Here (well, at the bottom) is a question I think it would be interesting to pose to Trump supporters:
Let’s pretend that none of the following things ever happened:
Trump’s blatant, massive, and open-to-the-public corruption;
his 2016 promise to balance the budget in two terms;
his sudden claim that “affordability” is a Democrat “con job” now that he is back in the White House rather than Joe Biden;
his narcissistic, infantile, and pathetic need to plaster his name on ships and on the JFK Performing Arts Center, and proposed re-naming of Dulles airport in Washington, his image on commemorative coins, and replacing Benjamin Franklin with his own image on the $100 bill;
his destruction of the East Wing of the White House, after earlier lying that his new Trump ballroom would not endanger the East Wing
his extortion of news organizations (CBS, the Washington Post), Facebook, universities, law firms—either for their money or their submission (or both);
his flooding of mostly blue U.S. cities with masked agents in military gear who seem to answer only to him;
his attempted overthrow—“If you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country anymore”—of a legitimate election that did not go his way;
his pardoning of all the January 6 insurrectionists, including those chanting “hang Mike Pence”;
his usurpation of congress’s control of taxes and tariffs and declarations of war as mandated by the Constitution;
his kidnapping the narco president (however murderous and illegitimately elected) of a sovereign country while pardoning Honduras’s former president convicted in a federal court of massive drug smuggling into the U.S.;
his leaving in place Venezuela’s vice-president Delcy Rodriguez who is wholly complicit in Maduro’s gangsterism, especially drug trafficking, while dismissing Maria Machado, the popular leading opposition candidate who was barred from running for president in Venezuela’s 2024 election (and who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize —the Peace Prize Trump SOOOO wanted), as not having the support and “respect” of the Venezuelan people, as if that would be his right to determine;
his historic two first-term impeachments;
his fan-boy relationship with Vladimir Putin;
his illegal firings (including nineteen Inspectors General) and closings of institutions like USAID and Voice of America;
his almost hourly lying;
his further coarsening of American political discourse through his tweets and general vulgarity;
his turning the Justice Department—typically the most independent Cabinet position—into his personal law firm focused on revenge toward his enemies;
his 180 flip-flops and general flim-flammery concerning the files of sex-trafficking former friend Jeffrey Epstein
his making Project 2025, largely based on Viktor Orban’s authoritarian rule in Hungary, unofficial American policy;
his taking existing healthcare subsidies from millions of Americans to further enrich millionaires and billionaires with tax cuts;
and dozens of other actions and pronouncements and executive orders—some flagrantly illegal—that would have been major scandals under any other president—
So, to repeat: Let’s pretend that none of those things ever happened.
Instead of all that, let’s look at just one thing. On the sole subject of national security, how can Trump supporters possibly defend this president, given his actions that undercut our national security, including:
Undermining and even threatening withdrawal from the NATO alliance, causing Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada to bluntly state that Trump’s abdication of American responsibility relative to NATO is a “rupture, not a transition,” meaning that the other NATO countries should treat the U. S. as no longer a dependable ally and as having seceded from the alliance:
Insulting, even threatening (Canada, Greenland, Denmark, Ukraine), our allies and embracing our adversaries;
At the 2025 Davos Conference and in interviews actually mocking our NATO allies’ support and sacrifices in service personnel (this coming from President Bone Spurs) in the American war effort in Afghanistan;
genuflecting to Vladimir Putin and his chosen outcome of the Ukraine war;
firing and lecturing generals and admirals, though a draft-dodger himself;
installing an incompetent like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense;
installing Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, who was and perhaps still is a member of the secretive Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna spin-off, and who has defended both Putin and Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad;
demoting or firing federal employees with national security skills and knowledge and replacing them with sycophants;
planning to build at untold cost (the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford cost $13 billion) so-called “Trump-class” battleships to pump an egomaniac’s ever-so-needy ego—ships that can be mortally damaged by several well-directed and comparatively dirt-cheap drones;
attacking and planning “to run” a sovereign nation after capturing its president, after all his “America First” promises of keeping us out of foreign wars and “nation building”;
So, back to my long-promised question: How can anyone justify such a president of either party frittering away American national security in a world where democracy, historically led by an American president, is in retreat, and threat environments—especially cyber ones, at least for now—are advancing?
John Rachal's Blog 
Our Third American Crisis
March 30, 2026 at 4:08 pm (Political Commentary)
Tags: democracy, donald-trump, history, news, politics
The following brief essay has already in its short life had a checkered career. It has been sequentially sent to, and rejected by, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Clarion-Ledger as a guest editorial. Given its unfortunate, shady, and even leprous career, read at your own risk. On the other hand, if so inclined, feel free to share.
OUR THIRD AMERICAN CRISIS
The dangers of an ambitious demagogue coming to power were not lost on Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine. Hamilton noted in The Federalist, Number 1 that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” Jefferson warned of a presidential incumbent like the current president, who, being defeated in a close election, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” In the pamphlet Common Sense Paine saw how “men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent,” and in his wartime “The American Crisis” he dismissed pretenders to democracy, who today are the president’s weak-kneed supporters in congress, as the incarnation of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.”
The current president is the fulfillment—in truth, an ominous excess—of these prescient forewarnings. He has made lies, mob-like shakedowns, corruption, rapacious greed, self-idolatry, racism, vindictiveness, moral degradation, election rigging, war mongering, economy wrecking, and even murder our new and shameful presidential reality, all while weakening our national security, birthing despotism, rending our shared bonds, coarsening our culture, finding common ground with dictators, insulting and even threatening our friends, usurping congressional power, and accelerating threats to the earth itself. He wishes to make us his subjects, as we were under George III, but we are not. We are citizens, we have been since 1776, and two and a half centuries later those citizens who cherish democracy will be heard—and will prevail.
Aside from Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Paine’s “The American Crisis,” of “These are the times that try men’s souls” fame, is the fiercest document urging separation from Great Britain. George Washington led us through that first American crisis. Mr. Lincoln, by whose high measure of presidential greatness we have fallen so far, from our best to our worst, steered us through our second American crisis.
Now we are in our third, where our own democracy and our political and moral leadership in the democratic world hang in the balance. The shot heard round the world in the first crisis was at Concord, the shot in the second crisis at Fort Sumter. The shot heard round the world in our time was at our national Capitol, a day of treasonous infamy, a day whose seeds have borne a poisonous fruit now sowing its own seeds in sometimes fertile soil. Yet all those traitors have been proclaimed by the current president as patriots and pardoned.
Other times have tried our souls: the Second World War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam. Yes. Yet in none of those did we face all three of the threats we face now, a fearsome triumvirate: profound internal division among our people and among our politicians, a morally bankrupt president untroubled by character or conscience, and the foundational question as to whether or not our grand, two-and-a-half-century experiment in democracy can, in Lincoln’s words, “long endure” and not “perish from the earth.”
Surely we have suffered long enough the rot and disease and shame which have so afflicted us. Our national fever must break. Let us prove ourselves worthy of the best in our founders and honorable to our children and grandchildren, and let the future say of us that we did so. With our collective voice and vote this November, and despite the intimidation of the president’s masked military-style enforcers in blue cities, we must cleanse the Congress of those who hold loyalty to a would-be dictator and their trembling fear of his wrath above our Constitution, our democracy, and our humanity. We must end our descent into cold and darkness. We must find a more righteous path. Let us now, this day, start to climb back into the light, back into the warmth of a shining sun.
(I am indebted to Kevin McCauley of The Atlantic for Jefferson’s quote in a 1787 letter to Madison and to Jake Lundberg of The Atlantic for Paine’s first quote in Common Sense. The Hamilton quote, the second Paine quote from The American Crisis, and Lincoln’s quote from The Gettysburg Address were known to me and are thus not cited as secondary citations.)
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