John Rachal's Blog

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.

(Written the day after the event)

Late yesterday afternoon there was an attempted assassination of Trump, apparently from a man with a rifle atop a one-story building outside the perimeter of the rally. A bullet apparently nicked Trump’s ear and he, along with virtually all of the rally-goers behind him, ducked down, or possibly in his case fell down as several Secret Service agents surrounded him and with difficulty lifted him up. Secret Service snipers, or perhaps some other federal agency, zeroed in on the would-be assassin and killed him, but not before the bullet meant for Trump killed a rally-goer, while another was wounded apparently in the wrist. Trump was hustled off, shaking his fist and yelling to the crowd what seemed to be “fight, fight, fight.”

Certainly violence and specifically assassination should be off the table in American politics today, though clearly it is not. I am not so sure, however, that I could honestly say that if I lived under Vladimir Putin’s rule or, even more obviously, Hitler’s. But not here. Of course our politics have become so inflamed that violent outbreaks, even including assassination, should not be terribly surprising. For me the greater surprise is that the attempt was against Trump rather than Biden, given the right wing’s love of guns, proclivity for violence (e.g., January 6^th), Trump’s not-so-subtle encouragement of violence and generally hate-filled inflammatory rhetoric, and the right’s resulting hatred of Biden. Nancy Pelosi rightly condemned the assassination attempt in terms similar to her condemnation of the wounding of Republican House leader Steve Scalise a couple of years ago, though surely in the hidden recesses of her mind she must have thought something along the lines of “So how does it feel when it’s you?”, given the attempt on her husband’s life not so long ago as the would-be assassin sought her.* Even Mike Pence might have been thinking the same thing as he recalled the January 6^th insurrectionists yelling “Hang Mike Pence” and “Where’s Nancy?” as they stormed the Capitol that treasonous and violent day—after being told by Trump that they would have “to fight like hell” if they wanted to keep their country.

After watching news coverage of the event for probably a little over an hour, I turned off the television, and I have not yet read anything about it today or watched further developments. So this is written based on news reporting shortly after the event. It remains to be seen what the repercussions will be. Security will be even tighter for both candidates to be sure. Trump supporters will be even more enraged—of course—and conspiracies will circulate that Biden was behind the attempted assassination. His public appearances may be curtailed as many, many right-wingers will be fantasizing about revenge, and someone, or some group, may even try. Now it is even more unlikely that Biden will drop out of the race since doing so would in the right’s eyes be seen as cowardly. Meanwhile, Trump just got another five million votes.

The last assassination attempt against a president was John Hinckley’s wounding of Ronald Reagan in 1981, in his pathetic attempt to impress an actress. But it had no political overtones. Even Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 (which I well remember as a tenth grader) was mostly apolitical, at least as seen by the general public, if not by the number of conspiracy-mongers who longed for fame with their books. The nation collectively mourned. The 60s certainly erupted, but not yet in 1963. Then there was no huge political divide, no Fuck John Kennedy signs**, no “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore” rhetoric spewing from either political party. Things did get uglier beginning in the late 60s, but today’s turmoil has a distinctly Trumpish cast. That is what Trump, the man who just missed death by two inches, has brought us to.

Maybe Trump is “the chosen one,” as he once referred to himself. He grew up rich; he and his father paid a doctor to say that he had bone spurs in his feet to keep him out of Vietnam; he was given millions by his father (despite claiming it was mere thousands); he has been convincingly accused of stiffing numerous contractors as well as other shady practices resulting in his being involved in roughly 4,000 lawsuits prior to his presidency yet has never served a day in jail; he was elected president by an anti-democratic iniquity in the Constitution called the Electoral College which has veto power over the choice of the majority of American voters; he escaped two impeachments, the only president to be impeached twice and only the third to be impeached at all.

His good fortune most certainly does not end there: he has been convicted of sexual assault and thirty-four counts of falsification of business records by paying hush money to a porn actress without, so far, doing a day’s time in jail; his felonies actually increased donations to his campaign; in a single term he got three Supreme Court choices, and he is almost certain to be elected to another term*** where he may get more; the Trump court just ruled that he has immunity from prosecution for any act, apparently including assassinating a political rival or selling US secrets, that might be considered an official action of a president; that very same ruling–slow-walked by the Court–will delay his three other trials past election day, and, presuming he wins, he will be able to dismiss the two federal cases against him for stealing documents and for inciting an insurrection to overturn a fair election. And now, a bullet meant for his head nicks his ear, he survives the assassination attempt, raises his fist in defiance, and will thereby gain enormous sympathy and votes—almost ensuring his re-election. So yep, the gods smile on him—he does seem to be their chosen one. Lucky guy.

* At a rally after Paul Pelosi’s beating with a hammer, Trump sarcastically asked the attendees, “How’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump’s mocking was noted by David Frum, while the Trump quote was cited by Adam Serwer.

**As there are Fuck Joe Biden signs.

***Written prior to Biden dropping out

I have been slack-jaw perplexed by all the claims of the far right about what a corrupt, indeed evil genius and manipulator of the New World Order Joe Biden is. Where are they getting all this unbounded, scratch-your-head buncombe? Where is a scintilla of evidence that Biden has used the judicial system to persecute poor victim Donald Trump? Where is a particle of truth to Biden’s interfering to minimize son Hunter’s judicial woes? Where are all those dollars Joe has made steering foreign diplomats to stay in his hotels? Where are all the dollars extracted from the students at Biden University? Where are all the Biden Brownshirts marching in the streets of Charlottesville? Which judge was it who ruled that the Biden Foundation was guilty of fraud?

I really haven’t been keeping up with all of Joe’s corruption, so maybe you folks in MAGA World could help me with a few more. What was the name of that porn star Joe paid hush money to in order to hide their rendezvous from the public? Which general did Biden ask if he could have the army shoot protesters in the legs? Sorry, I can’t remember, was it a four-star or a three? Which state Secretary of State was it that “gimme a break” Biden called to demand that he find 11,000 more Biden votes? Darn it, my memory is getting so bad, which European president was it that Joe pressured to call for an investigation of Trump and his sons? When was it that Joe told his now-deceased Iraq veteran son Beau Biden that he was a sucker and a loser for his military service? Which rally was it that Biden told his cult that if they didn’t fight like hell they wouldn’t have a country anymore? And—sorry, I must have been dozing—what were those dates that he publicly denied doing all these things?

So anyway, in my galactic-wide naivete, I’ve been wondering about the origins of all the claims of corruption and general depravity spewing from the Biden crime family, and in particular why those claims are so persistent. And finally, finally, the 40 watt light bulb switched on. You do that when your guy (I use masculine nouns and pronouns because I am really talking about Trump and Biden) is himself guilty of those very things. You do it to establish immoral equivalence, or, perhaps better phrased, amoral equivalence. If you are wallowing in the sewer, or if your candidate is, you have to try to convince the electorate that No, you are not covered in feces, despite it covering you from head to toe, but the enemy—not merely your “opponent”—is.

Let’s call it guilt transposition—you transpose your actual guilt to create, ex nihilo, the invented guilt of the other guy. Knowing the amoral or immoral depths of your own candidate, you can hardly sit idly by and allow your enemy to stand on the moral high ground, however legitimately he does so, even if merely by comparison. You have to knock him off that high ground, you have to fake slime him with your own real slime. You’re actually incompetent? No, the other guy is. You’re actually corrupt? No, the other guy is. You as candidate, or you as supporter of that candidate, have long since established that any moral or ethical concern about you or your candidate’s behavior is a preposterous consideration, positively laughable. Honor, shmonor. Hence GOP “investigations” of Biden; hence rumblings of impeachment inquiries, at least until your prime witness turns out to be an established liar; hence a subpoena for Hunter Biden to testify before a congressional kangaroo hearing; hence Biden crime family; hence Biden is “the worst president in history.”* You create a looking glass wonderland, where bad is good, up is down, black is white, false is true—and you repeat it again and again, hoping the electorate is gullible enough to buy it.

*Said by Trump about Biden. A 2024 poll of presidential scholars by the American Political Science Association ranked Biden 14^th among our 46 presidents–impressive, I thought, for a one-termer. I looked to see who all the one-term-or-less presidents were and where they ranked in the APSA list. Of those 23 one-termers, Biden was number three, behind John Adams and John Kennedy. Of all presidents, Trump ranks dead last.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today that arc bent heavily in that direction.

So now Nikki Haley says she will vote for Trump. As my wife said, Republican politicos will sell their souls very cheaply these days. It almost begs the question as to whether they were issued one to begin with. For a while, back when Haley took down the South Carolina state flag, one could decently respect her, as I did. But when she raised her hand in that first debate saying she would support Trump if he were the nominee, and when she could not admit that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, she made clear that she was all about personal ambition—not about honor, or integrity, or the good of the country. Now she has erased any doubt. Elected officialdom of the Republican Party has morphed into a jamboree of toadies, cringers, mountebanks, and bootlickers, all clamoring for a touch of the Dear Leader’s hand. The vanishing few who might have brought the party back to decency, or at least to a recognition that Putinism, Trumpism, and autocracy in general are not desirable aspirational goals, have fled the arena (Romney, Kinzinger, Sasse, Burr, Toomey) or been kicked out of it (Cheney, Beutler, Rice). Others—Burgum, Stefanik, Vance, Rubio, the insufferable Ramaswamy—seek even lower ground and further mortification, obscenely soiling themselves for the exalted role of carrying the Dear Leader’s chamber pot as his veep.

What a ghastly parade of trembling obeisance was on display for our edification by those who scurried to a Manhattan courtroom, all bewailing their leader’s Inquisitorial persecution, all prostrating themselves on all fours with arms extended and faces kissing the ground in groveling submission to the grand panjandrum who reigns in their morally pitiful lives. Lapdogs Burgum, Vance, Ramaswamy, Johnson, Rick Scott, Tuberville, Boebert, Gaetz, and almost two dozen other House Republicans all cowered before him, knowingly supporting a despotic authoritarian who instigated a violent, attempted coup against their country, and thus they knowingly undermine democracy itself. With their presence in Manhattan, as Lawrence O’Donnell observed, all were debasing themselves, if further debasement is possible, by aligning with a man known to have paid a porn star to keep a sexual encounter under wraps before an election and shortly after his third son was born. Normally the grovelers might consider their support of extra-marital sex with porn stars a questionable career strategy, not to mention their support of lying about it, but for His sake–and ultimately theirs–exceptions can be made.

Not one of them has a drop of the courage of Navalny in their unwillingness to publicly whisper even a word of reproach, even the barest intimation of doubt, against the man who has said that he would suspend the Constitution and who clearly intends to be an unconstrained dictator. And unlike Navalny, all they might lose is their jobs, not their freedom and their lives. Meanwhile Russia and China are celebrating, clinking their champagne glasses and toasting the cancer metastasizing through the world’s most consequential democracy. Join us, Putin and Xi are saying; and a significant plurality of the country—easily enough to win the Electoral College—is drooling at the prospect of doing so.

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.

(Title from the witches scene in Macbeth)

I am re-reading the eighteen sea novels in the Aubrey-Maturin series by the truly incomparable Patrick O’Brian, novels deemed by one NYT critic as “the best historical novels ever written,” and flooded with superlatives and accolades from dozens of other reviewers. The prose is simply beyond compare; the characters are developed to the finest pitch; the plots are multifaceted, adventurous, and gripping. I am in the second novel now, Post Captain, and there is a passage in which Captain Aubrey, who is hated by Admiral Harte, refers to the latter as combining “ignorance and malice.” That got me to thinking of friends of democracy’s favorite whipping boy—how easily my mind drifts there—“the most dangerous American who has ever lived” according to John McCain’s former campaign manager Steve Schmidt. Ignorance and malice—dangerous enough when present separately, yet far more so when combined. But when the two are aligned with the power to exercise authority, the danger is immensely magnified, and a deadly storm is in the offing. Truly, something wicked this way comes. For my friends and relatives who will vote for Trump, all I could say—much of which I have said elsewhere on this forum—can be reduced to its lowest terms: In a second Trump presidency, very corrupt and despotic things will happen, our country and our democracy will be severely imperiled and degraded, Russia and China will rise, the world itself will be a lit fuse. You will, if you are honest with yourself, eventually regret your vote—perhaps even feel shame; possibly even fear.

This election, more than any other ever, will be the ultimate test of national character. Whatever the outcome of the popular vote, that is who we are. We are predominantly either a people whose values are allied with a core of honor and decency, or we are a people whose values are allied with a core of rot and sickness. We are not “the greatest generation.” But we are in danger, knowing what we know, of being the worst.

As Ukraine enters its second winter of war, American support for continuing aid to Ukraine in the form of arms and humanitarian assistance has dropped from 65% in June, almost sixteen months after Putin’s invasion, to 41% currently. This erosion of support was probably as inevitable as it is odious. Trump and other right-wing Republicans oppose the aid, and so naturally Trump voters, whose moral compasses seem so often wanting, oppose it as well. Their tax dollars shouldn’t go to some country we don’t give a damn about! Putin’s not a threat to us! And, as I and many others have noted elsewhere, Trump’s failed attempt to extort Zelenskyy is the very thing that led to the former president’s first impeachment.

I have already mentally compared Zelenskyy to Churchill (see “Churchills, not Chamberlains” in a previous blog). So it is “altogether fitting and proper,” to use Lincoln’s words from Gettysburg, to note what Churchill said to then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after the latter claimed “peace for our time” by sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, resulting in the Munich agreement: “You had a choice between dishonor and war. You have chosen dishonor, and you will have war.” After Zelenskyy’s country was invaded and he was advised to skip the country, he said, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” I swear I can hear Churchill cheering.

In 1948, ten years after the infamous event that became known to World War II history simply as “Munich,” Churchill published The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his monumental memoirist history of the war. In the chapter “The Tragedy of Munich,” he offers a moral lesson for the future that our time, and our country, should heed:

“It may be well here to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. . . . There is, however, one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies. This guide is called honour. It is baffling to reflect that what men call honour does not correspond always to Christian ethics. . . . Here, however, the moment came when Honour pointed the path of Duty, and also when right judgment of the facts at that time would have reinforced its dictates.”

His future is our present. He continues:

“For the French Government to leave her faithful ally, Czechoslovakia, to her fate was a melancholy lapse from which flowed terrible consequences. Not only wise and fair policy, but chivalry, honour, and sympathy for a small threatened people made an overwhelming concentration. Great Britain, who would certainly have fought if bound by treaty obligations [as France was to Czechoslovakia], was nevertheless deeply involved, and it must be recorded with regret that the British Government not only acquiesced but encouraged the French Government in a fatal course.”

It should be noted that France and Britain had already sacrificed Austria without a fight. It was not until September 1, 1939, a year after Munich and after France and Britain had shamefully allowed a weak Germany to violate the 1919 Versailles treaty by re-arming to the point of military supremacy in their vain hope of “peace,” that the war officially began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Who knows how long the U. S. would have remained isolationist had not Japan done Britain and France—and Europe itself—the enormous favor of attacking Pearl Harbor over two years later?

It should also be noted that in 1994 the United States, along with the United Kingdom, Ukraine and, of all countries, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, which provided Ukraine with security assurances in exchange for its surrendering of its nuclear weapons.

So let’s change the countries and a few tenses in Churchill’s lead sentence of his second paragraph: “For the American government to leave her faithful ally, Ukraine, to her fate would be a melancholy lapse from which will flow terrible consequences.” Not only is helping Ukraine and its “small threatened people”—in the form of money and arms only, let us remember, not American troops—“wise and fair policy,” but also the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do, the absolutely necessary thing to do.

Tom Nichols (former Republican and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College; also five-time Jeopardy champ), has a great November 16 essay in the digital The Atlantic. He argues that Trump has finally crossed the line from mere authoritarianism to full-blown fascism, which he defines and characterizes in a compelling paragraph. He notes how he (Nichols) was reluctant to use the word fascism earlier partly because he was aware of how emotionally potent words are sometimes used and inflated for their dramatic effect, like war on poverty, war on drugs, and war on terror, and how that very inflation ultimately diminishes their impact.

I remember expressing the same idea when I reviewed a book on ageism years ago that, among various other sins, compared in some detail ageism (prejudice against old people) to Nazism, as if a Holocaust survivor might agree and say “oh yeah, they’re about equal.” The problem, of course, is that when you hyper-inflate your use of a dramatic word, or draw a comparison between two very unequal things, a critical auditor or reader sees the disjunct between what you want him to think and the actual reality, and that undermines your credibility. It also can be a disservice to history, as the ageism authors proved, by equating non-equal things in order to enhance the ignominy of the speaker’s (in this case the authors’) particular bete noire. I suspect this was Madeline Albright’s reluctance to characterize American politics of just a few years ago as fascist because she had experienced it first-hand as a young girl in Europe. Nichols was wary of the “f-word” when applied to Trump early on, observing that he could see Trump’s potential fascism but did not want to use the term because Trump had not yet “crossed the line.” But Nichols says that now Trump has crossed that line in two recent bellowing, semi-stream-of-consciousness speeches, one in which he described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” and the other, in Claremont, New Hampshire, where he says:

“We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

This is Mein Kampf language, pure and simple. Note that there is not a reference to “radical right thugs,” such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the modern American equivalent of Hitler’s Brownshirts. The word vermin is also right out of Hitler’s playbook, suggesting that the Jews of Hitler’s era, and the immigrants, antifa, and Black Lives Matter of ours, are “sick” and less than human, and need to be “root[ed] out.” Given Trump’s limited vocabulary, his use of vermin may suggest that at least some of the speech was ghost-written, and if so, that just tells us how surrounded he is by fellow fascists.  The choice of vaguely archaic, almost biblical verbs–drive out, cast out, throw off, root out--implies Hitlerian purification, but the means of purification are not specific–concentration camps? Deportation to–somewhere? Imprisonment? Murder? Civil War? Meanwhile Trump’s “poisoning the blood of our country” is exactly the same as Hitler’s semi-sacred, race-pure Aryanism, and it’s designed to summon from the deep the grievances and resentments of whites who are unable or unwilling to see contemporary fascism when it stares them in the face.

Add to all of this Trump’s promise of “retribution” if he is re-elected. Has there ever been a presidential candidate whose party platform consists of his personal, self-proclaimed victimization and his consequent infliction of “retribution”? And is our nation so currently debased that over forty percent of its voters have been conned into thinking that is what they want?

As I’ve suggested before, this is no longer just about one man vs. another, an honorable Democrat vs. an honorable Republican. This is about voting for democracy, or voting against it.