Small Town, Big Playbook

How MAGA’s war on public institutions has come for the Coos County Clerk’s office

If you’ve spent the past year watching Trump and his movement treat public institutions like rental cars at a county fair, floor it, smash it, shrug, blame the deep state, move on, it is tempting to think of that as a federal problem. A Beltway pathology. A spectacle for cable news and exhausted late-night writers.

It is not. The same playbook is alive and well in small counties like mine, where the offices are humbler, the budgets are smaller, the scenery is prettier, and the damage can still be very real.

A Coos County Clerk race here in Oregon is a brilliant microcosm of this larger problem. To understand the stakes, it helps to start with a simple question: what does a county clerk actually do? The answer is not glamorous. No one gets to strut through the office in tactical cosplay. The job is administration. Records, legal documents, elections. Accuracy, procedure, trust, neutrality. Exactly the kind of work Trumpism despises most: boring competence.

Trumpism does not merely appoint unqualified people to important jobs. It also teaches the public to sneer at the institutions themselves. Think about DOGE, that slick little exercise in branding government as a joke so dismantling it can be sold as a virtue. The message is always the same: the institution is corrupt, the professionals are suspect, the rules are fake, and only the aggrieved outsider can save you. It is government as conspiracy content. Public service as an audition for talk radio.

And once that mindset takes hold, it does not stay in Washington. It shows up in school boards, county commissions, sheriff’s races, and clerk’s offices. Everywhere there is an institution to capture, discredit, or “fix” according to a worldview that begins by assuming the institution was illegitimate in the first place.

We have already seen that dynamic here in Coos County.

In 2022, this county narrowly replaced a competent incumbent commissioner with Rod Taylor, a January 6 participant and enthusiastic Douglas Frank believer. Taylor helped bring Frank and his election “math” into county proceedings, laundering debunked conspiracy theories through the machinery of local government. In response, Commissioner John Sweet and I brought in Stanford political scientist Dr. Justin Grimmer to explain why Frank’s methods were nonsense. It made no difference where Taylor was concerned, because the point was never to understand elections. The point was to validate the preexisting belief that elections are corrupt. That same ecosystem is still with us. It has simply moved on to new targets.

The incumbent, Julie Brecke, is exactly the sort of public servant who rarely becomes a folk hero but absolutely should. She does the work, administers the office, and does not use the job as a stage for grievance performance art. She understands that elections belong to everyone, not just the loudest people on Facebook. In saner times, that would not be a remarkable qualification. Today, it feels almost exotic.

Her primary challengers tell a different story. Both filed as Republicans for this race, not as nonpartisan candidates, which is already revealing for an office that depends on public confidence in neutrality. Pam Lewis’s filing identifies her as a registered nurse with prior governmental experience listed as “PCP.” Marty Kuhrt’s filing lists no prior governmental experience at all and identifies a background in computer science.

Pam Lewis is especially troubling, not because she is conservative, but because the public record raises questions that go straight to the heart of what a county clerk must be trusted to do.

The Oregon State Board of Nursing did not revoke her license, but it did place it on probation under a stipulated order signed by Lewis and entered in 2025. The allegations are not minor. They include a major medication error, irregularities involving controlled substances, altering a physician-signed medication order form to obtain non-patient-specific controlled medications, instructing another staff member to use the altered form, abandoning her shift on multiple dates, failing to order necessary medications for patients, and falsely documenting a patient chart after an emergency response. The order cites standards involving dishonesty, misrepresentation, and falsified or altered documentation. In plain English: the official record says there were serious problems involving honesty, records, and procedural integrity. Those are not side issues for a county clerk, it is the entire job.

A county clerk is not supposed to be someone who treats official forms creatively, documents events inaccurately, or decides procedure is optional when it gets in the way. If you were designing a list of traits voters should avoid in the person running elections and maintaining public records, you would not exactly start with “history of falsified documentation.” Yet here we are. Freedom, apparently, means never having to do due diligence.

Marty Kuhrt presents a different version of the same institutional problem. His issue is not a disciplinary order. His issue is ideology. More specifically, an active and conspicuous relationship to election-fraud mythology.

Kuhrt is not just a passive consumer of Douglas Frank’s nonsense. He has helped facilitate Frank’s travel in and around Oregon and has visited him in Ohio. It places him inside the ecosystem, not just adjacent to it. He also freely associates with former local right-wing talk radio provocateur Rob Taylor, who now maintains a smaller but still familiar outrage machine on Rumble and YouTube, built on the usual anti-immigrant, anti-homeless, anti-antifa theatrics. Think Lars Larson or Alex Jones, only with less reach and worse scenery. The point is not guilt by association. The point is that this is the political culture Kuhrt moves in comfortably: suspicion, grievance, scapegoating, and permanent outrage, not the mindset of a neutral election administrator.

The reason local readers should care is obvious. The reason national and international readers should care is that this is how democratic erosion actually works. Not all at once or with tanks or dramatic constitutional crises. Sometimes it arrives in a filing form for county clerk.

We keep hearing about the chaos in Washington as though it were some kind of exotic weather system unique to the capital. But what has Trumpism actually shown us? At the FBI, Kash Patel has been described in serious reporting as erratic, frequently absent, and so engulfed in reports of excessive drinking that officials worried about public safety and national security. At Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer exited under an internal misconduct cloud after allegations that made her sound less like a cabinet secretary than the worst boss in a regional office park. At DOJ, Pam Bondi treated justice as a delivery system for Trump’s grudges. At Homeland Security, Kristi Noem managed to turn taxpayer funds into what looked suspiciously like a personal branding portfolio. And at Education, Linda McMahon has served less as a steward than as a cheerful demolition contractor. These are different personalities, different scandals, different flavors of absurdity. The common denominator is institutional damage.

Some of these people damage institutions through chaos. Some through misconduct or politicization. Some by walking in the door already committed to hollowing the place out from the inside. But the result is always the same: public offices stop being public trusts and start becoming weapons, props, or ruins.

The real lesson of Trumpism is that it does not just produce bad people in high office. It produces a culture in which institutions themselves are treated as suspect unless they serve the movement. If they administer justice neutrally, they are corrupt. If they certify elections honestly, they are rigged. If they educate children without turning the classroom into a loyalty seminar, they are indoctrinating. If they follow professional rules, they are controlled by elites. The institution is always guilty unless captured. Once you understand that, a local clerk’s race starts to look a lot less local.

The danger is not merely that one candidate might be inexperienced and another might be ethically compromised. The danger is that both challengers approach the office from within a worldview that is already hostile to the kind of neutral institutional stewardship the job requires. One comes with a disciplinary record involving dishonesty-related findings and falsified documentation. The other comes embedded in an election-conspiracy culture that begins by assuming the system is corrupt. Neither posture reassures anyone who believes elections should be administered fairly and records should remain accurate.

The County Clerk’s office is nonpartisan for a reason. It is supposed to belong to all of us. The person who runs it should not begin from the premise that the system is fraudulent. Nor should that person carry a documented history that raises obvious concerns about truthfulness in official records.

This isn’t just about Coos County because this is happening everywhere. If you think your community is too obscure, too practical, too grounded, or too decent for any of this to happen there, I regret to inform you that this is precisely how people end up waking up one day to discover their local government has been taken over by Facebook comment sections in human form.