John Rachal's Blog

Donald Trump’s “peace” plan for the Ukraine-Russia war is, as sure as night follows day, a de facto Ukraine Surrender Plan, designed to offload a Trump headache, burnish (he thinks) his Nobel prospects, and give his friend Vladimir Putin almost everything he wants while rewarding him for his war crimes and his extinguishing scores of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The 28 point plan most affecting the one country disallowed any role in its formulation is in fact an ultimatum: surrender within a week or we cut you off entirely.

Putin is doing a happy dance, smiling at the ease with which he plays the American president. He gets to keep Ukrainian land he has taken by invasion, making Ukrainians in those areas suddenly Russian; Ukraine must unilaterally and significantly disarm, opening it to future invasion; it must forgo any hope of joining NATO, all while taking cold comfort in assurances that the United States, a totally undependable ally under the current administration, will be there when Putin comes back for more a year or two down the line.

The Ukraine Surrender Plan is one other thing: an absolute disgrace to the United States. It would shame us and haunt us. It already does just by being proposed. Being accepted in anything like its current form, it would further diminish us as the indispensable still-free (though starting to teeter) nation in the world, a world where democracy is in retreat, a world in which 72% of its eight billion inhabitants live under authoritarian regimes according to the Varieties of Democracy Institute and cited by PBS’s News Hour. Fortunately, Ukraine will save us most of that historic ignominy by rejecting Trump’s plan for its capitulation, by choosing not to live on its knees.

Pentagon correspondent and Atlantic writer Nancy Youssef and virtually the entire pentagon press corps—even Fox News—have been expelled from the pentagon building by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, obviously hampering them from doing their jobs of reporting how the military spends close to a trillion dollars per year and how it manages and deploys nearly three million personnel.

Their crime? Declining to sign a pledge that they will only report what Mr. Hegseth allows and approves. Rather than become a shill for Hegseth, the pentagon press corps has abided by its journalistic duty to be an independent source of news coverage for the American people. To do otherwise would be to become the American version of Russia Today, the mouthpiece of the Kremlin, concerning military matters.

As for Hegseth’s juvenile response to the press corps’ collective decision—a decision ensuring that you will get a straighter take on what your military is doing with your money and our young men and women in uniform—Youssef notes that that response was to post an emoji with a hand cheerily waving goodbye.

It should be noted that all responsible journalism is very careful not to report matters of critical national security. I cannot think of a single instance in which a time-sensitive, vital national security matter was revealed irresponsibly by the press. By contrast, Hegseth himself HAS revealed extremely sensitive information when, like a ten-year old showing off his knowledge of a secret, he blabbed the specific war plans to attack Yemeni rebels on a commercial, non-secure Signal platform, potentially endangering American pilots. He should have been sacked for that alone.

Of course his boss is not much better: Last week Trump publicly stated that he was sending a nuclear submarine to the Caribbean, though at least he did not give latitude and longitude. Normally submarine movements would not be publicly mentioned at all—there is a reason they swim UNDER water.

The womanizing, sometimes sozzled, administrative novice and Fox News spin doctor turned “Secretary of Physical Fitness” (as retired Naval War College professor and Atlantic writer Tom Nichols calls him) invites scatological commentary, as in “he’s a walking, talking, load of…well, to be nice, that other four-letter word starting with s, scat.” But a better analogy might be that of a 20-year-old kid playing Call of Duty or Hell Let Loose video war games on his computer twelve hours a day. This epic nonentity, so concerned about wokeness and pushups, knows something about actual national security, alliances, strategic defense, and the capabilities of our adversaries? This little pipsqueak thinks he should lecture some 800 generals and admirals on ANYTHING? He’s not fit to shine their boots. Even three Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, voted against him, and he was saved only because of the tie-breaking vote of J. D. Vance.

Maybe Trump was right when he told the generals and admirals that America’s greatest threat is from “within.” But that threat from within is not who he says it is—all he has to do is look in the mirror. And as for the threat from without, if you think Trump and Hegseth have made the nation more secure in a world where autocracy is on the march, think again.

On my previous question on Facebook of who is the second-most dangerous person in America, there were two votes for Robert Kennedy Jr., one for Ron DeSantis, one for Mike Johnson, and two who were simply overwhelmed by the multitude of possibilities. My thanks to all. I guess I’m in that last camp as well, but since I asked for one individual, I guess I should give just one myself. My candidates were: Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr., Secretary of DEFENSE (not “War”) Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice-President J. D. Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Presidential consigliere Steven Miller, OMB Director and Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought, and finally Chairman and CEO of Fox News, Lachlan Murdoch (his father Rupert is now Chairman emeritus).

Under this administration, America faces a vicious interplay of actual threats from the White House and loss of respect from abroad. From the administration’s anti-science ignorance represented by Kennedy; to the autocracy-loving malice of Miller, Vought, and Hegseth; to the clinking of champagne glasses in Moscow and Beijing after the demolition of agencies like Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, USAID, and others; to the firing of senior military officers and intelligence personnel considered insufficiently Trump-loyal, the sunsetting of American democracy and the wavering in national security are clear and present dangers.

As for my own choice, my original thought was Robert Kennedy, autism provocateur and Center for Disease Control and National Institutes of Health deconstructionist. I do believe there is a high probability of people getting diseases or dying who might not have done so with a competent health professional in his place. Under his rule at HHS, we will be less prepared for our next pandemic or measles outbreak. But I also believe that he is an ideological ignoramus, at least more than he is a malicious underminer of national security. And since I am particularly concerned with American decline on the world stage, America’s retreat from democratic principles, and its slide to join the autocratic world with no other equally strong democracy in the wings, I ruled him out. As journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has succinctly noted, we have entered a new era: the “post-American world.”

I toyed with Murdoch, given his extraordinary influence through Fox News, the propaganda arm of the Trump administration. Perhaps unknowingly employing an apt term from the Reagan administration—“perception management”—Fox News*  has captured the minds of far too many Americans who love Trump’s bogus machismo and his daily falsehoods. I also toyed with Hegseth, an unqualified macho Signalgate  incompetent and former Fox News host subverting our national defense and obsessed with “lethality” and “warfighters.” The chasm between him and former Secretaries of Defense like James Mattis, George Marshall, Clark Clifford, Leon Panetta, or Robert Gates is almost as wide as the Grand Canyon between Republican Presidents Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln.

But finally I settled on Vance. Sure, he has Trump’s ear, “couldn’t care less about Ukraine,” excoriated Trump in 2016 but in a fit of fevered ambition flipped to unabashed Trump lapdog, all while exhibiting his own fascist instincts—his embrace of the German extreme right-wing party AfD and “the professors are the enemy” speech as two examples. But perhaps his greatest threat lies in the future, when he is likely to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2028. If he wins, he will assume the Trumpist mantle and agenda, he will know where Trump faltered, and with his cunning, intelligence, and lean and hungry look, he would make restoring democracy and actually making America great again an even more distant goal.

*Exemplifying Fox News’s extreme Trump bias, Charlie Warzel, writing of the Jeffrey Epstein “birthday book” in which Trump has apparently drawn a “bawdy” picture and says “May every day be another wonderful secret,” notes that “Fox News’s article about the birthday book, which was on its front page earlier this evening, mentions Clinton in the headline [and text] but contains zero mention of Trump at all.” “You Really Need to See Epstein’s Birthday Book for Yourself,” digital Atlantic, 9/9/25. Interestingly, the Wall Street Journal, owned by the Murdoch family, first reported the Trump quote.

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

Vladimir Lenin had a mantra to give his coming Russian revolution the chaos, grievance, and turmoil it needed to frighten the masses and turn them to his side: “The worse, the better.”

Is this what Donald Trump is doing to attempt to manufacture a crisis in Los Angeles and claim that, as a matter of national security, he must invoke emergency powers to send in the National Guard and U. S. Marines to quell the uprising—when the L.A. police have said that their 9,000 police officers are more than capable of handling the disturbance all by themselves, thank you? Is Trump, who in his first inaugural  considered “American carnage” good for him, instinctively thinking “the worse, the better”?

If you’ve ever wondered if we have the best government money can buy, as Mark Twain may have said, you can quit wondering. The Republican “one big beautiful bill,” in addition to adding at least $2.4 trillion to the national debt over ten years, will distribute its largesse thus:

People making over $1 million per year will have a net 4.3% tax cut, averaging over $89,000

Top 1% income earners: 4.3% cut, $64,000

90-99% income earners: 4.2% cut, $10,960

80-89% income earners, 2.9% cut, $4,500 (mean income for top quintile, 80-100%: $277,300)

60-79% income earners: 2.7% cut, $2,750 (mean income for fourth quintile: $119,900)

40-59% income earners: 1.9% cut, $1,290 (mean income for third quintile: $74,730)

20-39% income earners: 1.5% cut, $640 (mean income for second quintile: $43,850)

Bottom 20% income earners: 0.6% cut, $90 (mean income for bottom quintile: $16,120)

(Percentage tax cut and dollar amount are from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; mean income per quintile is household income from  Tax Policy Center for 2022)

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top 1% of earners would receive about $121 billion in tax cuts, while the bottom 60% would receive about $90 billion. Read that sentence again. The top 5% of earners would receive 43% of the cuts. For working class Americans, Trump-proposed tariffs—effectively a tax on consumers—would have a net effect of actually raising taxes.

The bill barely passed the House 215-214, with two GOP representatives voting against, one voting “present,” and two not voting. One of the two GOP No votes, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, complained that the House rules allow 72 hours for a bill to be read by members, but that was not the case here. He asked, “Shouldn’t we take more than a few hours to read a bill this big and this consequential?”

The regressive aspects of the bill are bad enough; favoring the wealthy and cutting benefits to the less well-off are GOP hallmarks. But we should not overlook what it does to the national debt, already at $36 trillion. When Trump was running in 2016, he promised to totally eliminate the debt within two terms. Instead, he added to it in his first term, especially with his 2017 tax cuts (“my rich friends are going to hate me,” he said with a straight face), and he’s doing it again here. The debt itself may not affect our pocketbooks today or next month or next year, though then again the stock market and IRAs may not like it. But this bill is irresponsible, and there will be a day of reckoning. And it may be our children and grandchildren who will have to face that day—and pay for our spendthrift ways.

On Saturday Val and I drove to Gulfport to participate in the nationwide protest against Trump known as “Hands Off,” presumably referring to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, American freedoms, American pocketbooks, and American democracy. Val and I made our small-ish signs: Hers warned, “Wake Up: Trump Doesn’t Care About You” and mine admonished, “Patriots: Silence Is Submission.” The use of Patriots was a small attempt to re-claim the word for people in the middle or on the left who, like me, hate to see the word co-opted by the right, as it largely has been. In fact a FB friend chided me for its use for exactly that reason, but gave my explanatory reply a “like.” Actual patriots are the folks who are not trying to storm the Capitol, trample the Constitution, deconstruct democracy, and institutionalize authoritarianism. By saying Silence Is Submission, I was also acting on my decision that I will make my views known—no longer simply on my unread blog, but on Facebook and in conversation if my interlocutor is knowingly or unknowingly willing to offend me by taking a Trumpist view—not that I won’t hear him out.

The protest itself was uneventful. We started near Senator Roger Wicker’s office in the Cadence Bank Building and listened to some impassioned anti-Trumpist, anti-Wicker boilerplate. The organizers contrived to overlook the utility of a hand-held megaphone, so much of the boilerplate was lost to the crowd of what I estimated to be nearing 300. We walked two-thirds of a mile to a federal building, with obligatory chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Trump and Musk have got to go” issuing from some of the more inspired. At the end there was another short megaphone-less speech or two, after which there was some mulling around, posing with signs for passing motorists, and heading back singly or in small groups to Cadence Bank or other stops along the way.

I have generally felt that virtue is most credible when it is done when no one is looking, and so doing it will be its own reward. Thus I feel a certain ambivalence about my own participation in such protests. On the one hand there is an uncomfortable feeling of performative self-indulgence, or virtue signaling (“Hey, look how virtuous I am”), or just plain showing off—especially when the prospective dangers are few or almost non-existent. After all, it’s not like we were Russian citizens protesting the war in front of the Kremlin (where even calling it a “war” is a jailable offense), or Chinese students in Tiananmen Square (much less the solitary man blocking the tank), or a young John Lewis and company civilly disobeying the Selma police by marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge—and knowing they would pay for it, as indeed they did. No, ours was not even civil disobedience—we had a permit—nor did we rate a single counter-protester, much less modern brownshirts or menacing police with tear gas and billy clubs. And I’m sure not saying I wish we had.

But on the other hand of my ambivalence, the threat of Trumpism is so profound, and the stakes so high, that making one’s non-violent stand known is, if not an actual act of physical courage, at least a willingness not to acquiesce or meekly, silently, scurry to the safety of what Mencken called “the warm, reassuring smell of the herd.” Participation in the protest was—is—an act of active citizenship, an act of patriotism. So, performative as it may be, even more so is it necessary.

The adulation Donald Trump holds for known murderer and dictator Vladimir Putin, and the contempt he holds for Churchill-esque defender of his country President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, is now all but official. Trump has now called Zelensky a “dictator,” said that Ukraine started the war, and claims that Zelensky’s approval rating is 4%, whereas in fact it is 57% according to a poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology earlier this month, a number Trump can only fantasize about. Trump plans to meet with Putin—Europe and Ukraine itself are not invited—to surrender gritty little Ukraine to his Russian friend. Aside from Trump’s jaw-dropping lies–Zelensky is the dictator? Ukraine started the war? –has America fallen so low that it now abandons a democratic ally and exchanges smiles and handshakes with the former KGB officer who is the first to invade a European neighbor since Adolph Hitler?*

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously appeased Hitler by surrendering a region of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland to Hitler for a promise of “peace for our time” at Munich. “Munich” is now considered the most shameful act of appeasement—one country debasing itself to another in the hope of some reward—in modern history. (Churchill said to Chamberlain, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor; you chose dishonor, and you will have war.”) The ignominy of Munich and the ignominy of Trump’s plans to dismember and surrender Ukraine to Putin are certainly not perfect analogues, but in one way Trump’s plan, or concept of a plan, is worse. Chamberlain chose dishonor, but he surely knew Hitler was no friend; Trump will choose dishonor by abandoning a friend in need to a despot he admires.

* I must do my homework a little better. After thinking about it more carefully, I remembered the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, looked it up, and was also reminded of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Mea culpa.

Thomas Paine saw “The American Crisis” of his day and warned of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot [who] will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.” Perhaps he glimpsed the Republican summer soldiers and sunshine patriots in the crisis of our day, who have shrunk indeed. They have confirmed Russell Vought, one of the architects of the Project 2025 blueprint for dismantling American democracy, for director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Vought, Trump’s first term budget director and overseer of the Republican platform committee during the recent campaign observed, “what we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them” (Shapiro and Vegh, 2024). Those pockets of independence include the FBI, the CIA, and Inspectors General, the last charged with investigating fraud, ethics violations, and conflicts of interest in the federal government. Trump has already fired seventeen IGs. In goose-step with Elon Musk, Vought will oversee the purging of any federal government employee determined by them to be disloyal—not to the country, not to the Constitution, but to the person of Donald Trump.

Trump claimed during the campaign to know nothing of Project 2025, a 900 page document largely based on Viktor Orban’s takeover of Hungary. He lied, of course. It is unclear whether Trump, Musk, and Vought’s vision for America is merely the pseudo-democracy in Hungary or, in their fondest dream, Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia. Meanwhile the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots of the GOP bow and scrape.

J. Shapiro and Z. Vegh. “The Orbanisation of America: Hungary’s Lessons for Donald Trump,” European Council on Foreign Relations, October 9, 2024. https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-orbanisation-of-america-hungarys-lessons-for-donald-trump/