. He clung to the Republican ship and went down with it. He is who he is.

A brute-force campaign, no matter how big, even with that 157th iteration, is not persuasive. 

Here is the irony: Denise Krause won this election in significant part because the Hicks campaign was so very effective. They showed voters who Hicks was; it showed them what they did not want. His ads won the election for her.

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Killjoy.

"So you see, I'm not naive
I just would like to believe
Ah, what you tell me.
You see I, I don't want
To be hurt by love again." 

Frederick Knight, sung by Leonard Cohen,"Be for Real," 1992

Pardon me while I lower expectations. 

I am used to being disappointed at elections, but I am not good at it. 

Democrats on TV's talking panels are trying to suppress their giddiness. The polls look good. Democratic voters are hearing about waves. No, better yet, tides. No, plan for a tsunami! I am not  thinking about tsunamis. I am repressing thoughts that perhaps, finally, Americans have had enough Trump. I remember election night 2016, when Trump, despite nearly every poll to the contrary, won the election. I don't want to be disappointed again.

I try not to live in a news bubble of people disgusted by Trump’s character and policies. I watch enough Fox News to know that a great many people consider him a picked-on hero. They know nothing about his crypto grift, his "sale" of pardons, the conflicts of interest deals with his family. They know the Bidens were shamefully corrupt. 

Trump defines our era. I saw it coming and I think I see it ending, but he is still the center of action. On the morning of Election Day, 2016, amid every consensus report predicting a Hillary Clinton victory, I published a blog post titled “Prediction: Trump.” It was a lucky guess based on the observation that Trump intrigued people. They liked his frank, spontaneous, give-’em-hell talk. He had some of what people liked about Archie Bunker. And about Hugh Hefner. And about Tony Soprano. I predicted that there was a silent group of people out there who would not be captured in polling data.

Now there is a silent group of people who have decided Trump is a malicious crackpot. I predict we will see that opinion in the vote this evening.

Democrats should prepare themselves for what is to come.

-- It will still be the Trump era because he is still president and he is still more popular than Congress. He can operate decisively. He will make executive orders while Democrats in Congress will be in hearings. I expect the basic template of political battle to be Democrats trying to legislate and Trump confounding them. Plan to be frustrated that Democrats cannot do more.

-- Plan, too, for the very real possibility of peace and prosperity, and Trump taking personal credit for it. He won’t be miserably unpopular forever. The magic of a capitalist economy and markets is that eventually the system resolves itself and people find a way to make a living. And eventually wars end, the one between Russia and Ukraine, and ours with Iran. In the aftermath of some end to the fighting, the public will sense things are better. Prepare for people applauding Trump.

-- Make one last preparation: Democrats are deeply divided over the war that will not end because God is fighting it on every side, the wars between Israel, Palestine, and Israel’s neighbors. There is probably no way a Democratic presidential candidate can thread a needle on the issue of our best policy toward Israel. Some Democrats have given up on Israel and decided it is a dangerous, rogue state. Others think it the set-upon good-guy victim, just trying to defend itself. The mess in Michigan, with AIPAC-supported Haley Stevens endorsing a Republican over the Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, is a harbinger of the future. The Democratic Party may split up like the Whig Party.

Whatever the news tonight, it ushers in problems. There will always be problems. Young people in school and in first jobs will look back on this period as those exciting years of youth. They won’t have a sense of fatigue and hopelessness. The political ones among them may remember this day as they looked forward to election news with a hope for the open-ended future when all good things are possible.

"Anticipation, anticipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
(These are the good old days)"

                      Carly Simon, "Anticipation" 1971

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More bait: Will Democrats fall for it?

Republicans are promoting Clay Bearnson, a candidate running against their own Republican candidate in Oregon’s state Senate District 3 race.

It is deceptive, clever, hardball politics. They are playing to win. 

I wonder why Hicks’ side waited so long to do it.

Here is what popped up in my text messages Saturday afternoon:

The link takes you to Bearnson’s legitimate website, but Bearnson did not send or pay for this advertisement. It came from a Republican PAC dedicated to electing Republicans.

The text is an invitation to disaffected Democrats. Some of the most politically passionate Democrats are frustrated with their party. Some of the disaffection is a continuation of the Bernie-Hillary split from 2016. Those voters are confident we can and should implement Medicare for All and other redistributive aspirations sooner rather than later. Some of it is residue of the Biden-Harris loss and a feeling that Democrats are weak and incompetent, which is why Trump steamrolls over them. The internal debate now shows up as a split between Democratic Socialists of America activists and “regular” Democrats.

There are also local Democratic activists who want to punish Democratic nominee Denise Krause for defeating their preferred candidate in the primary.

My sense was that the normal erosion away from Krause would be about equal to the Jill Stein and Cornel West vote in 2024. Together Stein and West got just over one percent of the vote in Oregon. Those were protest votes, gestures from people on the disaffected left. That was my estimate of the baseline erosion from Krause due to Bearnson’s place on the ballot.

I am revising that upwards.

I suspect this late burst of GOP ads for Bearnson will push his share above that baseline. The Hicks campaign did a good job of demonizing a grainy black-and-white caricature of Krause, calling her a future rubber stamp for failed policies. (Krause is doing the same thing to Hicks, presenting him in grainy black and white as a tool of his corporate funders. Hicks has twice her money, so the overall impression is of Krause as the underdog getting pummeled, but that she is fighting back and is not a doormat.) While I typed a draft of this post, with MS NOW playing in the background, I heard, in a single half hour, two 30-second Hicks ads bashing Krause as a Portland-loving pawn of Democratic Governor Tina Kotek, yuck, and one 30-second Krause ad asserting that Hicks is a Republican, yuck. This is a microcosm of this campaign.

In a very close election, the Democratic protest votes Bearnson takes from Krause could be decisive. But this GOP text blitz is too little, too late. Bearnson was never visible and credible enough to become the real alternative to Krause’s left. A significant chunk of the political left is eager to support such a candidate, confident that the country is ready for a real progressive. Republicans could have spent several hundred thousand dollars from their cornucopia building up Bearnson with no loss to the Hicks campaign. Bearnson would have been the “good guy outsider” in the ad war voters are watching. Hicks and Krause are the fighting thugs; Bearnson would be the guy saying campaigns shouldn’t be so big and nasty. That would have some appeal, and I can imagine him getting 10 percent of the vote, likely securing a Hicks victory. Republicans did not do this.

Instead, the Hicks campaign repeatedly ran harsh ads condemning Democrats as corrupt and incompetent, then immediately saying that Hicks respects Democrats and would work across the aisle with them.  That is supposed to be credible. Very strange. It is as if they don’t watch their own ads. 

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Easy Sunday: A request for guest posts from Christians.

I don't get it.

Isn't Donald Trump the opposite -- flagrantly so -- of everything that Jesus preached?

I am not the one to write about what Christians are thinking. I am no longer a “person of faith.” I was brought up in a Protestant home and learned the standard version: the Jesus story, Christmas and Easter, original sin, the teachings ascribed to Jesus, and salvation through belief in Christ as God. Then, in college, I learned how Christianity was constructed by squabbling groups over its first few centuries, then refined and re-refined ever since. Oh. It’s all made up, I decided. It was made up at the start by opinionated, disputatious people we know very little about, and the documents are full of forgeries and later writings passed off as earlier ones, created as propaganda, not history.

I likened the creation of Christianity to a centuries-long argument built from the same mix of politics, group dynamics and ideology I saw in the squabbling anti-war groups of the late 1960s: SDS, Progressive Labor, the Eugene McCarthy liberals, the peace Republicans, and so on. It was just people arguing.

Christianity, I decided, is real the way the English language is real: a foundational cultural artifact. But it isn’t real the way rocks are real.

I keep thinking of a scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, which I saw as a child. The Israelites, tired of waiting for Moses, have made a golden calf. The narrator intones: “They bore him upon their shoulders and rejoiced, saying ‘This be our god, oh Israel.’”

Have Republican Christians simply given themselves up to sin and the worship of a golden calf? Maybe that’s it, and they are on a binge they will later regret. But that is a harsh judgment, and I am an outsider.

I know there are people of faith among my readers. Maybe they can explain the Christian/Trump deal from the inside.

So I am asking for guest posts. Maybe I can hear from Trump-supporting Christians who can explain their thinking, and from Christians who don’t support Trump who can tell me what they think is going on.

Send your guest post to my email address: peter.w.sage@gmail.com

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Yeah, so the USA took Venesualia's oil. So what?

"Thou shalt not steal.”
         Exodus 20:15

Are we really OK with taking Venezuela’s oil? 

We are strong. They are weak. They cannot stop us.

But is expropriating oil from poor countries because we can -- is that the kind of country we understand ourselves to be?

Trump:

We took over Venezuela very successfully. And they’ve sent me as a gift a boatload of a million barrels of oil, and I’m giving that to the United States of America. We’re going to accept a million barrels of oil, and I’m going to give it to you people to use it the way you want.

In January the U.S. invaded Venezuela and arrested its president, Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. did not then install María Corina Machado, leader of the popular opposition and winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for that work. It installed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, as interim leader, keeping the same corrupt regime in place. The U.S. got a compliant Venezuelan leader.

Trump makes a cursory effort to put a veneer of justice or mutual benefit on our taking control of Venezuelan oil. The deal gives the U.S. the right to buy a fifth of the output “at cost,” from fields the White House says are concessioned for 100 years. At the United Nations in September he called it an oil “deal.” Then he proudly described it as plunder:

Last month, we signed the largest oil deal in history, covering 65 billion barrels of oil, which will benefit both Venezuela and the United States enormously and helped drive down the cost of energy all over the world. And that is starting to perk right now. It’s coming out. The biggest oil companies in the world are going in, and the numbers are absolutely incredible. When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world. So it’s perhaps the biggest deal. It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belongs the spoils, you’ve all heard that.

Some of Trump’s wealth-seeking is private. He made some $600 million from selling a crypto coin with no intrinsic value. Individual investors lost some $3.8 billion as the coin fell from a peak of about $75, days after launch, to about $1.58 today. He simply cheated his loyal supporters: a private matter, not a matter of state. The large buyers are different. Their purchases were bribes in disguise. They were buying influence or “protection” for themselves and their businesses, a corruption of the public interest for private gain. Americans can observe this open corruption and be disgusted by it. I am. Trump is selling the public trust.

This oil “deal” is different. It directly involves every American citizen, and it changes the polarity of benefit. Trump is plundering Venezuela for us. In his telling, Venezuela is “giving” him oil, a personal gift, and he is re-gifting it to Americans.

Americans need to sit with this and decide if we are OK with it. The U.S. has been openly exploitive of smaller countries throughout our history, most openly in Latin America -- the Banana Republics, as we called them. But the way that history is taught in school, and framed today, says that is the past. Yes, the CIA or the U.S. Army did bad things, but we have learned our lesson. We are good and well-disciplined now. We are the good guys. There is enormous hypocrisy and self-delusion built into that framing, but at least it was hypocrisy. Plunder wasn’t the stated norm.

Now it is. Trump identifies the U.S. as a predator. We are the danger that the rest of the world protects against. We are the smash-and-grab criminal.

I am not OK with that. It makes me feel ashamed of my country, and I don’t want to feel ashamed of it.

And if it seems naive to cite morality in matters of state, I will cite practicality. I have enough experience in business to trust the childhood chant when a player cheats on the playground: “Cheaters never prosper.”

At least not for long. Bad behavior and a bad reputation catch up to them.



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