Leaving the
CIRCUS TENT
Some Oregon Republicans don’t see President Donald Trump
as the right leader for U.S., or their party
BY HENRY HOUSTON
B
ack in 2016, then-presumptive candidate
Donald Trump walked up to the podium at
Lane Events Center as 2 Unlimited’s “Get
Ready for This” played. For about an hour, his
yelled stump speech distorted the PA system
in front of a crowd of about 4,300 supporters
that was shoulder-to-shoulder for roughly one-third of
the floor space.
He hit all of the “greatest hits” of his campaign, like
asking who’s going to pay for his wall, having the crowd
boo the media and throwing out a protester who raised a
Mexican flag — and looking away as his supporters threw
punches at the protester.
At the end of his rally, after repeatedly pronouncing
Oregon as “Ore-gone,” he said “winning” was on the
country’s horizon if he was elected.
“You’re going to see things happen, and we’re going
to start winning again. We’re going to win, win, win,” he
said in 2016. “And you’re going to beg me, ‘Mr. President,
we’re winning too much, and we can’t stand it in Eugene,
Oregon.’ And I’m going to say, ‘I don’t care. We’re going
to keep winning.’”
That was the 2016 election year. Now in 2020 some
Oregon Republicans — some who are now former Oregon
Republicans — are begging him that they can’t stand
his “winning” anymore. More than five months into a
pandemic and more than two months into a historic civil
rights movement, they are stepping away from Trump’s
Republican Party.
The party’s defectors include Jonathan Lockwood,
an over-the-top former Oregon Senate Republican
spokesperson who says he couldn’t take Trump’s lack
of leadership after years of broken promises and a neo-
fascist response to Black Lives Matter-related protesters.
But Lockwood isn’t the first Republican to abandon the
Trump train. Trump has been a topic of the Oregon House
floor debate from a Republican who serves a swing district
and recently doubled down on his inability to lead during
a pandemic and the U.S.’s recent civil rights movement.
While some conservatives say the U.S. works well with
two healthy political parties that lean left and right and
meet in the middle for policy, others are looking for change.
Trump’s Republican Party is just another evolution
of the political party, according to Rich Vial, a former
Oregon legislator and someone who left the Republican
Party while running for secretary of state in 2020. He says
the issue is the two-party system, which embraces fringe
candidates during the primary election.
Trump’s Circus Tent
Lockwood is no stranger to the Democratic Party of
Oregon. The political party put together an attack memo
on the former Oregon Senate Republican spokesperson
and strategist titled “Republican Mouthpiece, Fear Mon-
gering Twitter Bully.” The report was distributed when
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he left his communications position with the Oregon
Senate Republicans to briefly run public relations for
Republican Knute Buehler’s unsuccessful 2018 guber-
natorial campaign.
The memo has a photo of Lockwood wearing a tank
top with “Stop Being Poor” written on it, which former
reality star and hotel heiress Paris Hilton once infamously
wore, striking a pose very similar to her with his arms
stretched out.
Lockwood tells Eugene Weekly that he’s been cast
as a right-wing villain, but if you look at the issues, he’s
not right wing; he’s aggressive. He adds that beating on
Democrats when they deserve it isn’t “right wing.”
He says he supported Trump in 2016 because he was
the guy who could beat Hillary Clinton. And Lockwood
thought Trump would actually tackle issues like the
student loan crisis. But that was campaign-trail Trump
speaking. The White House version is unfit for the
presidency, he says.
What finally pushed Lockwood away from Trump’s
Republican Party was when his administration decided to
use tear gas for a photo op earlier this summer at St. John’s
Church near the White House. But Trump did even more
damage. He decided to have his rally in Tulsa — the site
of a 1921 racist massacre — on Juneteenth, killed student
loan reform and rolled back health care protections for
transgender patients during Pride month.
And while Trump said Joe Biden would be soft on China,
Lockwood says Trump has ignored Uighur Muslims being
sent to concentration camps. So Lockwood had enough.
Trump’s Republican Party isn’t the party that Lock-
wood signed up for. He says the party has long seen itself
as the “big tent” party. It’s a party that welcomes fiscal
conservatives, the religious right, foreign policy hawks
— and a lot more.
“Now under Trump, we have a circus tent,” he says.
The party Trump leads is forcing the U.S. into a
borderline neo-fascist state where racism prevails, he
says. When EW talked with Lockwood, Trump had just
retweeted a video from a Florida Trump rally, which begins
with an old white man in a golf cart yelling “white power”
to protesters holding up Biden posters.
“It was so alarming to me,” Lockwood says. “I’ve worked
with so many campaigns. In no operation that I’ve ever
seen do you Tweet at a whim.”
Trump’s “Did I do that?” shrugging off the Tweet was
like Steve Urkel from Family Matters, Lockwood says, but
Trump has to know what he’s doing, adding that Trump
doesn’t actually have a philosophy. It changes day-to-day
on Twitter and is basically a stream of consciousness
from an unwell man.
“When he goes away, so will those people, because there
isn’t room for that kind of politics,” he says.
The party’s unspoken rule about not criticizing the
president is frustrating, Lockwood says. Back in the early
2010s with the Tea Party, he says, it was a mark of principle
and strength to take down leaders and call them out when
they went against conservative ideals.
When he spoke out about Trump, Lockwood says,
he heard positive responses from some politicians —
although some people on the internet wondered if he’d
been bought out by George Soros or if the Illuminati
finally got him.
He says his change of heart shouldn’t have been news
to anyone. When President George W. Bush and First
Lady Michelle Obama posed for photos together, he had
posted online that the country needed more of those
across-the-aisle moments.
He says a lot of Republicans are in the same position
as he was — but many are afraid of retaliation for saying
they don’t like Trump. Since Trumpism has injected
an element of cultism to the party, Trump supporters
lash out at Republicans who criticize the president. He
adds that it’s ironic because Trump supporters are the
“Republicans in name only,” aka RINOs since they put
Trump above the party.
Lockwood says he’s still considering what action to
take to get rid of Trump, but he won’t stay on the sidelines
as the 2020 election continues to boil. He has a vision of
the Republican Party that doesn’t have its current white
demographics.
“Ideally, I’d like to see the Republican Party become
the party of the young people and minorities,” he says
about making individual rights attractive to new voters
and activists.
He adds that he thinks that people will begin to leave
the Republican Party’s “big tent,” so it’s possible change
could come. And he wants to work for that change.
Not Bending to Trump
A week after the killing of George Floyd, Republican
state Rep. Cheri Helt of Bend went to Facebook to post
that Trump had failed the test of presidential leadership.
“When America was confronted with the global
pandemic, the President’s response was bad — but his
rhetoric and actions since the killing of George Floyd are
even worse,” she wrote on the June 4 post. “In November,
America needs to elect a new President who can lead our
nation in a more positive direction. Given what’s at stake
I feel I must speak out against the President who happens
to share my Party registration but does not share my
moral compass values.”
The post’s comments illustrated just how divided
Republicans are over Trump.
Some said Helt exhibited qualities of Oregon’s
Republican governors — Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield and
Victor Atiyeh. Others used some of Trump’s “greatest
hits” of insults: calling her a snowflake, accusing her of
pandering to the left and describing her as a “rhino.”
Helt wasn’t breaking any news about her opposition to
Trump — she’s been open about not voting for him in 2016
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