John Rachal's Blog

Our democracy and our role as leader of the democratic world are in peril. This coming election, unlike those of not-too-distant memory, is not one between mere policies or parties—or even the fervid cultural divisions that so plague us. It is not even just between contempt for military service and respect for it, between gibbering nonsense and rationality, between infantile name-calling and actual seriousness. No, it is something much greater. It is a contest between the gift of a constitutional democracy our Founders bequeathed to us and those who wish to tear down and burn that gift for their own ends. Knowing what we now know, seeing what we have now seen, this election, more than any other since a civil war cleaved us in two, will be our ultimate test of national character. Passing that test is not at all assured. We have a choice, and whatever we choose, whatever the outcome of this vital contest, that is who we are, that is our national character. As others have noted, the outcome is no longer merely a question of Mr. Trump’s character. It is now a question of ours. We are predominantly either a people whose values are still allied with a core of honor and decency, or we are a people whose values have become allied with a core of rot and sickness. Let us listen to conscience, let us rise to our better selves, let us choose honor and decency. Let us choose this not just for this moment, but for our future and for our children and our children’s children.

(Also posted on Facebook September 23, 2024)

On the point that a twice-impeached but unconvicted former American president and now the Republican nominee seeking re-election was yesterday convicted on all thirty-four counts of election fraud and is thus a convicted felon—on that point yes, one can legitimately say that for the American presidency to be so deeply shamed is sad. Out of forty-six presidents (Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms and his two terms are treated as separate presidencies though forty-five different men have served as president; Biden is thus “forty-six”), only one has the status of either convicted felon or convicted sexual abuser. Donald John Trump has both. It is also sad what continued support for this man says about what the Republican Party, which has chosen him for its 2024 nominee for president, has come to.

But that should not blind us to the clear fact that May 30, 2024 was a glorious day, a righteous day. The judicial system, stressed almost out of joint by a former president and his elected sycophants, worked. The curtain was lifted on all their claims of a rigged system and corruption as those claims were revealed for what they were: the debasement of a political party whose MAGA motto has devolved to “If we don’t win, it was rigged.” This theme has animated the party and particularly its now infamous leader since before the 2020 election when Trump stated it nakedly without even the adornment of fig leaves. And then he did lose, and then, outraged, he lost over sixty court cases clarifying that he lost by their findings of no election fraud.

As I noted at the time, it was wonderfully convenient that there were Republican howls and lamentations of fraud only in the states that Biden won, but not a whiff of fraud in states Trump won. As for those down-ballot Republicans who won in the Biden states? Were they elected through fraud also? No comment from MAGAdom—only the fearful silence of a mouse in a room full of cats. And now two-thirds of the GOP electorate—and virtually all of its officialdom—claim to believe that Trump was cheated out of re-election because Joe Biden is corrupt and the election was rigged. Now that is what is actually sad. What the GOP now bawls for—certainly its MAGA majority does—is a system in which they can never lose in a fair election or even a fair trial; if they lose, ipso facto, it was not fair. This overturning of the two most fundamental measures of democracy, fair elections and fair trials, by one of the two major parties does not augur well for the future, and despots the world over are smiling.

Even so, yesterday was also a righteous day because eighteen citizens, including six alternate jurors in the courtroom every day, were brave enough to accept the role of juror and to hear and see the evidence and render an evidence-based judgment. The judge conducted a trial that was professional and fair. Given Trump followers’ propensity for issuing death threats and committing actual violence (see violent protest, Charlottesville; Pelosi, Paul; insurrection, American), both the prosecutors and Judge Juan Merchan showed considerable courage in following the law. Perhaps they even heard the ancient admonition “Let justice be done though the heavens fall” hovering about their shoulders. The jurors were attentive and seemed to be able to set aside any biases, including the juror who acknowledged being a Truth Social follower (what an ironic name coming from the former president). I believe that I would say the trial was fair even had the verdict been different.

And yet, though the system worked so well in the weeks leading up to yesterday’s righteousness, there are heavy breakers amid the rocks between here and the safety of the shore. Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely delayed Trump’s classified documents trial, ensuring that it will not conclude, or probably even begin, before the election. If Trump wins in November, as she is happily aware, that trial will simply disappear, despite its likely being the closest of the four trials to a slam dunk. Meanwhile the Supreme Court purposefully stalls on Trump’s immunity claim,* also hoping (at least six of them) for a Trump victory in November that will obviate their need to decide whether a sitting president has immunity from prosecution—even if he were to send a SEAL team to assassinate a political rival or give classified documents to a foreign enemy. According to Trump’s lawyers, prosecution even in those cases could only proceed once the president has been impeached and convicted, thus reducing him to a mere citizen no longer above the law. No president has ever been impeached and convicted.

These disturbing undercurrents, especially the anti-democratic dangers posed by the elected MAGA rabble, their angry and gullible constituents, and the two MAGA Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas, clearly threaten our judicial system and our democracy. They stand between us and that safe shore. But yesterday was a good day, an American day, a righteous day.

* July 16 update: Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump appointee, dismissed the case altogether, Sunday, July 14, the day after the attempted assassination of Trump, claiming–shockingly–that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith was illegally appointed, since he was not approved by the President and the senate–as if the Special Prosecutor for, say, Hunter Biden had been through such a process. Moreover, this case, in which Trump illegally carted off classified documents to his Florida home, was the closest to an open and shut case among the three federal cases against him. As for the Supreme Court, the six Republican-appointed justices ruled within the last week that presidents are immune from any prosecution argued to be an “official act,” while leaving wholly undefined what constitutes an “official act.” Justice Sotamayor had asked Trump’s defense attorney if sending a Seal Team to assassinate a political rival would be allowable, and he answered that it would be prosecutable only if the president were impeached and convicted–i.e., rendering him a private citizen no longer above the law. The court majority rejected that argument, but appeared to say that any conversation between a president and the attorney general (or anyone?) would not be prosecutable even if they were conspiring to commit a crime, since such a conversation would be an official act. Indeed, it would be very tricky to come up with a presidential action that could not be construed to be an “official act.”

Support for Ukraine in its just war with Russia is the twenty-first century’s moral imperative just as abolitionism was the moral imperative of the nineteenth century. If you would have been opposed to slavery then, you must be supportive of Ukraine now. That is, you must be willing to provide Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to defend itself and not be grudging and tightfisted about it. Had you been a Southerner in 1850, a word or act against slavery would have been courageous because it could be dangerous. Today, the only danger Americans face in giving Ukraine weapons is a small dent in the nation’s bank account. (By contrast to the less than $100 billion we have given Ukraine, an estimated $600 billion is lost to that bank account each year due to uncollected but legally due federal taxes.*) But there are other dangers if we and other democracies don’t help Ukraine. I have always hated a bully (see “Was the Third Kid Wrong?”), and Putin’s bullying is a huge part of this war. But there are other bullies and authoritarians and totalitarians looking on, and so the stakes are truly higher. Not being able to improve on Tom Nichols’ wise assessment, I quote him:

If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.

Like Nichols, I normally consider South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham to be little more than a Trumpian lickspittle. Well, Nichols didn’t call him that, but he was being nice. But Nichols notes approvingly that Graham stood with two Democrats to complain about American and German reluctance to send Abrams and Leopard tanks, respectively, to Ukraine. Many months ago, I saw that Graham said the same thing that was on my mind then and now: Russia needs a successful Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the German patriot who attempted but failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944. No other politician was, or is, saying that. By contrast, Speaker of the House McCarthy, likely to be the weakest Speaker in memory after caving to far-right demands from fellow House Republicans, has already said that Ukraine should not get a “blank check,” and a recent poll showed that almost half of Republicans say we are already giving too much to Ukraine. This is the same amoral stand—indifference—taken by too many pre-Civil War Northerners toward slavery. Lincoln could not even use slavery as the moral impetus for the North going to war, knowing how unpersuasive it would be to so many. He had to argue that the casus belli was to preserve the Union.

It was not too many decades ago that the GOP considered Democrats soft on communism—primarily the USSR. Those tables have now turned. Trump practically embraced Putin, and Trump still has influence. We cannot return to the isolationism of 1914 or 1940. For those getting wobbly on support for Ukraine for fiscal reasons, and for others unmoved by Russia’s scorched-earth policy and the grim deaths of old women and children due to Putin’s indisputable war crimes, they should consider that if Putin wins, we and other democratic nations lose, and we might even find ourselves in a wider war. Robust, full-throated military and humanitarian support for Ukraine is the first international moral test of this century.

*The figure for total tax evasion, also known as the tax gap, varies. Several years ago it was calculated at $496 billion per year and estimated, on that basis, to be $667 billion c. 2018. As recently as 2021, the Department of the Treasury said that the wealthiest one percent of taxpayers accounted, all by themselves, for $163 billion in unpaid but legally due taxes, or 28% of the unpaid amount owed by all taxpayers, which would be $582 billion.

(This piece was written prior to the Republican National Convention to be held in 2024, but after Trump declared himself a candidate for the 2024 election, I decided that his entry into the race, and the danger he represents to our country, were sufficient justifications to post now and not to wait and see if he became the nominee.)

I once before noted on Facebook that I reserve my political commentary for an unvisited blog, being unwilling to annoy any of my Facebook friends with my ruminations in the form of original posts mired in politics. Facebook should be for fun, right? I do, I confess, sometimes reply to others’ political posts. On that one occasion when I broke my rule with an original post, I excoriated then-President Trump for his appalling comments and views of the American military. Anyone who supports American military veterans and active-duty personnel and still votes for this person for Commander-in-Chief—well, I’ll simply say that that is very, very hard to understand. (If you wish to see what he said and did or did not do, see “’Have You No Sense of Decency Sir?’” on my blog at https://johnrachalblog.wordpress.com/ Just put the title in the search box. Same for titles below in parentheses.)

But the upcoming election is so important that I feel obligated to break my rule once again. I really had hoped that the Republican Party would not have nominated this man or one of his clones. Had they done so, you would not be reading this. Though a Democrat myself, I was hoping the GOP would nominate someone who fell somewhere within the broad middle of the American political scene—right of center, naturally, but a person who was not a narcissist, not someone who was “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” (as Ted Cruz once said), not an authoritarian, not a friend to other authoritarians, not a person devoid of moral or spiritual values (see “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” on my blog), not a person far too incompetent and too ignorant to hold the office once held by Lincoln.

This election is ultimately about three central themes: character, truth, and democracy—not individual policies. Except for those who are irreparably fervid in their devotion to Mr. Trump, few arguments are needed to illustrate the “character” or the “truth” problems. He lied for years about then-President Obama’s citizenship, finally acknowledging that Obama was an American citizen, but notably never apologizing for the lie. After avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War by having a doctor report that he had bone spurs in his feet, he attacked American military hero John McCain out of sheer Iago-like jealousy of the high regard in which most Americans held him for his refusal to take early release from the North Vietnamese when they discovered who he was (see “When Amorality Meets Character”). In a late 1990s interview with Howard Stern, he said that during that war fear of venereal disease was his “personal Vietnam” and vaginas were “potential landmines.” He has used the Bible as a political prop in front of a church. When asked what his favorite Bible verse was, he claimed, since he didn’t know one, that he “wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal,” and he was too slow to even think of The Lord’s Prayer. Mr. Trump appears to be so insecure that he lied about things as silly as the crowd size at his inauguration compared to Obama’s (photos clearly revealing the lie). He lied about his affairs and groping women, even though the latter is on audio tape. Most dangerously, he has continued to lie about the 2020 election.

Most of this you probably know, but please stick with me a little longer.

There is a Mafia-like quality to him, as I am not the first to note. He is certainly a bully, and like a lot of bullies, he is a sycophant in dealing with other bullies. He bullied Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all but demanding that he “find another 11,000 votes” (see “’That Way Madness Lies’”). He admires, among a few other authoritarians, Vladimir Putin, taking Putin’s word in Helsinki that he had not interfered in our 2016 election despite our intelligence community’s conclusion that he had (see “Vlad’s New Puppy”). The Russians have a name for someone who can easily be manipulated to serve the purposes of others: a useful fool. Putin worked for Trump’s election because he knew that in Trump he had a useful fool. Even Trump’s infamous call to President Zelenskyy served Putin’s purposes: After congress had authorized military aid to Ukraine in the election season of 2020, the then-president tried to extort Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden by suggesting—“I would like you to do us a favor though”—that the aid was contingent on Zelenskyy’s announcement. No need to even carry an investigation out, just announce one. Zelenskyy didn’t. (See “Two Mobsters Walk into a Bar….”)

That didn’t go so well, and led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Trump called Putin “savvy,” and he has said nothing negative about Russia or supportive of Ukraine. Anyone supporting Ukraine’s struggle and opposed to Russia’s invasion, as I certainly am, would necessarily be appalled at the re-election of this man. Imagining anyone as reckless and undisciplined as Mr. Trump being in charge if Putin decides to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is extremely disturbing:  Trump’s bromance with Putin could lead him to call Putin’s choice of a tactical nuclear strike “savvy” and do nothing, or he could go to the other extreme, lashing out wildly and embroiling us in a world war.

My suspicion, however, is that Trump would do little for Ukraine, strengthening Putin’s hand. That too would be a tragedy for our country and for the world—not to mention gutsy Ukraine. It would be a tragedy for democracy globally. Not only would that failed phone call to Zelenskyy stick in Trump’s craw, but his submissiveness to Putin would disincline him from supporting Ukraine through weapons shipments and providing intelligence. Since the end of World War II the United States—and especially the GOP—has regarded the Soviet Union and then Russia as an adversary (despite a brief intermission in the Gorbachev years). Now, Russia is, in fact if not in official stated policy, the enemy. And now, more than at any previous time since the Cuban missile crisis, is hardly the time for America, under a re-elected President Trump, to roll over and hand Putin and Russia an unparalleled victory signaling American submission and an ignominious tolerance of Russian war crimes and expansionism. Indeed, it is never the right time to do the wrong thing.

Truth is critical to democracy. Where it thrives, democracy flourishes. Where it is suppressed or attacked, democracy fades—or dies.  Authoritarians and dictators the world over inevitably need to suppress truth, both burying their own misdeeds and substituting not only individual lies but an entire alternative “truth” since the road to autocracy is by definition a matter of controlling the narrative in favor of the would-be autocrat. This was nowhere more evident—and nowhere a more serious threat to American democracy—than on January 6^th, 2021, when Mr. Trump said to his rapt, even adoring listeners, “if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore” (see “1776 This Was Not”). He has repeatedly used the term “enemies of the people” in reference to a free press, echoing Stalin. Dictators and would-be dictators abhor a free press, and always, always move to supplant it with their own propaganda. The United States now has two competing truths, one which is real and where serious journalism and many of Mr. Trump’s former staff continue to reveal his moral, psychological, and legal unfitness for office; and one which is not real and where Fox News, Newsmax, 4chan, and Q-Anon flood the airwaves and internet with creepy fantasy and bizarre conspiracy tales.

I know that, if anyone has read this far, some might say, “Well, OK, he lies sometimes and behaves like a child sometimes, but he’s still better than the Democrats and their dangerous agenda.” No. He is not. He is a false Messiah. I use this phrase quite intentionally, hoping that my Christian friends and relatives will recall the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus warns of “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” Liz Cheney, as principled a conservative as they come, knows a ravening wolf when she sees one. So do many who worked for the former president. Mr. Trump has promoted himself from prophet to, in his own mind, the Messiah, having said “Only I can fix it” and referring to himself as “the chosen one.” For those who even one decade ago saw and still see themselves as pro-business, family values, law and order, anti-Russian, conservative Republicans, they are entitled to wonder what has happened to their now-cultish party.

Yet too many have drifted away from that long-gone GOP to the current radical, extreme right-wing, cult-like GOP where Mr. Trump and the poison he inspires in others threaten our democracy. Those “others” include far too many GOP politicians who once spoke harshly of Trump (I’m looking at you McConnell, McCarthy, Graham, Cruz, Rubio, DeSantis) and who know he is potentially a mortal danger to our country, but now fear saying so and ride the wave of his demagoguery. Even stealing classified documents gets a pass from Fox and its elected collaborators. Marco Rubio wriggled like a worm on a hook and called it a “storage problem”; one wonders what he and Fox and company might have said had Obama carted top secret documents off to Chicago. Storage problem. Sure.

So I am not talking about mere policies; conservatives and liberals will always debate policy. I am talking about character, truth, and democracy. We have a choice: in favor of those three themes, or opposition to them. The choice really is that stark.

I wish I could feel more optimistic about 21^st century America. It is generally conceded among those who do not have to cheerlead for Democrats that the Republicans will take over both the House and Senate in the 2022 elections, and anything approaching a Biden agenda will ground to an unceremonious, broken-down halt. Indeed, American factionalism is so profound that only three Republican senators could see their way to support the eminently qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Breyer. Almost everything else is strict party-line, except for Democrats Manchin and Sinema who sabotaged Biden’s already much-compromised Build Back Better program. Republicans do seem willing to join Democrats in supporting Ukraine with weapons, but for about everything else, Republicans especially seem willing to put party (and thus power) above country, morality, fairness, and personal integrity. Romney and perhaps Collins and Murkowski in the Senate and Cheney and Kinzinger in the House seem to be the only exceptions.

The party-and-power-over-all-else doctrine seemed perfectly illustrated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who after January 6 did the right thing by blaming Trump for the insurrection, and who now says that if Trump is the nominee in 2024, he will “absolutely” support him. So he is saying that the man that he himself said is responsible for the storming of the Capitol and the intended violent overturning of a fair election will be his man if Trump succeeds in winning the nomination two years from now. That turnabout is worthy of our sober reflection. McConnell, who said the right things in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection—including the fact that Joe Biden actually won—is willing to allow his integrity only to go so far. The president who was impeached twice, who lies from the minuscule (his inauguration crowds) to the epic (saying he won in 2020), who publicly admires Vladimir Putin, who more than any other single human being is responsible for turning normal conservatives—your uncle or mine—into deluded right-wing extremists, and who is and for the last five years has been the single most dangerous internal enemy of American democracy is now the man McConnell is “absolutely” willing to return to the White House.

Perhaps McConnell has been sobered by the fact that Trump still commands the collective adoration of the Republican party, given that 71% still believe, amazingly, that Biden is not the legitimate U. S. president. Thus, unwilling to buck that near consensus, McConnell trades his integrity for expediency. He is too smart, unlike some of the lesser fry of the GOP like Gaetz, Jordan, Cawthorn, Greene, et al., to be unaware that Trump is unequivocally the most demagogic, autocratic president in our history. He absolutely knows this, as do those marvelous contortionists Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham. Even if McConnell couldn’t see it for himself, his wife could tell him, having served in Trump’s cabinet. And yet, rather than say that he could not and would not support a second Trump term, he is willing to embrace a proven would-be despot, to put democracy at extreme risk, to invite the return of a sewer of presidential corruption, to subject the country to another corrosive four years of the degrading of truth as a critical democratic value, and to ignore the probability of future catastrophes Trump could beget during another term in the Oval Office.

This symbiosis of congressional cowardice and collusion, fed by half the populace who cannot see or choose not to see the poison Trump has injected into the body politic, depletes the strength of American democracy. As fantasy substitutes for reality and grievance displaces truth, democracy fades. The toxic mix of cowardice and collusion, fantasy and grievance, is enormously abetted by so-called news channels and a social media which daily, hourly, heaves gobbets of lies and disinformation at an addicted public craving new alleged outrages upon which to gorge. This public expects its Republican leaders to slay their imagined dragons. So McConnell and Trumpism Inc. choose to pretend the dragons are real rather than suffer the fates of apostates like Cheney, Romney, or, worst of all, Mike Pence, who would be dead today had he fallen into the hands of the January 6^th mob—the same mob engaged in “legitimate political discourse,” says the Republican National Committee. When Trump told his already stoked partisans that day “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he aimed at the very heart of American democracy, while he himself scooted back to the White House.* Democrats, already reviled by the crazy right as child sex-traffickers, and scorned by the merely deluded right as anti-American, have no standing to convince half our population that Trumpism corrodes democracy. Only Republicans can do that.

*June 28, 2022 testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to the January 6 House Committee revealed that Trump did indeed want to lead the mob at the Capitol in person, even wanting to go into the House chamber. He even grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, saying “I’m the fucking president,” when the Secret Service agent driving the car would not take him there and returned him to the White House.

Three weeks after the February 24 invasion

There is no off ramp for Putin. None. He is far too committed to what he has already done, killing thousands of Ukrainians (2,100 so far in Mariupol alone), targeting residential areas and hospitals in a war of terror. He has turned several Ukrainian cities into wastelands. He knows there is no turning back. He must win, and he must intimidate the West and NATO into a willingness to allow Ukraine to go under. He threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons, of which he has thousands and the United States has some 230. Lenin had a motto: “You probe with bayonets; if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” So far, the bayonet has not hit much NATO steel.

I am still hopeful that—short of Western military intervention—once he has destroyed the country and killed tens of thousands, he will be unable to occupy the country for the long term and that a Ukrainian Resistance and sanctions will somehow bring him down. But hope is not a dependable strategy. He has terrified us into thinking that World War III will ensue if NATO takes any military action. Putin has already said that we have committed an act of war merely by supplying Ukraine with weaponry. I am off the fence now: Enact a no-fly-zone as a start. Eliot Cohen, noting both Putin’s military weakness (despite his one advantage in tactical nuclear weapons) and NATO’s strength, has pointed out that American aircraft have fought the Russians in third countries, including Syria, Korea, and probably Vietnam. A NATO military presence over Ukraine is not the same as attacking Russia on its own soil. If Putin thinks he has a right to be on his enemy’s soil wreaking desolation, we have a right to be on our friend’s soil stopping him. We should at least bring a knife to the knife fight—and probably a gun. Our unwillingness to even support Poland’s offer to supply its own Migs to the Ukrainians and “backfill” the Poles’ reduction with our F-16s suggests that we are too afraid to even come to the fight, and are willing to watch the Russian Bear gobble up a country and murder its people, and not just its soldiers. We should be Churchills, not Chamberlains.

Short of that, we have the Hope Strategy—an unsustainable Russian occupation of Ukraine, a strong Ukrainian Resistance, Russian war fatigue, China choosing not to throw Putin a lifeline, and eventually Putin’s fall. And maybe the Hope Strategy will eventually be enough. But there is an alternative possible scenario: The West will tire of their own sacrifices in imposing sanctions, and rather than rising up against Putin, Russians may be duped by Putin’s propaganda and stand with him, while dissidents disappear. Ukraine will be in his pocket, and more countries may be on offer. He will smile at the political and moral weakness—the mush—of the much-vaunted NATO, America in particular. And what is left of Ukraine will glower at America and agree with Putin at least on that.

The Sunday-morning Christians—as opposed to those Christians who live Jesus’s values, or at least attempt to, day by day, hour by hour—seem to have found their paladin, if not their savior, in the form of Donald Trump. It is a mystery to me, unless the explanation is as simple as the sordid possibility that their values are one-inch deep, wearable only on Sunday morning, and wholly divorced from the man on the shores of Galilee whom they say is the model for their lives and whom they worship. It is, for me as an observer, the profoundest disconnect in modern political life, with the possible exception of the former anti-Soviet GOP slithering into a kumbaya embrace with a Russia headed by former KGB chief Putin. Most of us have a gap and sometimes a chasm between what we say and what we do, as well as what we say and what we think. But here is a chasm between what the Trump Gullibles think they think and what they actually think: Thinking they adore and emulate the man who preached the Sermon on the Mount but actually adoring the man who preaches hatred and division.

So who would Jesus vote for? Having himself healed demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, would he vote for the fellow who mocked them? Having blessed the poor in spirit, those who mourned, the meek, those who hungered for righteousness, the pure in heart, the merciful, would he then vote for the guy obsessed with his own grandiosity, self-aggrandizement, fire and fury, and vengeance for all his detractors? Having blessed the peacemakers, would he vote for the man who sows division and hatred? Would he vote for the man who bears false witness as freely as he breathes? Would he vote for the man whose Pride was so titanic that he proclaimed that only he could fix it, that he was the chosen one? Whose Wrath was such that he called one political enemy a monster, and said that others should be indicted and sent to jail? Whose Avarice is so embedded in his withered and twisted character that gaudy, ostentatious wealth is his paramount measure of success? Would Jesus vote for someone who could not even imagine that his indefatigable pursuit of wealth would, like the camel not going through the needle’s eye, prevent his salvation? Whose Lust and self-veneration are such that he felt entitled to manhandle women? Whose Envy of far better men, like John McCain or Barack Obama, lays bare his own rotted core? Whose Gluttony for power and wealth blind him to any vision of kindness, generosity, empathy, humility, sacrifice, duty, honor, stoicism, or character? Would Jesus, thinking of the good Samaritan, vote for a bully? Would he vote for a man whose entire adult life has been devoted to dishonesty, manipulation, acquisition, conquest, and cheating, all to lay up his treasures here on earth? Would he, remembering Micah 6:8, support the person who, in his dealings with others, does not do justice but perverts it? Who scorns mercy? Who most certainly does not walk humbly with his God? Who decries the mote in his brother’s eye, but refuses to see the beam in his own? Who never stoops to do for others what he demands others do for him?

Or would Jesus vote for the other guy, flawed to be sure, but standing on higher ground, seeking more the common good rather than singly his personal good?

Admiration for the Nazarene is not the sole province of the religious. In that light, I, who am not religious, ask not just What Would Jesus Do, but whom would he vote for?