John Rachal's Blog

Last night was the first and probably only debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris virtually demolished Trump; her margin of victory among those polled on the question of who won was 26%. So what was the most alarming thing Trump said or refused to say in the debate? That Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating the pet dogs and cats of people in that community? That “everybody” wanted to see Roe v. Wade overturned? That he refused to answer whether or not he would sign a bill implementing a nationwide ban on abortion? That he refused to answer the question of whether he wanted to see Ukraine win its war with Russia? (Close, very close, but not quite the most alarming.) That he lamented the deaths of Russian soldiers but did not specifically lament innocent Ukrainian citizens’ deaths? (Again, very close). On those last two, and on his claim that if elected he would end the war before his inauguration, he all but stated what we have long known: He would abandon Ukraine. The man he admires, Vladimir Putin, would be given an American imprimatur in Putin’s invasion of a free country.

Trump’s entire campaign is premised on scaring us into voting for him. Crime is “down all over the world” but has reached astronomical levels here due to Harris and Biden. (Another lie of course; moderator David Muir corrected him by noting that the FBI reports violent crime is down.) If “she” gets elected, “this country doesn’t have a chance of success”; he even at one point said World War III will follow. The classic demagogue, Trump campaigns on fear—fear that hell itself will ensue if he is not elected. But he does say things that really are scary though he doesn’t mean them to be.

A case can be made that the most alarming thing he said was to praise Viktor Orban because the autocrat—some have said dictator—of Hungary has visited Trump twice this year and praised him. Trump is easily suckered by flattery, but in this case the flattery appears genuine. Orban does like Trump. When Harris said that European leaders laughed at him, Trump’s response was to say how much Orban thought of him, claiming that Orban said that “the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump,” and that China, North Korea, and Russia were afraid of Trump, which Orban admired.

So did Trump refer to any mutual respect, much less chumminess, he might have with leaders of actual western democracies? No, he did not. Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland did not come up. Certainly not Zelensky of Ukraine in eastern Europe. Nor did Japan or South Korea. Trump chose Viktor Orban as his soul mate, apparently the only European leader who does like Trump. Here is the man Trump is so proud to be aligned with according to journalist and Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag, A History; Twilight of Democracy; and Autocracy, Inc.:

“First, Orbán’s control of the media raises obvious concerns, since it is difficult to hear the voice of opposition leaders in a country that systematically favors the ruling party. [One interviewee Applebaum cites estimates that 90% of Hungarian media is controlled by Orban’s regime.] Second, under Orbán, parliamentary districts were redrawn. The districts are superficially plausible, unlike the geometrically absurd dimensions of many districts in the US, but the upshot of the redrawing is clear: liberal-leaning districts in cities contain more people than conservative rural districts, which gives conservatives more voting power. The effect is obvious: in both 2014 and 2018, the Fidesz party received less than 50 percent of the vote, but retained a two-thirds majority in Parliament after both elections. Finally, Orbán and his party have reshaped the judiciary. They expanded the number of seats on the constitutional court, and also forced justices over 62 to retire. By 2015, 11 of the 15 justices on the court, which decides if laws are constitutional, were nominated by Orbán and confirmed by his Parliament. It is not so difficult to retain power when one enjoys broad control over the press, election procedures, and the judiciary.”  

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is designed with Viktor Orban’s model in Hungary very much in mind. Though Trump falsely claims to have no knowledge of Project 2025, the Orban tactics of creeping authoritarianism and permanent power (Orban has been prime minister for fourteen years) are precisely the tactics Trump hopes to implement in America if re-elected. The Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts has cited Orban’s policies as the model for “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This is why Trump so admires Orban. He has done in Hungary exactly what Trump hopes to do here.

There are a few fundamental laws that govern the life of Donald Trump. The first and most fundamental, the one from which all the others directly or indirectly flow, is that self-interest is the North Star of all his actions. National interest, public interest, even family interest are all secondary, even tertiary, to the one consuming goal of his life: the pursuit of what is good for him. Money is good, fame is good, ostentatious self-glorification is good, adulation from others is good, subservience and loyalty from others are good. Anyone who disagrees with him is both wrong and bad. Private sector work is good (despite six bankruptcies); public sector work is, if not quite bad, not really work (Kamala Harris has never had a job, he says). Military service is particularly bad—filled with “suckers” and “losers” as Jeffrey Goldberg first reported. Goldberg cites two other quotes acquired from anonymous sources close to Trump: With Marine General John Kelly at Kelly’s son’s grave in Arlington, a son who died in Afghanistan, Trump asked “his” general: “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” The fact that he doesn’t get it is precisely the problem—he simply does not have a psychological make-up capable of understanding national service; for him it’s a waste of your life, a strange acknowledgment that self-interest and your own safety might not be paramount. This same obliviousness was evident when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford gave a presentation and Trump asked an aide, “That guy’s smart. Why did he join the military?”

A second Trump law is to never, ever admit that you were wrong. Admitting error is weakness, and a projection of pretended strength is critical to the man who, at some subconscious, reptilian level, knows he is weak. In this same vein, he can never apologize, for the very reason that to do so is to admit error and thus weakness. When charged with something for which he should apologize, he must never retreat; he must double down on the original claim. The most egregious example is his January 6^th coup attempt. The election, he must continue to claim (and in total self-delusion may actually believe), was rigged, and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are now “patriots,” all deserving pardons. Offense is always better than defense; not only should you never apologize, you should accuse your enemy of the very thing you are guilty of. I-did-nothing-wrong-Trump of course never attempted a coup, but Biden and Harris actually committed one—Trump actually uses the word coup—when Biden stepped down and passed the baton to Harris.

For Trump, and for dictators and despots the world over, lying has no moral opprobrium at all but instead is a legitimate means of self-service. All lies—unless they issue from former opponents such as “lying Ted” Cruz or current ones like Kamala Harris—are, for Trump, natural statecraft, as natural as breathing, akin to a trick play in football. One is a fool not to lie: they are useful in that they hide unpleasant truths, glorify oneself by taking unjustified credit, smear enemies, or divert blame to others: thus he never had a sexual relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels or Playboy model Karen McDougal; he never sexually assaulted Jean Carroll; his inaugural crowd was the largest ever. The lies can be easily disproved or fact checked by a vigilant press such as The Washington Post’s documenting over 30,000 lies and untruths just in the four years of his administration, or by a knowledgeable insider: Trump claims he never called U.S. military service members suckers and losers, while a trusted general like John Kelly says he most certainly did. So you never retreat and just double down on the lie—No, I never said that—and move on. You never trouble yourself that a lie might have a moral dimension, even if you do possess a moral imagination. Whether the lie claims something good or denies something bad, it is always for self-advancement, and that is good. Hence lying itself is good. In Trump’s inverted moral universe–to the extent he has one at all–lying is a virtue.

When things go south, the Trump Way is always, always blame others. Externalize all blame since taking responsibility for your bad actions or statements is for suckers. He couldn’t, for example, go to the World War I graveyard in France because (he claimed) the Secret Service said it was unsafe to helicopter there because it was raining, when the real reasons were that he did not want to go because the cemetery was filled with “losers” for getting killed and he didn’t want to muss his hair in the rain. While the rule is to blame others for the bad, the corollary is that you claim credit—and the devotion it entails—for anything good, even if you in fact worked against that very good. Trump claims that he was and will be the best president for black people since Abraham Lincoln. From his demand for the death penalty for the eventually DNA-exonerated Central Park Five, to his dinner at Mar-a-Lago with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, to the recent “black jobs” comment, to his support for voter suppression laws, his racism is undisguised.

The fact that forty-seven percent of Americans will vote for this ignorant, dishonest, and dangerous narcissist—after all we have seen with our own lying eyes—continues to amaze me. He accuses Harris of being a flip-flopper. This from a man who once said Hillary would make a great president and whose views on abortion have shifted with the wind literally overnight. His own flip-flopping is never the result of a reflective and conscientious change of mind, or even the result of necessity in the process of political compromise. Rather it results from his attempt to ingratiate himself with whichever voting bloc he is addressing at the moment. Every statement, every act, no matter how feigned, is designed for personal and political applause.

In his pretense of religiosity he has used the Bible as a political prop, and in his pretense of respect for military service he used Arlington National Cemetery as a political prop. The photo of a grinning, thumbs-up Trump standing by the graves at Arlington of those he believes to be “losers” with some family members who support him is a desecration nothing short of nauseating. This political stunt had nothing to do with actual respect or reverence for thirteen deaths in an American war, nothing at all. It was all for perceived political gain, namely to blame Biden and by extension Harris for those deaths in the evacuation of Kabul, an evacuation Trump himself had set in motion as president. The fact that federal law prohibits the use of Arlington for political purposes is one more law to be ignored and broken for his personal gain.

If Trump is re-elected, it will be, to use one of Trump’s favorite accusations, a disgrace. If he is re-elected, shame, shame on us—our greatest national shame since slavery.