Easy Sunday: Signs of spring at protests in Medford, Oregon

Americans are experiencing shock and awe.

Candidate Donald Trump promised to dismantle institutions and traditional norms of presidential power, and he is doing so as president. 

Some people like it. Some don't.

People in opposition to Trump, Musk, DOGE, and MAGA turned out at back-to-back demonstrations in Medford on Saturday. 

One, organized around the theme of "Hands off" lined Jackson Street along Hawthorne Park to Biddle Road. It started at 10 a.m.  It was organized by ORD2 Indivisible and Women's March Southern Oregon. A second demonstration, organized by 50501, started at noon and centered on Vogel Plaza in downtown Medford. I estimate 3,000 people took part. 

The MAGA movement has Trump as  a single focus and leader. Resistance to Trump is more diffuse, so people opposed to Trump don't see equivalent numbers, energy, and motivation. People at the rallies told me it felt great to see that they were part of something bigger than themselves. There were like-minded people.

A theme of the protests were hand-made signs.

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"Move fast and break things."

"He's a runner and he'll run away
Soon there'll be no man
Woman ain't been born that can make him stay
Woman get away while you can
He's a runner, he's a runner and he's got to run
He's got to run away"

          Laura Nyro, 1966

 
Donald Trump rang a bell that cannot be un-rung. We are in a new era.

America is a hookup, not a partner.

One school of thought about the events of these first months of Trump's second term is that this is just Trump being a world-class negotiator. He unsettles his opponent, he makes outrageous demands to move the goalposts of the negotiation, and then settles for something better than what would have been possible if he had not come in big. It is the madman -- or mad dog -- theory. You give him wide berth. He described his tactic in The Art of the Deal:

I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

A second school of thought is that Trump has fixed policy goals built around a notion that it is a dog-eat-dog world. In this view, cooperation is just a temporary status of equal power. If other players in this state of perpetual competition seem content, it means that they are getting away with something through the disadvantage of others. He is a fighter and will fight back against this constant competition with every possible tool, which is how any realist plays the game. Play to win, not to get along. He will smash his domestic rivals, he will pull us out of foreign policy deals that are not clearly to our advantage, and he will impose taxes on goods from foreign countries if he can get away with it. A negative balance of trade is proof that they were cheating us, and Trump won't tolerate that. Therefore, in this school of thought, Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff plan is real; his abandoning alliances is real; and his efforts to sue and prosecute and de-fund domestic nodes of potential opposition is real. This time, this term, Trump is both literal and serious. He is fighting to win and win big.

Either way -- school of thought one or two -- the world has changed, because Trump put option two on the table. He may well start backing off his "Liberation Day" tariff announcement and start awarding country-by-country or business-by-business exceptions (which he is already reportedly begun doing with Vietnam after a "productive call" from To Lam, Vietnam's Communist Party general secretary who appealed on behalf of Nike and other footwear manufacturers.) It won't matter. He rang the bell and the world heard it. Trump established that the U.S. is unreliable. The U.S. will act transactionally, based on the president's interest at that moment. It is personal, unpredictable, and may switch 180 degrees based on the political contributions of a billionaire business owner or the see-saw of voters in Wisconsin. It isn't just Trump personally because the world can see that the Congress and the courts cannot be counted on to stop the whims of a president. The USA owns this.

The U.S is a hookup.  A transaction.

Trump doesn't find that disturbing or surprising. He is not disturbed by the polarity reversal on alliances. So what if allies complain? That was then; this is now. In a dog-eat-dog world every relationship is a transaction and always has been. Every employee is "at will." Any apprentice can hear the words: "You're fired!"

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney described the new world:

The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday. The system of global trade anchored on the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War—a system, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades—is over.

Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.

The eighty-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership—when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services—is over.

While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.

Trump can back off the tariffs. I expect that. He will respond to events that would hurt his popularity. I think commentators who say Trump is now in the "don't give a F" zone are incorrect. Trump loves the affirmation of crowds. Without it, he loses the power to control his party. Without it, he would be bereft. 

The crowds are still there, but the rest of the world has woken up to a new reality. Trump is a runner. The U.S. is a runner.

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Yet another stupid, counterproductive Vietnam War

It had been American policy to encourage trade with Vietnam.

Now we are pulling the rug out from under Vietnam.

Bloomberg headline this morning

Bloomberg headline yesterday

Americans fought and died 60 years ago because we wanted a strong, independent Vietnam. It would stop a falling domino of Chinese communist expansion. We had the deluded idea that a strong Vietnam would be willing to be a colony -- and then a client state -- of a Western, Christian, capitalist country, first France and then the USA. It was a profound mistake. Vietnam wanted independence, both from the West and from China. The irony is that the U.S. achieved its war aims by losing and leaving. 

Vietnam is a major trading partner with the U.S., a vital part of a global supply chain, sometimes manufacturing things themselves, sometimes assembling and remanufacturing and adding value to products made elsewhere, including China. A strong Vietnam is good for American business. A prosperous Vietnam is part of an American strategy of surrounding China with independent and capable neighbors. It is part of a larger goal of keeping the South China Sea an international body of water. 

Manufacturing in China has moved up the value chain. Its competitive advantage is no longer low-wage workers. That work has moved toward Vietnam and Indonesia. Nike -- the largest company headquartered in Oregon -- has moved most of its manufacturing from China to Vietnam over the past 20 years.

The scale of this is huge. Nike has 155 factories in what used to be known as South Vietnam and Saigon. It employs over a half million people. It has 10 giant factories that employ over 10,000 people at one site.

Some Americans have called these "sweatshops." My own observation goes the opposite direction. Those factories primarily employ women, and at high wages for the local economy. In Indonesia I learned that an experienced public works employee, a man doing roadwork midday in the equatorial sun, earned one dollar a day. I asked about Nike jobs. The tour guide brightened, "Oh, Nike! Wonderful jobs. Air conditioned. It pays three dollars a day, for work by women!" He had only one concern about Nike jobs: they allow wives to make far more money than their husbands, which can create trouble in the marriage. The jobs are too good.

Factories are expensive long-term investments. They cannot be turned on and off with a switch. There are complicated, expensive supply chains of intermediate goods and infrastructure to move the goods in and out. The jobs in those factories are never going to return to the USA. But the 46 percent tariff placed on products coming from Vietnam dramatically changes the economics of those factories and the country that has such a significant part of its workforce working in them. We just threw a wrench into that system. Nike stock has fallen another two percent as I type this.

It is in the U.S. interest for Vietnam to consider the U.S. a reliable, consistent trading partner. Insofar as China is the great threat to world peace and now our primary long-term strategic rival, it is in our interest for Vietnam to be a vital part of each others' economies. 

Trump targeted Vietnam because we have a balance of trade deficit with it. He interpreted the trade imbalance to be caused by a Vietnamese tariff or some other non-tariff restriction on trade, and therefore characterized this new 46 percent tariff as "reciprocal." We have two-way trade with Vietnam, buying from each other technology products and food that we each grow better in our own climates. The U.S. sells Vietnam machine tools. It is commonplace for developing countries to sell wealthy ones more than they buy because poor countries lack the money to buy rich-country goods. Money comes into those countries by means of "direct investment," i.e. Nike and others building factories there. We had a healthy relationship with Vietnam.

Trump supporters hope this period of chaos is just performance and a negotiating tactic by Trump. In a day or week he will say "nevermind," and he will have shown Vietnam who is boss and they will act more like supplicants to a strong America whose president can dangle favor and disfavor. Maybe this was just a bully flexing his muscles, with Trump being the great negotiator and practitioner of six-dimensional chess. Trump doesn't really mean to destroy the economy and he doesn't really expect textile factories to return to New England. 

But in fact the damage is done, in Vietnam, among our other trading partners, and in foreign policy among our allies. Trump has demonstrated that America is unreliable. It doesn't act on the basis of ideology or self interest -- something one can predict and plan around. The U.S. has become like a family dog that suddenly begins biting you and your friends, leaving blood and scars, for no apparent reason. You can never trust it again. It might turn on you. Trump is doing it right now, justifying it, lying about it, insisting he is right.  

Oregon's richest man, Nike founder Phil Knight, the "Uncle Phil" to the University of Oregon Ducks, has increasingly become a funder for GOP politicians, Nike has lost a quarter of its value in the six weeks since it became clear that Trump really meant it when he said he would impose punitive tariffs on our trading partners. Trump is unpredictable.

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Tariffs! Tariffs! Bring back manufacturing jobs to America!

There is too much news.

     Trump's tariffs

     Stock market tumble

     Trade war responses by the world

     Digesting the Wisconsin news

     Cory Booker makes his move

     Elon Musk begins an exit

     Immigration and renditions

     Court cases

People ask me why I write something every day. This is why.

Let's look at some data about manufacturing jobs in America. Fox News -- which I watched on TV while I made morning coffee -- had a segment praising the tariffs and bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. "Buy American," said the blonde woman with a tight dress and heavy "glam" makeup through her smile. 

Trump is on the TV as I write. "Jobs will be roaring back to America, ushering in a Golden Age."

We manufacture things in America. We have done so for centuries. Measured by its share of the real, inflation-adjusted GDP, manufacturing in the USA has stayed nearly constant over my lifetime, including back to the supposed Golden Age of the 1950s. This from the St. Louis Fed:

This doesn't seem intuitive. We remember that there used to be more American factories where workmen assembled stuff. Manufacturing employment has indeed declined:

The two charts can be explained by this one. Manufacturing has been subject to efficiencies and automation, so the dollar value added by manufacturing has not kept pace with the overall price level, which now -- as always -- consists of many things not subject to the same efficiencies.

The St. Louis Fed summarized:

Manufacturing in the U.S. has not suffered a significant decline. Rather, manufacturing's roughly constant share of real GDP and declining employment share indicate an increase in productivity of the manufacturing sector relative to the overall economy. This is likely because of automation.

American workers seeking family-wage jobs aren't competing against Mexican and Chinese workers. They are competing against robots. If factories move to the USA in response to tariffs -- a slow and questionable proposition -- they will be filled with labor-saving machines, not blue-collar workers. 

A close reader of this blog, Michael Trigoboff, writes in comments that the Democratic Party's go-to remedy for displaced American workers -- get retrained to write computer code -- is unrealistic in practice. He taught computer science classes at Portland Community College and saw that it takes an unusual native intelligence and mindset to do that work.  There are alternative approaches. There are unfilled jobs in construction that involve physical, hands-on movement and assembly of materials. These are location-specific and not subject to the standardization that takes place in factory-manufactured goods. Much of this work is currently done by immigrants. A set of policies on immigration and employment verification that re-established construction trades as a worksite for blue collar workers has more promise than does a tariff policy that attempts to re-shore blue-collar factory jobs.

The U. S. still makes and sells things abroad: intellectual property, software, movies, and content platforms. The U.S. has strong reason to use its trade relationships to protect those products against piracy. A tariff war weakens our influence with trading partners that use -- and steal -- those products. The stock market understands this. Apple is down 30 percent since Trump's inauguration and it became clear that he was serious about imposing tariffs. The stock is down almost 10 percent today on the news of Trump's tariffs. We were never going to assemble i-Phones in the USA. But Apple was going to design and brand them and sell them around the world at high margins, bringing wealth into the U.S.

Apple stock as of 8 a.m. Pacific Time today.

Trump is an agent of chaos. Americans thought they wanted someone to shake things up. He is doing so, and Americans are beginning to see what that means.

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Some things money can't buy

"I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I'll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
'Cause I don't care too much for money
But money can't buy me love

Can't buy me love
Everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love
No no no, no"
     Paul McCartney and John Lennon, 1964

Wisconsin voters elected Susan Crawford to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating the Donald Trump and Elon Musk-backed Brad Schimel by about 10 points.

This Rolling Stone headline has it backwards:

Crawford did not win despite Musk's money blitz. She won because of it.

Or, to be more precise, Schimel lost because of it.

An ongoing theme of this blog is that political messages often backfire. The messenger intends one message but voters receive a very different one. Sometimes that is because the message is flawed. Sometimes the medium of the message is flawed. And sometimes the message is completely shaped by the identity of the messenger and the messenger is flawed. This is a case of all three.

Powerful images from the Wisconsin campaign

Voters in judicial races cast votes based on a general impression of the candidates. We evaluate judges based on their reputation and the reputation of their public supporters. Judicial races in Wisconsin have become partisan races. Everyone knew that Crawford was the Democratic-aligned candidate and Schimel was the Republican-aligned one. 

Schimel was not blindsided by Elon Musk's sabotage of his campaign. He willingly walked into the trap. News stories about Schimel describe him as being openly and proudly part of the Trump/MAGA team. 

From: Wisconsin Examiner

Wisconsin is a purple state, nearly perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. It was not crazy for Schimel to let the world know he liked Trump, agreed with Trump, and was supported by Trump. But it turned out to be disastrous because he tied himself to a political anchor.

Popularity is the engine behind Trump's power. It is also the Achilles heel in the Trump MAGA movement. Trump was a powerful demagogue at the high tide of popularity in January because he looked like a man of action, taking up arms against the sea of troubles facing America. The idea of a strong leader is popular, but that leader loses the power to intimidate others if and when he takes unpopular actions. Trump and DOGE immediately began doing so. Elon Musk -- ever the child genius showboat -- waded into the Supreme Court race and made it a referendum on himself and his ability to throw his money around and get results. He grabbed center stage. The implicit message in front of Wisconsin voters was whether or not they supported a fabulously wealthy outsider openly trying to buy their Supreme Court with patently insincere cheese-head hats and million-dollar vote-buying schemes. Musk hijacked the Schimel race. Schimel perhaps would have lost organically, in the normal course of politics in a closely-divided polity, but he lost big because of Musk. 

Political consultants guide candidates to the proverb attributed to Napoleon: that God is on the side of the army with the big battalions. It is true. Big-spending campaigns with lots of ads can overwhelm small ones. "Free" money from a giant donor like Musk, or from a large state party "Majority Fund" in a local race, is a hard-to-resist temptation. Raising money $50 or $500 at a time from local supporters is hard and slow, and sometimes sacrificial for the donor. Isn't it better for everyone to let the outsider raise the money so the candidate can concentrate on his message and meet voters without hounding them for money? So tempting.

The problem is that outside money shapes the message. In the Wisconsin case, the message was that manic billionaire Elon Musk wants to buy your vote. Are you okay with that, yes or no? The same dynamic happened in a local state Senate race I have written about in the past between a Medford mayor, Randy Sparacino, running as a Republican against an incumbent Democrat, Jeff Golden (and coincidently, yet another college classmate). The upstate Republican state Senate PAC spent over a million dollars on attack ads against Golden on behalf of Sparacino. The intended message was that Sparacino was the better candidate. The received message was that if elected to the state Senate Sparacino would be a reliable errand boy puppet of his upstate handlers. They hijacked his message. He was a victim --  but he let them do it to him. 

The election results in Wisconsin sends new messages into the zeitgeist. Musk and DOGE are, indeed, unpopular at the ballot box, fatally so in purple polities. GOP officeholders are refiguring whether they dare openly advocate for anything other than total acquiescence to DOGE cuts. Maybe they can, after all. Billionaires are observing Wisconsin and protests against Musk and Tesla, and recalculating the perils of open support of Trump. Association with Trump may be bad for business. Donating to Republican candidates may be bad for business. The zeitgeist is now questioning whether Trump's tariff activity has changed the story on Trump. Maybe he is a loser, after all. Maybe MAGA is a powerful minority, but, at bottom, a minority.

Most importantly, the renewed idea floating in the zeitgeist is that Democrats can win elections.

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Up close: A protest over the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk.

     "As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something."
            Jane Collins

Democrats had been oddly quiet in the aftermath of the 2024 election. After the 2016 election, Democrats were angry that victory seemed to have been snatched from their hands. But after this election, Democrats were dealing with a discouraging realization, that a plurality of our fellow citizens preferred Trump to the Democratic nominee. There was more sadness and contemplation, less outrage.

That has changed. Now, six weeks into Trump's second term, dismay has turned into anger. Democrats are seeing that Trump wasn't bluffing about seeking "retribution." He had an enemies list and he is expanding the power of the presidency to squash opposition and make an example of opponents. It sends a chilling message. If you said or did something Trump didn't like, he will blackball you or your employer, call for your impeachment, "primary" you if you are a squishy Republican, sue you for defamation, threaten you with tariffs, take away your federal funding, fire you, or round you up and deport you. Trump's action is sudden. Decisive. It comes directly from an executive order, not through legislation. It is a performance to elicit shock and awe. "My God! Look what Trump just did!"

Shock and awe aroused opposition. U.S. Senate Minority Leader and college classmate Chuck Schumer's response struck many Democrats as weak and accommodative, not smart and strategic.  Schumer's strategy divides his party because it misses the mood of  a great many Democrats. It isn't enough. It isn't angry and indignant and resolute. Many Democrats want to do something, something visible and in the streets. Show the world that we are in opposition. 

Another college classmate, Jane Collins, is part of that group wanting more. She has a long history of political protest. She lives in the area of one of Trump's shock-and-awe operations, the arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. Collins joined a demonstration condemning that action. She wrote about it on own personal website, https://aliceT4.com. 

Her guest post is a shortened version of her full post: https://alicet4.com/2025/03/28/the-people-speak/

Guest Post by Jane Collins 

                      The People Speak
Ever since Trump and Musk began to take a chainsaw to the work of generations, I’ve been hearing, “Where is the outrage?” Go to a protest near you; you will find that outrage.

On Thursday, March 26, I went to Tufts for a rally against the abduction the day before of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at the school. She was snatched by masked federal agents as she walked toward a friend’s house, handcuffed, and driven away in an unmarked car. Before a judge could order that the government not take her out of Massachusetts, she had already been spirited away to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.

Ozturk was grabbed without any form of due process. She was in the United States legally on a student visa. She had done nothing wrong. About a year ago, she objected to Tufts’s refusal to divest from Israel in an opinion piece in the student paper. Trump & company have decided that anyone who uses their freedom of speech in a way they don’t like is a threat to national security, maybe even a terrorist.

Outspoken international students are low-hanging fruit. Trump means to pick them and throw them somewhere to rot. He doesn’t have to abduct all of them, just enough to shut the rest of them up.

But students are not shutting up. Ozturk’s abduction, added to the equally outrageous detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student, three weeks ago, and the rendition of more than 250 Venezuelans to the worst prison in El Salvador with no proof that any of them were criminals or gang members, has pushed many into activism.

The Tufts rally comprised about 2000 people, most with handmade signs. Never mind the speakers, whom I couldn’t hear anyway. This is what their signs said:

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Free Rumeysa!

Democracy -- NOT deportation -- protects Jewish students

We will not be silenced!

Silencing dissent is the REAL cancel culture

If not fascism, then why fascism-shaped?

Democracy > Deportation

Release all prisoners of the secret police

Democracy is under attack!

Speak out against injustice or you’re gonna be silenced next

I love inclusion, equality, diversity

Stop doing evil shit

Abolish ICE

ICE out of our communities! Free Palestine!

Jews Against Deportation

This Tufts alum affirms the equal dignity and humanity of all people

Nice Jewish Students for Democracy

Project 2025 indicates that it won’t be long before Trump uses the military against peaceful demonstrators. There will be tear gas, pepper spray, and water hoses, mass arrests, and eventually, rubber bullets or worse.

Meanwhile, Trump is damaging everything we love: our communities, education, alliances with other democracies, the environment, and most of all our rights. Democracy is clearly under attack. As Americans realize how much harm is being done, we get angrier, maybe even angry enough to get up off the couch and do something.

The protests are becoming more frequent, and the crowds keep getting bigger. If you’re not on the streets already, I hope you will join us soon. The homemade, passionate, outraged signs at every rally help me to believe that maybe we can save democracy. Not leaders or heroes, or the corporate-owned Democrats. We, the people.

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Repositioning Portland

Portland used to be the place that was crazy-liberal, and in a good way.

Then Portland was the national example of Democratic misrule, a willing victim of riots, vandalism, and homeless encampments.

Portland is getting a new brand: an oasis in a country that has gone MAGA.

Story in Sunday's Oregonlive

Vibe is hard to measure, but it is real.

For a decade Portland, Oregon had developed a reputation as the best city on the West Coast. It was liveable, prosperous, and growing. It was a tech center. It was less expensive than Seattle, San Francisco, L.A.,  and Silicon Valley.

Portlandia image of local residents

The TV sketch comedy Portlandia parodied it. Portland was the place where waiters showed diners family photos of the happy lives of the chicken, before it was served for lunch on a bed of organic kale. 

Then the summer of 2020.

I have been very critical of the way Portland handled the demonstrations -- and then riots -- following the suffocation of George Floyd in 2020. Over the course of a hundred days, anarchists and hooligans positioned themselves amid Black Lives Matter protests. The vandals carried out a campaign of statue-toppling, arson, and window-breaking. Portland's system for civic order broke down. The Multnomah County District Attorney, Michael Schmidt, came into office in August, 2020 as a "reformer," announcing that he was opposed to "mass incarceration" and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. He would not prosecute anarchist vandals. In response, Portland police went on an informal work-stoppage. They weren't going to arrest or stop vandals and arsonists if they weren't going to be prosecuted. Some people within the liberal BLM protesters were conflicted, so they did not identify and exclude the vandals. On one hand, the hooligans were hijacking the protests and destroying their message of peaceful protest. On the other hand they claimed to be ideological allies, also angry about the status quo but more willing to walk the talk. Liberals knew the argument that "violence is the language of oppressed," so one should expect some violence to protest the greater systemic violence done to marginalized people. 

Meanwhile, court decisions in the Ninth Judicial Circuit made it impossible for Portland to control homeless encampments which grew up on sidewalks and roadways. 

Within that mix of opinion and behavior, the very blue Portland sustained a summer and fall of disruption, destruction, and ugliness. The downtown hollowed out. Images of fires showed nightly on Fox News. Portland became the national poster child for Democratic inability to govern. The Portland reputation and vibe went negative. 

Portland is coming out of the funk. Portland citizens voted a major change in its governance. The mayor was replaced by Keith Wilson who ran as a "common sense businessman." The city created a city manager position and expanded the council to 12, which makes them neighborhood representatives, not operational department heads. Mike Schmidt got replaced by a district attorney who said he would prosecute crime. It is too soon to see if the organizational change will improve governance, but it is not too soon for there to be a vibe-change. Portland projects competence again.

Portland -- and Oregon -- is still liberal, and that gives it a brand position. It is still an immigrant sanctuary state. A trans male-to-female high school athlete won races, and is being supported by government officials. There are reasons to think Trump may target Oregon and try to make an example of it, as he is now doing with Maine, which has a female governor who refused his demand for a public apology for saying she would obey Maine laws. Portland and Oregon are giving off a proud don't-tread-on-me vibe. That is the new brand.

It isn't all rosy. Oregon's largest private employer, Intel, was behind the curve on AI and it is laying off people. The federally-sponsored CHIP Act expansions will take place in Arizona, New Mexico, and Ohio -- not Oregon. Nike, headquartered in Oregon, is struggling. With stock at $64/share it is in a four-year slump from a 2021 price of $155. And the supposed Trump increases in timber harvests off federal lands cannot get started if there isn't staff to manage the process. 

Still, Portland is regaining a national role and brand as a leader in the resistance to Trump, DOGE, and MAGA. A premise of this blog is that the Trump movement is now experiencing the exhilarating feeling of winning big. He is overreaching and doing the one thing that will end the MAGA movement's quest for power. Trump's populist movement will be stopped by the public because he does unpopular things. He is beginning to do them. 

Portland is ahead of the curve in being an example of resistance to Trump. DOGE, and MAGA, but the curve may catch up.

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