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 and what he could do to them.

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. And Trump leads his army of supporters who vote in Republican primaries. They take his advice. Texas Senator John Cornyn learned that the hard way. 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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