John Rachal's Blog

The American idea, that individual freedom is the supreme virtue and the franchise is its mechanism, labors against our baser instincts. Our truth falls short of our aspirations, manifested in and hanging between our dueling polarities: Jefferson the Declaration author and Jefferson the slaveowner; religious freedom and hellfire fundamentalism; Harvard-Berkeley-Princeton brilliance and Americans incapable of finding the U.S. on a world map; American soldiers liberating Dachau and machine-gunning at My Lai; “Give me your tired” and razor wire border fences; the Trail of Tears and manifest destiny; Tuskegee airmen and Jim Crow; Trumpish wealth and Delta poverty; The Donna Reed Show and The Feminine Mystique; forty million without health insurance and elective cosmetic surgeries; capital punishment and “the better angels of our nature.” Sometimes the polarities are not Manichean goods and evils but merely profound tensions, like liberty vs. equality, pluribus vs. unum, Whitman bravado vs. Dickinson intimacy, Twainian Tom Sawyer innocence vs. Letters from the Earth embittered experience. Hegel-like, the theses and the antitheses clash—occasionally, as with Jefferson and Twain, in a single individual. Sometimes in those clashes a just synthesis is possible. But in others, helping those better angels to prevail is our enduring challenge.

I wrote the above in October of 2007 and entered it in a contest for the best essay on “the American Idea,” the winner to be published in The Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic). The rules stipulated that the essay could not exceed 200 words, and I strained to meet that limit, and in fact mine was exactly 200 words. As it turned out, the winner was a person of some national recognition, and his essay tripled the limit, to my and I suspect other entrants’ considerable annoyance.

Sixteen months into his presidency, in May of 2018, Donald Trump told then National Security Adviser John Bolton to eliminate the National Security Council’s global health security unit, which he did.

By January 2020, Trump was told of the dangers of the coronavirus, and on January 22, he said he wasn’t worried, “not at all,” and that “we have it totally under control.” His see-no-evil approach meant weeks of delay in implementing social distancing and ramping up production of masks, protective medical gear, and ventilators.

On January 27, presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today in which he stated “Trump’s demonstrated failures of judgment and his repeated rejection of science make him the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health challenge.”

On January 30, the World Health Organization declared the virus an international public health emergency.

On January 31, Trump closed U. S. borders to foreign nationals (but not Americans) who had been in China over the last 14 days. While probably a good move, it was also an easy decision in that it had little if any economic impact and was in keeping with Trump’s larger immigration policies.

Even Tucker Carlson, conservative host of a Fox News show and ardent defender of the president, began warning about the virus on his show as early as February 3. He had a two hour meeting with the president at Mar-a-Lago on March 7, trying to convince him of the health danger of the virus and how it might threaten the president’s re-election.

On March 5, the World Health Organization (WHO) implored world leaders to prepare for the outbreak, its leader stating that the “epidemic can be pushed back, but only with a collective, coordinated, and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government.” On the same day, Vice-President Pence states that there were not enough tests for the virus.

On March 6, Trump started the day signing an $8.3 billion bill for healthcare and vaccine research, noting that he had only asked for $2.5 billion, and stating that the virus “came out of nowhere” but that “we’re taking care of it.” Later in that same day he stated that “anyone that wants a test can get a test,” a statement not only false then but false over a month later. As of April 17 only 146,000 tests were being conducted daily, prompting one commentator to calculate that at that petty pace, it would be January of 2027 before the whole population could have been tested. Trump spent the rest of March 6 and much of the next two days going to fundraisers and playing golf, along with a visit to tornado victims in Tennessee and a visit to the CDC, at no time modeling or demonstrating any concern for social distancing. Trump himself shook hands numerous times at all of these venues, as many as one hundred in Tennessee alone.

On March 11, the WHO declared the outbreak to be a global pandemic.

On March 13, in response to a question concerning the wisdom of the closure of the National Security health office, Trump replied, “I didn’t do it. I don’t know anything about it.” On the same day, he was asked if he accepted any responsibility for the failure to begin testing for the contagion. The man who on the campaign trail said that he would be the greatest president in history, possibly excepting Lincoln, responded in classic Trump style, “No, I don’t take any responsibility at all.”

In a March 21 press conference, Trump touted some antiviral drugs that Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci said would require testing to determine their efficacy and safety. Trump replied, “I disagree. I feel good about them. That’s all it is. Just a feeling. You know, I’m a smart guy.”

Back in January, the president stated that “China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus,” and shortly after a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump praised his counterpart as “strong, sharp, and powerfully focused on leading the counterattack on the Coronavirus.” But after a Chinese theory emerged that the U.S. planted the virus in China, the president flipped, saying that “it could have been stopped in its tracks” in China. Donald Trump Jr. also forgot what his father had said earlier about Xi being “powerfully focused on leading the counterattack,” tweeting on March 29 in a grammatically-challenged diatribe that “Anyone praising China’s ‘leadership’ in responding that the virus should be scorned for being the authoritarian/communist propagandist that they are.” At least the “authoritarian . . . propagandist” part was right.

On April 8, ABC News reported that the intelligence community submitted a report in November, over four months prior, and two months prior to the earlier reported date on which Trump was warned about the virus. The November intelligence report noted that the outbreak in China could have “cataclysmic” consequences. This information was a component of the daily briefing all presidents receive. Peter Navarro, a Trump economics adviser, also provided at least one memo to the president warning him of upcoming dangers posed by the virus. On April 7, Trump reported that he had not read the memo (“Peter sends a lot of memos”), and on April 8, he said that he did not remember being briefed on it. Yet he also said on April 8 that “people were shocked that I reacted so quickly.” He has also stated that he knew “months ago” that the virus would become a pandemic.

On Friday night, April 3, Trump fired the intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, whom Trump had appointed, for doing his job; namely, turning over the whistleblower report to congress that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment trial. Trump said “this man is a disgrace to IGs.” Michael Horowitz, Justice Department IG and chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, praised Atkinson’s “professionalism, integrity, and commitment to the rule of law.” On April 6, Trump continued his war against inspectors general, whose roles are designed to be independent of political influence, by lambasting Christi Grimm, principal deputy inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. Her crime was to have surveyed 46 hospitals and reported that they claimed significant shortages of equipment to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Calling her an Obama holdover, despite her having also served in two Republican administrations, her report revealed a lack of hospital preparedness and thus was “another fake dossier.”

On April 4, the president who had been ignoring and downplaying the dangers of the virus now indicated that it was “the worst thing the country has probably ever seen,” apparently forgetting that we endured over four years of civil war, two world wars, an influenza epidemic in 1918 estimated to have killed 50 million world wide, and a great depression.

In March, the president stated, uncharacteristically, “I think the media has been very fair.” By April 13, a total flip flop: “I wish we had a fair media in this country, and we really don’t.”

On Tuesday, April 14, Trump stated that “We’re going to put a hold on money spent to the W.H.O., we’re going to put a very powerful hold on it.” A reporter asked him a few minutes later if this were a good time to do that, and Trump replied, “I’m not saying we’re going to do it, but we’re going to look at it.” The reporter pushed back, saying, “You did say you were going to do it,” to which Trump replied, “No I didn’t. I said we’re going to look at it.”

On April 13, in his characteristic way of assuming authority without responsibility, Trump stated that only he had authority to relax social distancing policies and to determine when the economy could re-open. “The president of the United States calls the shots. When someone is president of the United States, the authority is total.” Governors of both parties made clear that they were not ceding control of decision-making in their states to a president seeking to portray himself as their boss. By the next day, Trump flipped, saying “The governors are going to be running their own states,” and “I’m not going to be putting any pressure on any governor to re-open.” But without the least sense of self-contradiction, and unable to see himself as anything other than master of all he surveyed, he flopped back, saying, “I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a re-opening.” Happy to play the alpha male and “authorize” the states’ re-openings, Trump claims that the states have primary responsibility for masks, ventilators, and testing. Authority is his; responsibility is other people’s.

On April 3, Trump fielded a question about whether he was thinking about having his name on the stimulus checks being sent to American citizens. He disingenuously replied as if this meant he would be required to personally sign them. “There’s millions of checks. I’m going to be signing them? No.” On April 15, the Treasury Department confirmed that the printed name “President Donald J. Trump” will appear at the bottom of the stimulus checks being mailed to Americans not receiving their payouts by direct deposit. Trump had recommended to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that his (Trump’s) signature be added to the checks. Though his signature will not appear, his printed name will appear. The Treasury Department denies it, but the addition will delay the mailing of the checks according to the president of the IRS’s Professional Managers Association.

By the middle of April, the clash between the health interests of the country and the economic interests of the country had crystalized. Trump from the beginning had prioritized economics, inevitably causing him to be dilatory and unprepared in addressing the dangers the virus represented. Partisanship was emerging, though it had been in the background, and to some extent the foreground, all along. MAGA-hatted protests, with concerns over 22 million job losses, 17% unemployment, and especially governors restricting protesters’ movements, were breaking out demanding re-opening of states. Counter-protesters, fearing a premature re-opening would lead to a second wave of the virus in the absence of much broader testing and loosened social distancing requirements, were calling for stay-at-home restrictions to be continued for now. Trump, finding himself on the horns of a re-election dilemma, sides with and encourages the re-openers, and on April 17 tweets (two minutes after a Fox News report on the protests) “Liberate Michigan,” “Liberate Minnesota,” and “Liberate Virginia,” where Democratic governors have incurred wrath from those protesting social distancing and closure policies. Terrified of the possible electoral repercussions of his incompetent handling of the crisis, Trump resorts to his usual weapons of choice, namely externalizing all blame, disavowal of personal responsibility, and demonizing of critics, all aimed at stoking right-wingers and others among his base needing scapegoats and fearful their president would pay for his zig-zagging ineptitude in November.

If Mr. Trump had been president from 1941 to 1945, we would be speaking German now.

Compiled from USA Today, CNN, ABC World News, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The News Hour.

Two mobsters walk into a bar. They’re burly guys, and they both have bulges under their coats. The first one says to the barkeep, “We need to see your boss.”

“He’s not really available right now.”

“Tell him two associates of Don Corleone want to chat with him.”

The barkeep does as he is told. The bar’s owner comes out, a little intimidated.

“Mr. Smith, ya gotta nice establishment here,” Mobster Number One says, surveying his surroundings. “Real nice. Real cozy-like. Lotsa nice customers, I’m sure. Never had no trouble here, I’m sure. Yeah, trouble is bad, the kinda thing ya wanna avoid. Know what I mean? Ya know, fires, and bad stuff like that. We can help ya. I’d like ya to do us a favor though. Ya know we sell insurance. Very reasonable. Two grand a month. Ya think about it, OK? We’ll see ya next week.”

Later that day, a sweaty Mr. Smith goes to the police station and finally gets in to see Detective Jones. The bar owner had a camera that captured the earlier exchange in both video and audio. He tells Detective Jones, “That was a shakedown. You need to arrest these guys, and Mr. Corleone. They tried to extort me for two grand a month. They won’t burn my place down if I hand over two grand a month.”

Detective Jones sees and hears the recorded conversation on Mr. Smith’s phone. He’s skeptical. “Mr. Smith, did they use the word extortion?” “No” is Mr. Smith’s response. Did they use the word bribery?” Another “No.” “Did they say, ‘if you give us two grand a month, we won’t burn your place down’?” A third “No.”

“But detective, when he said, ‘I’d like ya to do us a favor though,’ that very word though tells me the two things are connected, even if he didn’t use the word extortion.”

“Look, Mr. Smith, what they did was maybe inappropriate. I wouldn’t have done it myself. But it’s not like it’s a quid pro quo, or bribery, or extortion. It’s not like they conditioned the safety of your place on you having to pay them every month. They just made some comments that might not have even been related. And besides, just because they work for Mr. Corleone doesn’t mean he’s involved. Did they say that he directed them? No. You can’t send a guy to trial for that. It’s just not a crime or even a misdemeanor. In fact, we might need to investigate you. Bringing false charges against an upstanding citizen and his employees could be a sham. And do you have the proper license for your bar?”

Yesterday morning I’m sitting in the waiting room for my eye doctor appointment, innocently reading NPR News on my phone, and two rural women, perhaps a daughter and her 70-ish mother, come in and sit nearby. An older man and woman come in and sit down, three feet away, and eight or nine feet across from me. The man strikes up a conversation with the two women. Within a minute or two the conversation turns political. The next thing I know, the man is saying Trump is the greatest of our presidents (I start shaking my head in sad resignation), followed by his telling them who our two worst presidents were: FDR and—I knew it was coming, as inevitable as sunrise—Obama. FDR, he explains, knew about a Japanese invasion coming two weeks before Pearl Harbor. Apparently assuming no explanation is necessary, he offers not even a specious reason for Obama, though I’d put my money on race. So what does the older woman say, clearly in such obvious agreement that the sides do not even require identification? “I think it’s just come down to good vs. evil.” And I thought, “yes ma’am, you’re right—but maybe not in the way you think.”

It set me back for the whole day, despite my reading of The Daily Stoic. I’m a Mississippian, but even so, such views expressed right in front of me still hit me like a punch in the gut. I probably should have offered a rejoinder, but it wasn’t my conversation, and I just shook my head. Who is living in Alice’s Wonderland, me or them? My truth is their are-you-crazy? lie. Their truth is my are-you-crazy? lie. Their yes is my no, their bad is my good, their black is my white, their up is my down. Either for me or for them, facts just don’t matter, or, more likely, twist themselves through some contorted and fevered illogic into their opposites. The nurse calls me in.

To my own satisfaction, at least, I’ve basically figured Trump out: dishonest, authoritarian, self-dealing, ignorant, bullying, racist, amoral, narcissistic, incompetent. The folks in the waiting room and upwards of 40% of the country have a totally different take, and I keep trying to figure out why. Even accepting the estimate that roughly 30% of any given population have “authoritarian tendencies,” what do they like so much about a man I find so abominable? Well, he’s “tough.” He breaks the rules. He tells it like it is. He never has to admit he’s wrong. He hates all those foreigners taking our jobs and ruining our way of life. He sticks it to those pointy-headed pinko liberals bent on raising our taxes and confiscating our guns. But beyond that, forever Trumpers, let’s get specific: What has he done that makes you like him so much? Do you like it when he lies to you, as when he said Mexico would pay for the wall? Or when he said he would have won the popular vote if it hadn’t been for all the fraud? Or when he said he saw the video of the Muslims dancing in the streets in New Jersey after 9/11? Did you like it when he stiffed those small contractors—often little guys, with a handful of employees—by refusing to pay the amount specified in the contract, then telling them to sue him, then stalling in court for years, sometimes bankrupting them? Do you like how he admires Putin and other autocrats and dictators like Kim Jong Un, Duarte of the Philippines, el-Sissi of Egypt, Erdogan of Turkey, and others? Do you like how he groped women and bragged about it on tape, but somehow claims that he never did it? Would you like it if he groped your wife or your daughter? Do you like how he sold out our intelligence community by saying how “strong” Putin was when the Russian denied interference in our 2016 election? Do you like how he mocked a genuine American war hero like John McCain? Do you like how he paid a doctor to say he had bone spurs in his feet to keep him out of Vietnam, especially if you or your friends or relatives got drafted or volunteered to go?

So what else do you like about him? Do you like how he tried to extort our ally Ukraine by withholding $391 million in arms—already appropriated by Congress—to help them fight his pal Putin unless Ukraine’s president publicly announced an investigation into the Bidens and into how Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in our 2016 election? Do you like how under his presidency, the former anti-Russia GOP has become the pro-Russia GOP? Do you like how he tries to use the presidency to make a buck by trying to have official events at his properties? Do you like how he doesn’t have the stomach to fire people face to face but uses Twitter instead? Did you like how he put a “perfect,” totally innocent phone call on a highly classified platform so no one could see how perfect and innocent it was? Do you like his megalomaniacal bragging about his “great and unmatched wisdom,” how he knows more than all “his” generals, how “only I can fix it,” how he’s a “genius,” and how he’s “the Chosen One”?

How about some more things you might like? Do you like how the generals who have worked for him shake their heads at how ignorant he is of world affairs or how he acts in ways contrary to our national interests, causing them to resign or be fired? Do you like, for example, how he betrayed our Kurdish allies, allies who did almost all the ground fighting against ISIS and lost almost 11,000 men doing so, by pulling our guys out and giving a green light to Turkey to go in and clean the Kurds out? And how his buddy Putin was then able to fill in the void we left, enhancing Russian influence? Do you like how he considers climate change a Chinese hoax? Do you just love how he and the GOP got that tax cut, 63% of which goes to the top 20% of earners, and nearly one-fourth goes to the top 5%? Are you in that top 20%, making over $150,100, or in that top 5%, making over $303,200? Do you like how he said that tax cut wouldn’t help him at all, and that his rich friends would be mad at him? Do you really think he cares anything about you other than your vote and your continued gullibility? And do you love how the GOP used to claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility, but then passed that tax cut that adds about three trillion to the national debt over ten years and puts the annual deficit at a trillion dollars for the first time? Do you like how his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called him a “moron,” and was honest enough not to deny that he said it? Do you like how he obstructs justice by firing FBI Director Comey and tries to prevent people under subpoena from testifying before congress? Do you like how in a 2011 poll only 30% of white evangelicals said that someone committing “immoral personal acts” could be an effective public servant, but now 72% say so? Do you like how he represents pretty much the opposite of what Christians, which he claims to be, would say constitutes character?

Two other questions. If Obama had done any of these things, not to mention a majority of  them, would you have liked him a little more? Or would you be screaming “impeachment” and “lock him up”?

The first time it happened was 1824, when John Quincy Adams beat Andrew Jackson. The next time was 1876, when Rutherford B. Hayes beat Samuel Tilden. The third time was 1888, when Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland. The fourth time was 2000, when George W. Bush beat Al Gore. And the last time was 2016, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. So out of fifty-eight presidential elections, it has happened five times, almost ten percent. Of the five elections in this century, it has happened twice, or forty percent. In all five, it has happened quite legally, in accordance with the Constitution.

What is that “it”? In each of these elections, the person with fewer votes won. Yet the sine qua non of majority rule is that the individual with the most votes wins. The individual voter is the baseline of meaningful democracy, the most elemental characteristic of democratic government. The idea of one person, one vote was central to the civil rights movement; it is the fulcrum of our very sense of fairness. So why do we knowingly and willingly allow a system that potentially violates this most fundamental article of democracy to persist, especially when we have seen that violation actually occur five times in our history? At least in a country calling itself, above all, a democracy, are five times of the wrong person becoming president of the United States not enough?

We do not need a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college, a system of presidential election regarded—tellingly—by some founders including Madison and Hamilton as a means of holding in check the presumed dangers of the popular vote. Madison feared “factions,” and Hamilton, in The Federalist, number 68, feared that the popular vote might allow “foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” What an ironic concern given that the electoral college, not the popular vote, allowed Russia to focus its trolling in the 2016 election on a few “battleground” states. Many on both sides of the aisle were, and are, outraged by that Russian interference. But who in congress expressed even the mildest protest in 2000 or 2016 at the even greater outrage of giving the presidency to the person whom we know got fewer votes? We can combat Russian interference, but persisting in a system that has allowed the vote loser to win five times we do to ourselves.

No burdensome constitutional amendment is necessary, and lovers of the electoral college, with its element of representative rather than pure democracy, can rest content. Moreover, the issue is non-partisan: the electoral college does not inherently favor one party or the other. All that is necessary is a federal law making universal what Maine and Nebraska have already done, namely, dividing each state’s electoral votes in approximate proportion to its popular vote. No more winner-take-all victories. No more of all New York’s twenty-nine electoral votes quadrennially going to the Democratic candidate while all thirty-six of Texas’s votes inevitably go to the Republican. No more Mississippi Democrats knowing their presidential vote is a total waste, while California Republicans feel precisely the same. No more 78 thousand votes in three states trumping 2.86 million votes nationwide as in the 2016 election—making a mockery of one person, one vote in the process. No more “battleground” states and boring foregone conclusion states; they are all battleground states. No more of candidates ignoring voters in the foregone conclusion states and nearly taking up residence in the “battleground” states. No more of folks piously proclaiming that “the people” elected Candidate A when in fact “the people” actually voted for Candidate B, but Candidate A “wins” and is catapulted into the Oval Office by an enormous flaw in American democracy. And finally, and most importantly, no more of the simple debacle of the wrong person of either party living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. How many elections do we need to figure out that giving the highest office in the land to the person who got fewer votes is openly and ostentatiously anti-democratic? We don’t need to have rigged elections like so many other countries in order to defy the will of the majority; we openly and unashamedly defy the will of the majority.

Let’s fix that.

In deciding who is the truth-teller after hearing the senate testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh as the latter seeks to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court, it is worthwhile to note a number of pertinent facts, including: that Dr. Ford has taken and passed a polygraph test, while Judge Kavanaugh has not; that Dr. Ford made no known misleading comments to the Judiciary Committee, while Judge Kavanaugh did (stating, for example, that other attendees at the social gathering in question said the assault “did not happen” when in fact they said only that they had no knowledge of it, two very different things that any judge, of all people, should be able to distinguish between; or calling being a girl’s “alumnius” just being her friend); that Judge Kavanaugh alleged a bizarre conspiracy and “political hit” against him somehow involving the “revenge” of the Clintons; that the Republican committee chairman refused to subpoena the third person in the room during the alleged assault; that Judge Kavanaugh repeatedly evaded multiple questions asking him if he wanted an FBI investigation that might clear his name, while Dr. Ford asked for such an investigation; that Republicans on the committee accused Senator Feinstein of attempting to spring a last minute assault on Judge Kavanaugh by withholding Dr. Ford’s letter to her for weeks when in fact Senator Feinstein was abiding by her consent to keep the matter confidential; that Judge Kavanaugh’s high school friend, Mark Judge, wrote a book called Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk in which he describes a character “Bart O’Kavanaugh” as belligerent and sometimes passing out when drunk; that a Republican female friend of the Judge from their days at Yale declared in a letter to Cory Booker that she had seen him so drunk that it would be totally understandable for him not to remember events during those periods of drunkenness.

But for those assured of Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness for a Supreme Court seat, set aside for a moment those facts and ask three questions in determining the truthfulness of the two witnesses before the committee:

(1) Which one has something to gain by lying, and which one does not?

(2) Which one was often evasive in answering questions, and which one was not?

(3) Even if we rule out intentional lying by either witness, which one of the witnesses is more likely to remember the event: the one who knew her attacker by face, name, and social acquaintance; who remembered specific and telling details about both the setting and the attack itself; who told her therapist six years ago about an attack when she was fifteen and named her attacker to her husband sixteen years ago; who was traumatized by that event; and who did not want to become part of a political battle and did so only when her name was leaked presumably by friends to the press? Or, on the other hand, the one who, at that time, had a reputation for heavy drinking and drunkenness, has acknowledged his fondness for “skis” (i.e., “brewskis”), and has enormous incentive—a Supreme Court seat—to suppress a memory of something he may have done when so inebriated that he could have been physiologically incapable of remembering the event at all?

Let’s don’t talk politics for now. Let’s talk character.

A great American died this past weekend. And an American president, of the same political party—a petty, weak man incapable of a scintilla of grace—slinks to his corner, jealous of the honors and especially the respect and even affectionate regard being accorded John McCain, an affectionate regard that will never be accorded Donald Trump. Trump knows this, and it is central to the Iago-like hatred he has borne for McCain. In some reptilian way, Trump knows that McCain—whatever his flaws—had character, character largely built by transcending his flaws and seeking not his self interest but the national interest, even the global interest. This is alien to Trump; he seethes, knowing that he suffers grievously by any comparison to McCain. Like Iago’s hatred of Othello, Trump’s hatred is rooted in jealousy, though it is deepened by McCain’s criticism and Trump’s own sense of entitlement. After all, he achieved what McCain tried and failed to do twice.

McCain was not a war hero because he was a POW. He was a war hero because the North Vietnamese sought a propaganda victory when they discovered that he was the son and grandson of important navy admirals, and they tried to persuade him to accept an early trip home. He refused since his fellow POWs would be left behind. No doubt McCain’s decision was made just a tiny bit easier because he would have regarded a choice to accept his captors’ offer as dishonorable, and he would have hated the ignominy of knowing that he had taken a comparatively easy out while leaving his brothers behind. So possibly fear of dishonor helped him choose honor. But he did choose it, whereas Trump would have been wholly incapable of McCain’s choice, oblivious to the moral implications and pitfalls. Instead, he behaved then as he always has, his moral compass perpetually fixed on ME, in this instance by getting some physician to give him a medical exemption from the draft by claiming that his patient had bone spurs in his feet. So, no Vietnam for Trump, yet all the while he covets martial glory by looking quite fine in his military school uniform. (In a 1990s interview, Trump commented that trying to avoid venereal diseases was his “personal Vietnam”). Decades later, Trump, jealous of the honor accorded McCain for his service and endurance of five and a half years as a POW, could not help himself and petulantly denigrated that endurance by claiming that he “liked people who weren’t captured.”

It is impossible to imagine Trump doing what McCain did at a McCain town hall meeting in 2008. In front of a large crowd, a woman said she didn’t trust Obama as a Muslim and an Arab. Though McCain missed an opportunity to say that Muslims and Arabs can also be good Americans, he did not miss the opportunity to correct her, saying “No ma’am, no ma’am,” calling Obama a decent family man with whom he had serious policy disagreements. The response even elicited some booing. Two years later, in 2010, he did backslide a bit, turning rightward to appease conservative voters in his senate re-election bid. But Trump could have sprouted wings and flown into the air before he could have corrected a supporter inaccurately disparaging his opponent. He is so controlled by friendly audiences, and he so needs their adulation, that he could never have risked their criticism or disdain by saying anything that might have undermined their adoration. This is Lesson One in the art of the demagogue.

At some core level, even the ever-self-deceiving Donald Trump must surely have recognized his monumental inferiority to a man who, whatever his human shortcomings, had actual principles, demonstrated physical and moral courage, acted in what he thought was the best interest of the country, did not lie, did not approach his every single act in terms of how it might affect him personally, who was not a sycophant (especially to despots), who did not wallow in a sewer of corruption. These two men were the antipodes of the Republican party, and it is no wonder that only under intense national pressure could Trump grudgingly offer a half-hearted statement of respect after McCain’s passing, negated by days of dithering and reluctance to lower the flag to half-mast. Trump looks in the mirror and initially sees himself as the greatest and most feared president who, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, declaims “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” But then, little doubts creep in, and he sees in the mirror the man he wishes he could be—but only fleetingly, and he soon dispels that glimpse of John McCain and returns to his greatest deception of all: seeing himself as a great man.

All the recent Charlottesville and KKK news reminded me of my own encounter with the Klan, fifty-one or fifty-two years ago when I was about seventeen. Martin Luther King was giving a speech c. late 1965 or early ’66 at Memorial Auditorium in downtown Raleigh, and the Klan decided to march in protest. I believe it was a Sunday afternoon. Several of my buddies decided, in our marvelously naive and cavalier way, to ride our motorcycles downtown and watch the parade. My memory is that the Klansmen were walking single file about ten feet from us, some in robes, some not, and some in a kind of militia-like uniform, the last of whom were carrying flashlights about fifteen or so inches long as weapons. I had never seen Klansmen or their robes before, and, ever the absurd provocateur, I called out “Where’s the party?” A short, thirty-ish, rather Snopes-like fellow took umbrage, and before you could say white supremacist, he darted out of line, landed a fine roundhouse punch to my left jaw, spit out “THAT’S where the party is!” and then quickly retreated back in line immediately behind one of the flashlight fellows. I had never actually been sucker-punched before (childhood fights being mostly wrestling matches), and more than anything I stood there simply shocked—“Damn! Some SOB just hit me!” A plain-clothes detective of some sort quickly came up to me, asked a question or two, including “Do you want to file charges?” Not having any particular desire to enmesh myself in the criminal justice system, I declined. Then, in the throes of Justice Outraged, I started heading off to find the culprit and, I guess, call him out, or at least call him something. I had gotten who knows how many yards at a brisk walk on the way to finding him when a close friend—then and now—proved his courage, friendship, and sanity by chasing after me and dissuading me from my dubious quest.

It’s amazing how foolish a young fellow can be when seen through his own old man’s eyes. Not just foolish for the initial taunt, but even more so for interacting with the Klan when I probably could have seen MLK.

So after ceaselessly decrying Obamacare, and multiple Republican attempts to eviscerate it with their depressingly hypocritical mantra to repeal and replace, the GOP finally controls both houses of Congress, the White House, and, soon enough, the Supreme Court. And yet, when finally in a position to repeal and replace, they come up with, to reprise George H. W. Bush’s famous criticism of Reaganomics as “voodoo economics,” Voodoo Healthcare 1.0. But alas, it is still far too liberal with the taxpayers’ money for the far-right House “Freedom Caucus” to stomach, and no Democrat is going to vote for actual repeal, so House Speaker Ryan’s Voodoo Healthcare 1.0 goes up in much deserved flames without even going to the floor for its inevitable No vote, much to the embarrassment of Republicans, the cheers of Democrats, and the usual whining of our Liar-in-Chief, Mr. Trump, who characteristically externalizes all blame to others, in this case the Democrats. Well gee, Donnie Boy, aside from the right-wingers who were poised to vote against it, did you really think that the party that passed Obamacare without a single Republican vote was going to suddenly have a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus experience and vote your way?

Whatever the flaws of Obamacare, it did re-set the bar such that real healthcare reform, aspiring, at least, to eventual universal care at affordable prices, is now firmly in the public mind, and even the Republicans must respond. It is no small irony—actually hypocrisy—that in the early 90s, Republican current senators Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch along with then senators Bob Dole and Richard Lugar and House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich latched on to the conservative Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute’s idea of an individual mandate for healthcare. Thus armed with the imprimatur of conservative think tank bona fides, they boldly proposed it as an alternative to anything First Lady Hillary Clinton might come up with. The theory was that if everyone had it, not just the sick and elderly, prices would be affordable, we’d have universal healthcare, and those who already had it would no longer be subsidizing the many who did not and who sought out hospital emergency rooms since hospitals could not turn them away. In the curious flip-flop of party politics, the Democrats—rarely averse to a touch of hypocrisy themselves and hoping for better—were extremely lukewarm about the mandate idea, being leery of its provenance, and so of course it was never passed. It was a reasonable idea then, and it was just as reasonable when Obama proposed it as a key element in his healthcare reform package. It was also reasonable when Massachusetts Republican Governor Mitt Romney signed the mandate into law in his state. But somehow, in that magical way that political hypocrisy is portrayed as high principle, when Obama promoted the idea, it suddenly became the work of the devil and represented a godless attack on capitalism and a government overreach heralding the birth of American totalitarianism. The Grassley-Hatch-Gingrich-Bob Dole embrace of the mandate in the early 90s was happily long forgotten, and Democrats were weak in reminding the populace of it, likely because their view of it back then when it was a conservative idea was moderately contrary to their own present enthusiasm. Romney, as presidential candidate in 2012, was not quite so fortunate in escaping the national amnesia, being frequently peppered with questions about Massachusetts’ more recent Romneycare. But, as an accomplished politician, he wriggled and squirmed and demurred at all comparisons of his mandate and Obama’s mandate.

Meanwhile Foxy News—sorry, Mr. Ailes and Mr. O’Reilly; well, not really—aka Foxy Nudes, aka Faux News, aka Fake News, rails against all things Obama and what was originally a Republican idea is now transmogrified into the work of Beelzebub himself. This stokes the Gullibles, and the GOP, fearing another entitlement, excoriates Obama and his diabolical and un-American plan. They suffer a serious blow when temporarily apostate Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts actually affirms the constitutional legitimacy of the mandate, giving Obama a rare 5-4 Court victory, and earning the Chief Justice the eternal loathing of those masses who are largely ignorant of The Affordable Care Act’s actual provisions but know very well which president concocted it, which is all they need. So Obamacare escapes an early grave. Nevertheless many uninsured do not enroll, especially many younger, healthier Americans, despite subsidies for lower income enrollees, and they are reluctantly willing to pay the modest penalty for failing to do so. Consequently, the “universal” part does not kick in well. Predictably insurance companies raise prices, partly because it’s just what they do, and partly because they are no longer allowed to refuse coverage for pre-existing conditions, nor are they allowed to kick someone off coverage for exceeding maximums allowed for expensive medical conditions.

Citizen Trump, and later candidate Trump, has managed to take about every side possible concerning healthcare, which obviously means he has no real convictions at all. He has stated, in a debate, “I like the mandate.” He has blamed legislators and insurance companies for being in thrall to each other. He has actually endorsed the importation of lower-priced Canadian drugs, competition among insurance companies across state lines, and even, back in the day, a national, single-payer system—all anathema to conservatives whose fierce opposition to all of those has forced him into line. Candidate Trump, whose own physician appears to have just been released from the local de-tox rehab center and who declared in a momentary fit of ecstasy that Trump is the healthiest candidate ever to run for the presidency, promises to repeal and replace Obamacare on his first day in office with “something terrific.” Naturally he doesn’t have the remotest idea what that would be, nor do his fellow Republicans, as evidenced by their recent failure to do what they have long promised despite their congressional majorities and Trump in the Big House. Now that the luster of “repeal and replace” has been tarnished a little, the current GOP shibboleths are “patient-centered healthcare” and universal “access” to healthcare. The first one trips off Republican tongues as if it actually means something, which of course it does not, but it makes a deliciously invidious comparison to Obamacare, which by implication must not be interested in patients at all. The second one, like all political rhetoric, also sounds appealing—“access.” Heck, who doesn’t want access? By what conceivable right does the many-tentacled government deny me “access” to something I want? The worm in that pretty apple, as Bernie Sanders pointed out to Ted Cruz in a post-election debate on healthcare, is that everyone already has access to healthcare, just as Bernie has access to buying a Maserati. But if you can’t afford it, then “access” is a sweet-sounding but meaningless term. Or, rather, what it does mean is that those who can afford it can have it, and those who can’t—well hey, it’s a Darwinian world out there.

And that is where the political divide really is: Is healthcare a right, whose costs are to be amortized among all Americans, with the wealthy subsidizing the unwealthy; or is it a normal commodity like cars or L. L. Bean coats, where those who cannot afford it, even those working full-time, will just have to do without? (Or, as Representative Chaffee has characterized it in Marie Antoinette fashion, they should quit buying a new cell phone every few months so they can afford it.) Obama has forced the Republicans to come forward a little; even they now must speak favorably of preserving the ban on excluding those with pre-existing conditions as well as allowing individuals to stay on their parents’ healthcare until age 26—both progressive features of Obamacare. The problem is that they want the dessert but don’t want the vegetables, the vegetables being the mandate and the higher taxes on the wealthy which are indispensable pieces to make the whole thing work. In that sense it is simple economics: the goodies have a cost, and if you take away the mechanisms for paying for the cost, the system falls apart.

Having promised for years, the Republicans are trapped in their “repeal and replace” rhetoric, and Democrats are firmly resolved that no repeal will take place with their help. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has, however, offered that if repeal is abandoned by Republicans in favor of fixing some of Obamacare’s problems, Democrats would be open to that. Two obvious reforms would be allowing insurance company competition across state lines, and allowing Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices. Aren’t Republicans all for capitalist competition? Well, they are at least until corporate lobbyists with lots of dollars to dispense convince them otherwise. And what possible objection would Democrats have? Other bones will be much more difficult to pick, especially the “right” of healthcare vs. “access” to it, and the who pays, who benefits implications of that. Nobody, of course, is talking about a single-payer plan, as Canada and Britain have. Research indicates that those countries have lower per capita costs and equal if not better health outcomes. But that is not on the table—Democrats are too cowed to mention it and are aware of the corporate interests that would never allow it, while Republicans support those corporate interests and have screamed “government takeover” so long that some actually believe it.

So we’re still waiting for “something terrific.”