John Rachal's Blog

As Mark Twain may or may not have said, history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes.

Scientists sometimes get in the way of religion and politics. In 1633, Galileo had gotten in the way of religion and faced the Inquisition for advocating that the sun was the center of the universe, not the stationary earth, which was the Church’s view. Neither, of course, was right, though Galileo was making progress toward the truth—the earth did after all move. Conviction for heresy at his trial could have resulted in torture or even worse, but, after forcing him to recant, the Inquisition gave him a break—life in prison, later commuted to lifetime house arrest. (Pope John Paul II acknowledged the Church’s error in 1992 though did not officially apologize.)

We now have our own Galileo Moment, this time in the realm of politics. Anthony Fauci was the victim of a show trial led by Republican Senator Rand Paul who seems to all but blame Dr. Fauci for the pandemic,* accusing him of lies that he says cost lives. The evidence is terribly thin, perhaps nonexistent. The show trial forced Fauci to plead the fifth amendment roughly one hundred times simply to prevent any possibility of making what could be construed as inconsistent statements under oath.

Scientists are certainly not always right—Galileo didn’t get it quite right either. Scientists hypothesize, weigh and if possible test the evidence, and draw conclusions often based on the “preponderance of the evidence” available at the time. This seems to be what Fauci did. What an ugly irony that Senators Paul, Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, and company—supposedly in the name of public health—subject Anthony Fauci to a modern Inquisition, when anti-masking, bleach-endorsing Donald Trump appointed non-physician, non-scientist, anti-vaccination Robert Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary. Perhaps they should come before Mr. Paul’s Inquisition.

American politics has been in the sewer before, but it has been a while since the stench has been quite this stomach-churning. I’m two years from octogenarian-hood, and I don’t remember things being this bad. The Fauci show trial is a paradigm example of how far we have fallen. I don’t know Dr. Fauci of course; I doubt anyone has written his biography yet, but if so, I haven’t read it. Maybe he robbed banks in his twenties or conned little old ladies out of their pensions in his thirties. Surely he was unwise by using a government-issued computer for his personal diary.

But my impression is that he was a conscientious scientist trying to do an extremely difficult job in a hyper-volatile health and political environment. Now that the covid crisis is in the rearview mirror, Republican Senators Rand Paul and Josh Hawley have brandished their knives—GOP Senator James Lankford seemed almost Lincolnian by shunning their extreme partisan histrionics—and for reasons that are not quite clear to me, Paul and Hawley among other Republicans need a scapegoat. And that scapegoat is Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Senator Rand Paul has had a personal vendetta against Fauci for some time. He called for the show trial and served as its chairman. He has said that Joe Biden’s pre-emptive pardon of Fauci deprives Fauci of the right to the Fifth Amendment, apparently thus making up constitutional law on the spot. At least that’s not in the Constitution that I checked. And since when does pleading the Fifth constitute contempt of congress—which is the vote Paul will have his committee decide next Wednesday? Before gaveling the “hearing” to a close, Paul asked, “Did his actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?” In normal times that would have been a vile and shocking question, reminiscent of something applicable to the Nazis at Nuremberg in 1945-46. It was vile and shocking enough, even now. Senator Paul was sure of his own answer, and that answer was that the villainous Dr. Fauci, twirling his metaphorical mustache, conspired in the deaths of over a million Americans, and profited by doing so.

Meanwhile GOP Senator Josh Hawley—grandstander extraordinaire, goading Fauci by asking him what color his tie was so as to ridicule him for pleading the Fifth—called Fauci “a megalomaniac and a liar….You’ve lied to the American people, and you’ve lied to this body, and you disgraced your profession by doing it.” Hawley, the senator videoed scampering at high speed down a congressional hallway in fear of the January 6 rioters, seemed oblivious to the fact that the fellow who sits in the Oval Office is an actual megalomaniac and an actual liar (pathologically so, according to an earlier Ted Cruz) who has lied to the American people beyond counting and has disgraced the office he holds so many times that there is legitimate concern as to whether the country can recover.

In a way, it would be satisfying to just say they are all, Democrats and Republicans, a bunch of crooks, that there is equal blame on both sides. As Mercutio says, a plague o’ both your houses! Such a view might suggest objectivity and equally distributed disgust. But it would not be true—instead, an easy dodge. The country is unravelling, and the fault for that is mostly on one side. The sneering vitriol of the Fauci show trial is a crucible for where we are in the country, and it is not a good place.

Trump and his administration span the entire moral spectrum from depraved to execrable. I continue to be astonished, befuddled, amazed that so many people, including people whom I consider friends, can still support this man. I do realize that they are addicted to the false “news,” sophistries, tendentiousness, and lies of Fox News and never pierce its veil to see the corruption, degradation, and sometimes the sheer evil of his administration that lie beneath. And yet I occasionally wonder what would it take for Trump’s most ardent adorers to repudiate him. The 35% to 40%  who still approve of his presidency have already at least heard fragments of his corruption, including his $2.2 billion grifted income since taking office the second time; have seen his destruction of the east wing of the White House; have imagined themselves dining in his gilded and glorious ballroom; have heard and recognized at least a couple of his lies; have paid and will continue to pay at the pump for a foolish and very expensive war he started and has lost; have at least heard of and possibly seen videos of his gestapo (ICE) killing American citizens; and have shrugged off countless other abominations, not least of all his “I rule the nation and the world” (yes, an actual quote) megalomania.

Yet they offer no rebuke, no reproach. So what would it take? Would seeing him with their own eyes take a sub-machine gun and mow down a group of children on a playground do it? Or would at least some of them say that that is a small price to pay for the glory of having the greatest man in history as their leader?

The American president has managed to despoil the American soccer team by infusing it with the excremental stench of his administration. In its penultimate game of the World Cup, the team’s best scorer was given a red card which, by FIFA rules, suspended him from the rest of the game and from the team’s next game. Trump, who “know[s] about these things,” called the FIFA president, a man who has previously sought to curry favor with Trump, and asked him to “review” the call—totally inappropriate from the get-go. If FIFA overturned the call, the suspended player could play against Belgium Monday night. Magically, and for the first time in World Cup play since 1962, a red card was overturned.

The American team coach did not ask the president to intervene. By his action, Trump contrived, with the complicity and cowardice of the FIFA president, to effectively put the team in the role of cheater and gain the enmity of every other soccer team in the world. No objective soccer fan (admittedly a rara avis) could possibly regard the team with anything other than contempt. Trump, by yet again sticking his nose where it does not belong, managed to deprive the team of an honorable win if it beat Belgium and cast it as pathetic cheater if it still did not win despite its advantage with the illegitimately overturned penalty. In fact, America did lose to Belgium 4-1.

The result is that a good American team which made the round of 16 for the first time in twenty-four years will most likely be remembered not for its good play in the 2026 World Cup but for the American president blackening its reputation. 7/7/26

(written May 8)

Henry Kissinger had a maxim: “The conventional army loses if it does not win; the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.” I’ll modify it slightly: Great powers in a conflict lose by not winning; lesser powers and insurgencies win by not losing.

Trump’s war of choice, one that he and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started, has: (1) caused Iran to successfully close the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war and would be open now if Trump had not chosen this war; (2) revealed Trump’s arrogance in that he ignored military advice that Iran would do exactly that; (3) killed the 86-year-old-Khamenei, but installed his son, presumed to be an even more militant leader; (4) caused the deaths, so far, of nine Americans; (5) dramatically upset world oil prices; (6) caused gas prices in my city of Hattiesburg to leap from $2.29 the day before the war to $3.89 today, seven weeks later; (7) saddled Americans and the world with higher prices for everything that is transported by truck, train, or plane using fossil fuels; (8) initiated a disturbing depletion of American Tomahawk missiles and other war materiel; (9) cost America a minimum of $27 billion according to the pentagon as of several days ago; (10) delighted Vladimir Putin as American attention and war assistance are diverted away from Ukraine; (11) strengthened China’s hand for the same reason, potentially encouraging its takeover of Taiwan; (12) delighted Putin further given the increased polarization of Americans; (13) reduced American sanctions on Russian oil and thereby increased income to Russia by approximately $150 million per day; (14) offended even further our allies who were never consulted about the war and were then insulted by Trump as cowards for not taking the lead in opening the Strait—an extremely challenging task in any event; (15) increased the likelihood that Iran will in fact now move forward to develop nuclear bomb capability, an outcome the previous ayatollah had resisted; (16) further blackened America’s international prestige as an ally and as a nation with sane leadership; (17) given our adversaries Russia and China a very good look at our military capabilities and limitations; (18) taught Iran that it has a different kind of nuclear weapon—permanently controlling the Strait and charging tolls for ships to pass through it for the foreseeable future; (19) killed or made homeless untold numbers of innocent Iranians who may have hated the theocracy but at least still had a home and their lives, and now may have an even worse leadership, with no end in sight.

And all for what? I cannot think of a single, not one, upside to this war. On virtually every single measure we as a nation and the world at large are worse off, with no counter-balancing benefit. The objectives of the war (other than the primary one of making Trump look strong and tough and etching his name gloriously in the history books) were to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, to effect regime change and liberate the Iranian people, to acquire its nuclear material, and to degrade its conventional military capability and its ability to further support Hamas and Hezbollah, thus undermining its goal of destroying our partner in the war, Israel. The last of these has been partially achieved; the others not at all. Worse, since the war started, a new objective has emerged, one that did not exist prior to the war, and one that makes the others secondary: opening the Strait of Hormuz.

War is notorious for defying predictions (especially about how short they will be). Perhaps that counter-balancing benefit will emerge. But at least right now it’s hard to see any positive outcome of this war. It seems to fit Kissinger’s maxim quite well.

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?

From a long, long ago reading of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s grim The Gulag Archipelago, I still remember one particular scene. A high Party apparatchik was extolling the pretended glories of Stalin’s communist regime to an assembled (volutuntarily? Who knows?) group in a large room. At the end of the speech, everyone rose to applaud. And applaud. And applaud. This went on for several minutes, everyone afraid to be the first to stop clapping. Hands were tiring, even beginning to burn, Solzhenitsyn tells us. Finally, one person stops clapping. He is immediately arrested by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. He protests: “Someone had to stop clapping!”

“That is very true,” the arresting officer replies. “Just never let it be you.”

Let us all, especially a servile GOP and its supporters, stop clapping.