John Rachal's Blog

Republican representatives and senators assure us that President Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” will “rein in the national debt.” They assure us that the only folks who will lose Medicaid are people here illegally and able-bodied recipients unwilling to work. They assure us that we need the bill to cut taxes—but they will never be honest enough to add the necessary four words “mostly for the wealthy.” In truth, estimates are that the senate version of the bill will add $3.3 trillion to the debt. Back in the day, Republicans and conscientious Democrats were concerned about the debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the House version of the bill 7.8 million Americans will lose their insurance, a majority of whom already work. Polls show low levels of support for the bill nationwide—a Fox News poll showed 38% favored and 59% opposed, while The Washington Post had it underwater by 19 points and Pew Research by 20. And yet it will pass. I join with Old Testament Jeremiah in asking, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?”

Donald Trump was once asked what his favorite Bible verse was. He said he didn’t want to say, that it was too personal—which almost certainly meant that he didn’t know one. For about three decades my favorite Old Testament one (among quite a few I’m not at all crazy about) has been Micah 6:8. You can be Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jew, Taoist, Zoroastrian, agnostic, or atheist and still like it: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”

I can’t help but ask, Did the Republicans in Congress who passed the “Big Beautiful Bill” with not a single Democratic vote do justice in giving great tax breaks to the wealthy and adding trillions to the national debt? Did they love mercy in stripping ten million of their health insurance? Did they walk humbly with anyone other than Donald Trump, with whom they were humble indeed?

Trump voters might say this is just a little thing, totally forgettable. But it’s not. In fact it is a single, tiny part of a much bigger enterprise to turn the United States into, say, Viktor Orban’s quasi-dictatorship Hungary. Project 2025 used Hungary as a model.

Last week the Smithsonian Institution took down a part of a display concerning presidential scandals in its National Museum of American History. The parts that remained untouched were Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Richard Nixon’s Watergate, and Bill Clinton’s impeachment (though neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted and removed from office). The part that was removed—theoretically temporarily—involved Trump’s two impeachments. Gone. Atomized. This is not whitewashing history, it’s erasing it, like a person airbrushed from a Stalin-era photograph. As David Graham of The Atlantic notes, the current display now has this sentence: “Only three presidents have seriously faced removal.”

Graham mentions this as just one of five “assault[s] on truth” from the administration just last week. He also notes that the Trump administration has been “pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president’s political priorities” and that J. D. Vance is an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board.

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was a Jewish, German World War I veteran who kept one of the most important diaries of World War II as he and his non-Jewish wife sought to survive Hitler’s rise and fall (they did, but barely). In I Shall Bear Witness, the first volume of his journal published posthumously in 1995, Klemperer mentions that he is asked why he did not focus on the large events of the war that seemed more important in charting its course. His reply was that he chose to focus instead on the “mosquito bites” that he and others experienced and that collectively add up to a dictatorship and genocide.

The Smithsonian’s action is one of those mosquito bites—by itself just an itch to be forgotten next week. It is barely making the news. And yet it is emblematic of Trump and his lackeys’ grand mission to transform a democracy into an autocracy one act and a hundred lies at a time, accumulating and gaining momentum, and leading us in a direction no patriotic American should want.

Also posted on Facebook, 8/5/25