What do Trump-supporters want? Validation.

     "Democrats are fueled by hate, anger, intolerance, and violence. Thank God for Republican sanity, civility and tolerance. Democrats will rue the day they brought assassination, lawfare, banning presidential candidates, and anti-American politics to the forefront."

            Email from a Trump-supporter this week

I learn by hearing from Trump supporters. 

My correspondent writes that Republicans are sane, civil and tolerant, in contrast to Democrats. 

In the view of Trump supporters, they are the little guys and victims in the great national political drama. The entire culture -- the "establishment" -- consisting of the global economy, the mainstream news, TV and Hollywood, the system of education top to bottom, plus the levers of government -- the whole shebang -- are part of Democratic-controlled groupthink. 

That establishment groupthink oppression is bi-partisan, which is why Trump needed to make a wholesale change in the GOP.  I attended a GOP convention in New Hampshire in October of 2023, when the GOP nomination was up for grabs. I saw all the candidates up close and listened to a broad set of GOP activists. Theoretically, candidates like Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie were viable alternatives to Trump -- Trump without the warts. Not so. 

Pence is not an understudy to Trump. He was not the cleaned-up, noncriminal, non-graft, non-adulterous, non-insurrectionist, Christian version of Trump. Pence is the opposite of Trump.  

Pence, along with Reagan, both Bush presidents, Dole, McCain, and Romney, are the old establishment, the America that isn't great, the one that paid unnecessary respect to the wrong people. The old GOP leaders accepted laws and norms. That defined "conservatism." Trump is different. Trump is a rebel. He smashes those laws and norms because they were tacitly part of the oppression. The old order didn't protect and reward normal White guys and their wives, good Christians. 

Trump is stomping on the symbols and policies of the old order. Stop wind and solar projects. Erase monuments to civil rights. Fire Black leaders in government, the military, and the universities. Cancel medical research grants. Question vaccinations. Stop the slow-motion, checks-and-balances process-dominated government. The establishment respected the wrong people: foreigners and immigrants. It respected diversity, and "diversity" is just part of the groupthink that benefits everyone except people like my correspondent.

Isn't Trump a world-class provocateur, a name-calling, divisive leader? Isn't he the prime example of un-civil intolerance? In a Trump-supporter's mind, not at all. He didn't really summon people to D.C. to overturn an election and incite a violent riot. He didn't really grope women, defame women, lie to banks, pay hush money, take papers home and hide them and lie about hiding them, or conspire to replace electors with fake ones. Those things didn't happen. People say that only because he was being picked on by the establishment and its fake-media tool. Whatever he did was just self defense from the oppressors, not wrong, and therefore not real.

Republicans' sharp rejection of Mike Pence is the best "tell." Pence is a "good boy." Trump opposes the good boys. And since the good boys are oppressors, Trump is sane, civil, and tolerant when resisting them.

Are things really that terrible and oppressive for my correspondent?  Where's the beef? 

From the 1976 movie "Network": "I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everyone knows things are bad. . . . I'm mad as hell and I'mnot going to take it anymore."

He does have a grievance. He is a White male from rural southern Oregon. A backwater. The world is passing these places by. They vote bright red. It isn't just Hillary Clinton who called him deplorable. Modern sensibilities about who is a legitimate, respected American are changing out from under him. The world is passing him by, too. 

[Note: I had a guest post last week from Alan DeBoer, a local businessman, former mayor and state senator, and civic philanthropist. With help from ChatGPT, he wrote describing  resentment of elites that he thought explained populist Trumpism. But, to avoid confusion or conflation of the two posts, let me note that the correspondent I quote today is not Alan DeBoer.]   

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Thoughts and Prayers at a vigil for Charlie Kirk

Nothing happened. 

That's what happened. 

Nothing happening isn't "newsworthy," but it is good to notice.

I attended a "Vigil for Charlie Kirk" at 4:00 p.m. in the plaza in front of the Jackson County, Oregon courts building. It was scheduled by the local Republican Party, and I estimate that 400 people attended.

It was a quiet, friendly event. 

There was a brief welcome by two local Republican Party spokespersons. Colleen Roberts, a Republican County county commissioner also welcomed us. This part went quickly.

The bulk of the event was a celebration of a religious martyr and advocate for traditional Christian families. People sang "God Bless America," "Amazing Grace," and a couple of more religious songs that I didn't recognize, but the audience seemed to know, including all the verses. There were prayers, one of which, by a pastor named Tim Cook, was a speech/prayer, but that was the only real speechifying. He wore a big black cowboy hat but removed it while praying. A three-year-old wandered onto the stage while his mother spoke. A large dog was quiet during the talking, but barked loudly while people were clapping. People around me chuckled at that.

It was a lovely afternoon. Sunny. Dry. Temperatures in the 70s.

Notice what did not happen. 

No one roused the crowd with anger. 

Speakers referred to the sorry state of the world, but no one denounced the murderer or the presumed political faction he represented. 

There were no signs blaming Democrats, liberals, godless communists, Biden, Obama, trans people, the media, or Tyler Robinson. In fact, there were no signs at all except one saying Kirk's voice would live on and the one with a Bible verse from Matthew, both pictured above.

         There was not one mention of Donald Trump. 

No MAGA hats. No MAGA merchandise.   

No opponent of Charlie Kirk spoke up, carried signs, or was otherwise apparent.

No fights broke out. No one called for revenge or retaliation. There was no tone of Fox News outrage.  

There was no hint of Stephen Miller's pronouncement on Thursday that "There is an ideology . . . which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved, . . . an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence.” There was none of that talk. 

Americans asserted the freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and the freedom to assemble peaceably. All quiet. Americans were being Americans. Something did happen.

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Easy Sunday: Choosing fruit. Loading the dishwasher.

Does your partner load the dishwasher correctly?

My wife does. Apparently I don't.

We don't argue about where I put dishes and cups. She just changes whatever I do. 

I stumbled upon this 30-second video on YouTube.

Click:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dAXpwybq3fs

The husband in this video seems amused.  The wife seems happy to be choosing the fruit. As goes John Lennon's line in that dreamy, soft-focus, everything-is-OK song, "Strawberry Fields Forever," it's nothing to get hung about.

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone, but it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me . . . .
And nothing to get hung about

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Trump blamed radical leftists. We won't hear an "oops."

FOX NEWS' AINSLEY EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. . . . How do we fix this country?

TRUMP: I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble -- but I couldn't care less. 

By now readers have heard the news. Tyler Robinson, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk, wasn't a "radical leftist" after all. 

Robinson is a clean-cut, White, native-born, Utah Republican Mormon, from a pro-Trump, pro-gun household with a father formerly in law enforcement and now a Christian pastor. Robinson was in an apprenticeship program to be an electrician. [Update: his father was apparently not a pastor; he installs cabinets.]

Robinson is not a liberal. Not a progressive. Not trans. Not studying ethnic or gender justice at some liberal sanctuary. He wasn't sending coded trans messages. He wasn't in a gang. He wasn't from Harvard, thank God.

He is one of theirs. 

For two days Americans heard Trump, Republican politicians, and MAGA citizenry complain that Democrats killed Charlie Kirk and that they will get revenge. Social media was full of threats and warnings. I received letters. One, from a MAGA lawyer who should know better, but doesn't, wrote me saying that Democrats "brought assassination," and Democrats will rue the day they aren't nice and civil and tolerant like Trump. He wasn't being droll. He was serious. I received multiple veiled death threats from a local Trump-supporter, which I have turned over to the police. The police won't think they are funny. 

On Thursday, the day after the assassination with the shooter still unknown, I posted here likening Trump's instant blame of "leftists" to Adolph Hitler's response to the Reichstag fire of 1933. The actual cause of that fire was uncertain at the time, and remains so, but that didn't matter to Hitler. He blamed the fire on an opposition party, which became justification to use war powers to suppress them. I warned that Trump was doing the same thing, scapegoating his political opposition. That is still happening.

This could be an opportunity for Trump, Fox, and other Democrat accusers to reverse course and de-escalate. Even Ainsley Earhardt tried to do it. Trump is forging ahead blaming Democrats. Fox News now asserts an improbable theory that college corrupted the shooter.  Blame Utah State, that hotbed of woke progressivism.

Robinson spent one semester at Utah State. He left. He is now in his third year in an apprentice electrician program at Dixie Technical College. Fox isn't blaming Dixie Tech. Utah State is  scrambling to make the case that it didn't infect Robinson with leftist woke elitist propaganda. He just took normal science courses, they said.

I personally feel a sense of relief. Whew. The assassin was an all-American classic. 

Robinson -- and apparently the two people who attempted to assassinate Trump and the man who invaded the Pelosi home -- were pro-Trump. But there are crazy, disturbed people on the left, too. It could have been a Democrat this time. Assassins, school shooters, and impulsive murderers of strangers are one-offs. Loners. People with confused politics.

I don't blame Whites, or Christians, or Mormons, or Trump families, or gun owners, or Dixie Technical School apprentice electricians for killing Charlie Kirk. Tyler apparently consumed right wing conspiracy nuttery, and chose to pick up and use a gun that was right there in the house. We tolerate that nuttery and we tolerate gun culture. Freedom. But I only blame one person: Tyler Robinson.

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After an assassination

     "What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?"
            Burt Bacharach "What's it all about, Alfie?" 1965

People my age know about the shock of assassinations. I was in junior high when JFK was killed. 

Grownups talked in hushed voices. The TV showed a funeral procession with people in black. A somber announcer explained the riderless horse. We knew this was special.

Erich Almasy, author of today's guest post, is my age, and a college classmate during the heady days of the late 1960s. We are in a generation that expected to change the world for the better. Blacks were equal, women were liberated, and our brains had opened the doors of perception. We were going to fix everything.

Erich strikes the right tone here in this aftermath of another assassination. The new school shooting in Colorado, within the hour of the murder of Charlie Kirk, doesn't shock us, although it should. School shootings are commonplace, alas. We live with them. But assassinations are different. They are rare enough to surprise. They reflect intention and purpose. Someone killed a political commentator. Someone interposed himself to silence a voice. Assassinations set off chain reactions of responses. Wars start from assassinations. It is reasonable to feel dread. We have seen how things can go very wrong.

Something happened. We are trying to be careful. 

Erich is retired, now living in Mexico.

Almasy

Guest Post by Erich Almasy

No sane person I know would condone the assassination of Charlie Kirk or take pleasure from it. A young man with a young family is gone, and we can only be saddened by this event. The question for me now is not “who did it?” or “why did they do it?” but “what’s next?” 

As we have seen in the Twentieth Century, assassinations tend to change world events radically. Please think of how each of these assassinations caused very negative change: Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and World War I; President Francisco Madero and the Mexican Revolution; Mahatma Gandhi and the Pakistan-India Civil War; Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the resulting rise of the Ayatollahs; Ngô Đình Diệm and the eventual fall of South Vietnam; JFK, MLK, and RFK and the alterations to the American view of itself; Malcolm X and the rise of Black distrust; Egyptian Anwar Sadat and the Mideast Peace process.

I can see how my Boomer generation likely sowed many of the seeds of the divisiveness we see today. Previously, the United States had not been the scene of presidential impeachments, campus unrest, and violent riots. Today, complacent, old, white men from my generation still run our government and own most of our wealth. Even the younger ones act like my generation’s elders, with a Theory X management style, blatant displays of riches, and trophy wives. Gen X, Y, and Z may think they invented social media, but we helped bring gossip columnists to the world.

I look at this era’s gun violence, and I remember growing up with the Marlboro Man. No one gave much thought to the four actors who played him in ads, and that they all died of lung diseases. Instead, we saw them as rugged individualists, always portrayed as cowboys. The Reaganesque (as host of GE Theater, not as president) vision of this man and his horse permeated my childhood with the actual “white” hats faster on the draw than the bad guys. And, since everyone knew the difference between good and evil, it was perfectly all right to use a gun.

Then, we lost our sense of infallibility in Vietnam, white people felt threatened by people of color, and the American Dream dissolved before our eyes. We began to question our uniqueness, and anger that is as old as the American Civil War was resurrected. Can we stop this flow of venom before it overwhelms us? Do we have what Tom Wolfe called “The Right Stuff,” namely, the courage, confidence, and capability to do the right thing? The sane thing? The human thing?

So, I promise myself that I will hesitate before sending a comment or email and ask whether it is a knee-jerk reaction or a proactive, rational response. Am I simply adding to the cacophony and noise? Am I representing the person I want to be? Am I prepared to reap what I sow?

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The Reichstag fire

Charlie Kirk was assassinated. All Americans should grieve.

Democrats especially.

In an Oval Office speech yesterday, Trump said the "radical left" is "directly responsible" for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Trump's video comment on Kirk's death began with words about the value of open debate, civil discourse, and Charlie Kirk's work to engage citizens. But two minutes into his four-minute talk, the tone shifted. It went dark. The nation was under attack and we are at war against an enemy within.

Trump said:

It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day and year after year and in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. 

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today. And it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organization that funded and supported, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country from the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a healthcare executive in the streets of New York to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and three others. Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives. . . .

The amicus brief my attorney filed in the tariff case before the U.S. Court of Appeals -- and there will be a new one now that the case has gone to the Supreme Court -- argued that the case was about more than tariffs. It was about our form of government. President Trump is changing it from a constitutional democracy with broadly shared powers into a form of strong-man government. The brief argues that tariffs, which under our Constitution are to be determined by Congress, are a strong place to draw the line on Trump overreach.

The weakness in this argument is a president who would claim wartime emergency power. If a president declares that a decades-old problem is in fact a time-sensitive emergency, or a president says that a chronic problem in America -- gun violence -- is in fact an act of war against the U.S., then the rules of civil government might be lifted, especially if a compliant Supreme Court wants that particular president to have his way. In a wartime emergency, a president can ignore the usual checks and balances. A president with a taste for autocracy could silence, arrest, imprison, or kill whomever he targets.

There is history to observe here. In 1933, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, caught fire and burned under mysterious circumstances. The Nazis blamed communists. The Reichstag fire was a convenient excuse for the Nazis to suspend civil liberties and to silence and arrest opposition activists. This allowed the National Socialist Party to increase its plurality in the next election, and, from that, to take total control of the government.

An event like the Reichstag fire is an opportunity. Without knowing the real culprit, and without acknowledging their own acts of insurrection and civil discord, both Hitler and Trump instantly blamed a partisan opponent. Trump, using inflammatory and divisive speech, blamed "the radical left" for using inflammatory and divisive speech. Irony is not dead. Like the Nazis in 1933, Trump says he intends to go after the institutions of his opponents. 

The German National Socialists wanted a justification for suspending the rules. Trump argues that he already has justification: immigrants, fentanyl, gangs, unbalanced trade, a fire in Los Angeles, crime in Chicago and other cities, mail ballots, protests on university campuses, and more.

Now he has another. A visible one. A shocking one. A sad one for the Kirk family and the country. This one doesn't appear, at first look, like a murder committed by the traditional villain of school shootings, some mentally ill person with random murderous intent. This one has a different first-impression look: Charlie Kirk was assassinated with a weapon of war.

I sense this is a Reichstag fire event, an opportunity to accelerate suspending the rules of a constitutional democracy. When America is at war, a president can do anything.

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An alternative to political retribution.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden announces a $6 million grant for upgrades to the failing Gold Hill, Oregon sewer system.

Yes, Gold Hill. 

Bright red Gold Hill.

Rogue Valley Sewer Services General Manager Carl Tappert credited Oregon Senator Ron Wyden (D) for securing this money.

Thanks to the hard work of our local USDA representatives and strong support from Senator Wyden we were able to secure a USDA Rural Development grant of over $6 million. This is more than double what we were hoping for and should allow us to keep sewer rates in Gold Hill below $120 per month.

Wyden has risen to a position of power in the Senate as ranking member of the Senate's Finance Committee. The new digital Southern Oregon newspaper, the Rogue Valley Times, had a story on it.

Rogue Valley Times

I'm highlighting this special attention to Gold Hill because it is such a contrast to the message of President Donald Trump. Trump openly and proudly says that the power of the federal government under his command is directed to helping his friends and punishing his opponents. 

Trump announced that he was moving the Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama because Colorado voted blue while Alabama voted red, and because Colorado had mail-in voting, which he opposes. Trump threatened Wes Moore, the Democratic governor of Maryland, with pulling federal funding to repair the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is essential to the port of Baltimore and collapsed last year when it was hit by a container ship. Moore said he objected to Trump's sending federal troops to Baltimore. 

Trump barred from federal courthouses law firms that represented clients and interests Trump opposed until they paid him a tribute bribe. Trump pulls research funding from universities that he thinks are aligned left. Trump threatens cities with Democratic mayors, pledging to send federalized National Guard soldiers from red states. There is a message: Please the king; Don't cross the king.

Senator Wyden projects a very different approach. The Gold Hill residents who will benefit enormously from this grant vote bright red. They voted over two to one for Trump over Kamala Harris. Wyden helps them anyway.

They voted for Wyden's Republican opponent, Jo Rey Perkins with 67 percent of the vote -- 31 percent for him -- in Wyden's 2022 re-election bid. The area gave Tina Kotek, the Democratic candidate for governor, only 22 percent of the vote in that election. 

Wyden didn't treat Gold Hill voters as enemies. He treated them as Oregonians and his constituents. He wrote me explaining his approach:

I'm not the U.S. senator representing just Portland, Oregon. I'm the U.S. senator representing all of Oregon. Which is why every year I go to all 36 counties and have town halls -- over 1,135 at this point since my time in the Senate.

Listening to people, and realizing that we have a lot more in common than apart from one another, is the Oregon Way. It's something I've always done, and I will continue to do as long as I have the honor to represent this state. It's something I encourage all senators and members of Congress to do.

I urge readers to resist the temptation to read this and think "yadda, yadda, typical political Mr. Nice Guy talk." Stop and reflect: Wyden's position and words are not typical -- not anymore. It is a statement of principle of good, representative government, in direct counterpoint to Trump's quid pro quo approach. 

Trump is normalizing the old spoils system, the idea that it is acceptable to direct federal resources disproportionately toward friends and to punish opponents by withholding resources. You represent your base. You smash your opponents. You make liberals cry. Opponents will learn from their suffering and, if nothing else, MAGA voters will love to see Rachel Maddow fume.

Wyden communicates a better, more just, understanding of American government. We are all in this together. Politicians represent the whole of the people. We each enjoy the equal protection of the law. That idea is under attack, but it isn't dead yet.

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