John Rachal's Blog

The following was written before the election.

The fellow whom we hired to cut some trees for us  generously dropped by a second time since we changed our minds about what needed to come down. Mr. Michaels is probably my age, good ol’ boy, wearing bib overalls, had the gentlest voice, and for all the world could have been your decent country boy grandpa. Deep in the Mississippi Bible Belt, he is, no doubt, a good churchgoer, possibly a deacon, and a fine family man, beloved by his daughters. He’s also wearing the same Trump 2020 hat he was wearing a few weeks ago. I ignored it then and hoped to ignore it today. But somehow the driveway conversation drifted to Montana, and he mentioned going there earlier this year and he and his family walk right into a restaurant not wearing masks. Here we go. Implying that the restaurant staff realize the silliness of masks, he makes clear that nobody says a word. Masks don’t work at all, he informs my wife and me, stuff is just too small to be blocked by a mask, and people pushing masks are just trying to take down our president. My wife and I are both trying to just get him on his way, but like a moth to the flame, I say, “Well, we’re on the other side of that”; he shrugs. Then, apropos of the political divide, he says, “I just hate all the lies.” Val said my mouth opened, presumably aghast, but just in case I was about to rebut, she said, sotto voce, “let it go.” I said, trying to shuffle him off as quickly as possible, “OK, we’ll see you next week.”

He hates all the lies? It was a revelation, though not without its humor. Can there be any more titanic irony than those words spilling from a Trump man? Those like me who see Donald Trump as the most consummate liar—indeed, gifted liar, if judged by the number of his marks—ever to even run for the presidency are blown back on their heels to discover that those on the right wing consider them to be the ones spewing daily mendacities. Trump, Fox News, social media, anti-deep state warriors, and conspiracy fantasists nationwide have turned truth on its head, turned the world upside down. The true believers, rejecting reality as too mundane and simplistic, knowingly and unknowingly spin fantasies and magical thinking, speak of “alternate facts,” and assault truth as fake news. According to The Washington Post, Trump has made over 20,000 false and misleading statements since taking office. His demagoguery as president is unparalleled, and even his demonstrable lies fall on the true believers like refreshing summer rain on the fertile soil of their grievance and discontent. I told Val that Mr. Michaels probably went home and said, “Martha, I had these two customers today that were damned Democrats, and they were white too! I betcha they thought our president was a liar!” And just today Trump was re-spewing the lie about the Democrats dropping “under God” from the pledge at their convention. At least until this president, you at least had to tell plausible lies. Now you can say that the Democrats have been negotiating with the Martians and the Venusians to take over the world so that they can fully establish their Satan-worshiping, pedophiliac, child-eating caliphate. Through the megaphone of Fox News, Facebook, and creepy social media sites and shares, the Mr. Michaels of the world lap it up and conclude, “Well damn! So they are doing it! I was wondering if they were doing that!” 

I know I’ve been polarized. I know the Mr. Michaels of the country believe their narratives as strongly as I do mine. So could we both be equally wrong, or worse, could they be right and I be wrong? I take some solace—in fact, a lot of solace—in the fact that I have a pretty good education; I read things other than Facebook memes and shares; intelligent people, including a few in the GOP or with conservative points of view, agree with me on Trump and his enablers; I have some capacity for critical thinking; indeed, I entertain the possibility that I could be wrong, or at least partly wrong. So, even recognizing this clash between the ideologies of Trump et al. and everyone else from Lincoln Project conservatives to Sanders left-enders, I wonder how far off base I am to see parallels between Germany of the 30s and Trump’s America, and specifically the mind of Trump himself and the despotism of Putin of Russia and Xi of China, obviously; but also Orban of Hungary, Bolsonaro of Brazil, Duterte of the Philippines, Lukasovic of Belarus, and a few dozen or more autocrats scattered over the planet.

You can tell most of what you need to know about a person by whom he admires. I don’t mean lip-service admiration like Trump pretends to have for Lincoln, or some Christians for Jesus, but who that person actually admires in wishing and trying to emulate. And if that little aphorism is right, then the gang of people Trump admires and truckles to bodes terribly for his continuing leadership of the country in a qualitatively different way from that of Romney, McCain, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Those Republicans’ differences from me and others like me were essentially policy differences, which can of course be profound and have moral implications. But their views were still within the elastic bounds of American political discourse. Trump’s vision of America is categorically different; he admires and wants to be like those other guys, the ones who have or want lifetime presidencies, earned through the charade of “democratic elections,” and whose hands rest on all the levers of their nations’ power. Trump neither respects democracy (it’s “rigged”–but only if he loses), nor separation of powers (like an independent judiciary), nor American institutions, from a free press (“enemy of the people”) to inspectors general. Those institutions are there to serve him, to be loyal to him. This is new in our country; there is no previous president who has so boldly taken steps toward totalitarianism and about whom such things are so widely said and thought. Yet almost half of America thinks he is not only within those elastic bounds, but if he exceeds them it is only because he indeed is the chosen one, he is the representative and implementer of American greatness. Simultaneously they think that the collective rest of the country is, at best, hopelessly naive and deluded; or, at worst, the dark knight of moral degeneracy, the perpetrator of squalid lies, the anti-Christ mocking American greatness. Whether Trump himself actually sees us in that way or not is almost beside the point. For him the critical point is simply that we are the hated enemy, standing in the way of his idealized self-image, self-aggrandizement, power, and Messiah-ship.

If it were just him it would be bad enough, but it is also all the GOP supporters who think this is just politics as usual, not a dangerously deviant breakaway from our traditional Democrat and Republican norms and values, both constitutional and moral. The Gullibles like Mr. Michaels and 60% of the voters of Mississippi have simply joined a cult, with outstretched raised arms in a sieg heil salute; the Accomplices like Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have simply collaborated and sacrificed their integrity and pretend he’s not really all that bad—either succumbing to an ends-justify-the-means rationalization like many evangelicals have or selling their souls for some kind of personal advantage like Vice-President Mike Pence or some of the ultra wealthy. Is it a bridge too far to say that this election is the greatest test of our democracy since the Civil War? No. Not at all.