John Rachal's Blog

I have finally allowed myself to recognize the horrendous inevitability of a Trump victory in November. In what Maria Popova calls “the interplay of hope and cynicism,” hope is losing, though not altogether lost. It is clear simply by looking at and listening to Biden that his age is an enormous impediment to his re-election, despite his having done a reasonably good job as president—an infrastructure bill passed (which neither Obama nor Trump could do), the anti-inflation act, progress on the cost of prescription drugs, fairly savvy leadership in helping organize Ukrainian support, getting us out of Afghanistan—however terribly ugly—all while presiding over the lowest unemployment rate in several decades, a record-breaking and booming stock market, and inflation down from 9% in June of 2022 to 2.4% as of this writing. But while Biden seems frail, with an elderly gait and a soft, subdued speech pattern, Trump, forty-two months younger, comes across as forceful, in charge, younger than his age, and oratorically masterful (despite oratory filled with lies, bombast, ignorance, conspiracy, and pandering). On “presence,” Trump wins hands down. And the polls are reflecting that.

But besides age and presence, Trump will win because of a confederacy of the possessed. These include: (1) the cultists whose grievance he has inflamed and turned to his advantage; (2) the natural authoritarians (estimated by one academic to constitute about 30% of any given population) who, like Trump himself, actually admire the Putins and the Orbans and wish for that kind of authoritarianism here in America; (3) the elected Republican leaders who either admire Trump or, at least equally likely, fear him, and support him out of that fear; (4) a considerable majority of the wealthy, who know he will not raise their taxes; (5) the isolationists, who wish to retreat into their caves or under a rock, unwilling to help other democracies struggling to stay democracies; (6) the racists, who rightly see in Trump a reflection of themselves; (7) the nostalgists, who imagine, at least for themselves, his first term as a time of economic and social well-being and who have forgotten or forgiven January 6^th; (8) the severely pathological conspiracy-mongers, who embrace fantasies such as Democrats like Hillary Clinton literally sucking the blood of trafficked children; (9) the Christian nationalists, for whom God is a Republican and Satan is a Democrat, and who simply hate Democrats on principle, often without being able to explain why; and (10) a wide distribution of the MAGA-hatted uninformed and ignorant who love bombast and who accept and admire Trump’s lies and could not possibly care less about liberal democracy here or in the rest of the world. These constituencies, inexorably overlapping, are all in some sense possessed—either by money, by grievance, by paranoia, by racism, by fear, by fundamentalism, by a despotic temperament, or by a Snopes-like instinct devoid of any concern for anything other than their own advantage.

When this formidable alliance is arrayed against Joe Biden, joined by a few traditional Republicans who just don’t think Trump is that dangerous, the likelihood that the worst and most dangerous president in American history will be re-elected seems a very safe bet. This despite John McCain’s campaign manager calling Trump “the most dangerous American who has ever lived” and his own former high-ranking subordinates Pence, Barr, Tillerson, Mattis, Kelley, McMaster, Esper, and Bolton stating publicly that he is unfit for office. Aside from the problems of age and presence, Biden is losing young voters, brown and black voters, Arabs and Muslims opposed to his failure to overtly condemn Israel’s killing of innocent Gazans, along with older Americans who find him too progressive as well as some on the far left who consider him not progressive enough. Biden has few enthusiasts; Trump has a solid and unwavering base of a third of the country. Our politics are demonized and fiercely tribalized; whatever center there was cannot hold. Add to this the inherent advantage that the Electoral College, favoring small states, gives to a Republican candidate, and further add the Supreme Court’s intentional stalling on the decision concerning immunity from prosecution of a president, and the path for Biden narrows considerably. And of course it would help if he had a more popular vice-president, especially given his age.

My wife says he should have committed to being a one-term, transitional president early on, in time for other candidates to come to the fore. She is right. His failure to do so will cost him and the country. After Charlottesville, Trump said there were “some very fine people on both sides,” thereby valorizing the moral worth of the neo-Nazis marching that day. We have heard his Hitler-esque comments about “poisoning the blood of our nation” and eliminating the “vermin” who he says infest the country, and he sure wasn’t talking about the thugs on the far right. We are about to re-elect America’s first fascist, the first man to serve as president who has, by his own words, allied himself with Nazism.

And yet I will not abandon hope. I have often been wrong. Let me be wrong on this.