John Rachal's Blog

The following was written before the election.

The fellow whom we hired to cut some trees for us  generously dropped by a second time since we changed our minds about what needed to come down. Mr. Michaels is probably my age, good ol’ boy, wearing bib overalls, had the gentlest voice, and for all the world could have been your decent country boy grandpa. Deep in the Mississippi Bible Belt, he is, no doubt, a good churchgoer, possibly a deacon, and a fine family man, beloved by his daughters. He’s also wearing the same Trump 2020 hat he was wearing a few weeks ago. I ignored it then and hoped to ignore it today. But somehow the driveway conversation drifted to Montana, and he mentioned going there earlier this year and he and his family walk right into a restaurant not wearing masks. Here we go. Implying that the restaurant staff realize the silliness of masks, he makes clear that nobody says a word. Masks don’t work at all, he informs my wife and me, stuff is just too small to be blocked by a mask, and people pushing masks are just trying to take down our president. My wife and I are both trying to just get him on his way, but like a moth to the flame, I say, “Well, we’re on the other side of that”; he shrugs. Then, apropos of the political divide, he says, “I just hate all the lies.” Val said my mouth opened, presumably aghast, but just in case I was about to rebut, she said, sotto voce, “let it go.” I said, trying to shuffle him off as quickly as possible, “OK, we’ll see you next week.”

He hates all the lies? It was a revelation, though not without its humor. Can there be any more titanic irony than those words spilling from a Trump man? Those like me who see Donald Trump as the most consummate liar—indeed, gifted liar, if judged by the number of his marks—ever to even run for the presidency are blown back on their heels to discover that those on the right wing consider them to be the ones spewing daily mendacities. Trump, Fox News, social media, anti-deep state warriors, and conspiracy fantasists nationwide have turned truth on its head, turned the world upside down. The true believers, rejecting reality as too mundane and simplistic, knowingly and unknowingly spin fantasies and magical thinking, speak of “alternate facts,” and assault truth as fake news. According to The Washington Post, Trump has made over 20,000 false and misleading statements since taking office. His demagoguery as president is unparalleled, and even his demonstrable lies fall on the true believers like refreshing summer rain on the fertile soil of their grievance and discontent. I told Val that Mr. Michaels probably went home and said, “Martha, I had these two customers today that were damned Democrats, and they were white too! I betcha they thought our president was a liar!” And just today Trump was re-spewing the lie about the Democrats dropping “under God” from the pledge at their convention. At least until this president, you at least had to tell plausible lies. Now you can say that the Democrats have been negotiating with the Martians and the Venusians to take over the world so that they can fully establish their Satan-worshiping, pedophiliac, child-eating caliphate. Through the megaphone of Fox News, Facebook, and creepy social media sites and shares, the Mr. Michaels of the world lap it up and conclude, “Well damn! So they are doing it! I was wondering if they were doing that!” 

I know I’ve been polarized. I know the Mr. Michaels of the country believe their narratives as strongly as I do mine. So could we both be equally wrong, or worse, could they be right and I be wrong? I take some solace—in fact, a lot of solace—in the fact that I have a pretty good education; I read things other than Facebook memes and shares; intelligent people, including a few in the GOP or with conservative points of view, agree with me on Trump and his enablers; I have some capacity for critical thinking; indeed, I entertain the possibility that I could be wrong, or at least partly wrong. So, even recognizing this clash between the ideologies of Trump et al. and everyone else from Lincoln Project conservatives to Sanders left-enders, I wonder how far off base I am to see parallels between Germany of the 30s and Trump’s America, and specifically the mind of Trump himself and the despotism of Putin of Russia and Xi of China, obviously; but also Orban of Hungary, Bolsonaro of Brazil, Duterte of the Philippines, Lukasovic of Belarus, and a few dozen or more autocrats scattered over the planet.

You can tell most of what you need to know about a person by whom he admires. I don’t mean lip-service admiration like Trump pretends to have for Lincoln, or some Christians for Jesus, but who that person actually admires in wishing and trying to emulate. And if that little aphorism is right, then the gang of people Trump admires and truckles to bodes terribly for his continuing leadership of the country in a qualitatively different way from that of Romney, McCain, Reagan, or either of the Bushes. Those Republicans’ differences from me and others like me were essentially policy differences, which can of course be profound and have moral implications. But their views were still within the elastic bounds of American political discourse. Trump’s vision of America is categorically different; he admires and wants to be like those other guys, the ones who have or want lifetime presidencies, earned through the charade of “democratic elections,” and whose hands rest on all the levers of their nations’ power. Trump neither respects democracy (it’s “rigged”–but only if he loses), nor separation of powers (like an independent judiciary), nor American institutions, from a free press (“enemy of the people”) to inspectors general. Those institutions are there to serve him, to be loyal to him. This is new in our country; there is no previous president who has so boldly taken steps toward totalitarianism and about whom such things are so widely said and thought. Yet almost half of America thinks he is not only within those elastic bounds, but if he exceeds them it is only because he indeed is the chosen one, he is the representative and implementer of American greatness. Simultaneously they think that the collective rest of the country is, at best, hopelessly naive and deluded; or, at worst, the dark knight of moral degeneracy, the perpetrator of squalid lies, the anti-Christ mocking American greatness. Whether Trump himself actually sees us in that way or not is almost beside the point. For him the critical point is simply that we are the hated enemy, standing in the way of his idealized self-image, self-aggrandizement, power, and Messiah-ship.

If it were just him it would be bad enough, but it is also all the GOP supporters who think this is just politics as usual, not a dangerously deviant breakaway from our traditional Democrat and Republican norms and values, both constitutional and moral. The Gullibles like Mr. Michaels and 60% of the voters of Mississippi have simply joined a cult, with outstretched raised arms in a sieg heil salute; the Accomplices like Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have simply collaborated and sacrificed their integrity and pretend he’s not really all that bad—either succumbing to an ends-justify-the-means rationalization like many evangelicals have or selling their souls for some kind of personal advantage like Vice-President Mike Pence or some of the ultra wealthy. Is it a bridge too far to say that this election is the greatest test of our democracy since the Civil War? No. Not at all.

The broadcast journalists are making an extra effort to show how objective they are by wishing the president a speedy recovery and using words like sad and concern. I certainly respect the impetus for them to do so, whether from a personal ethical stance or from a journalistic need to seem even-handed and to show that their professionalism is such that they can rise above their personal feelings of dislike for his policies, corruption, and temperament. And they certainly know that any snarky comment like what I am about to say would cast them in a bad light and lend credence to right-wing charges of bias. I just wish they could not say such things at all and just report the situation as developments occur. It’s hard to imagine Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity wishing Joe Biden a speedy recovery if the shoe were on the other foot. Nor do I remember a lot of conservative condolences and well wishes when Hillary had a week-long stretch of pneumonia in the 2016 race, despite the fact that to hear the right-wing journalists spin it, her survival was sufficiently in doubt that she needed to get out of the race. Where were Tucker’s and Sean’s sweet words of well-wishing then?

Here’s my take. Choices have consequences. If you choose to jump out of a plane without a parachute, Mother Nature will insure that certain consequences result. If you choose to jump out of a plane with a parachute, you are a lot more likely to avoid those consequences. Mr. President, you chose not to wear a mask and never practiced social distancing. You downplayed those behaviors and even mocked Biden for practicing them. By ignoring and even disparaging those practices, you politicized them and contributed—not solely caused but definitely contributed—to the deaths of thousands of others. These are Mother Nature’s consequences for that. As for yourself, you made your bed, now you must lie in it (the double entendre not exactly intended, but if the shoe fits…). You are trying to kill Obamacare, with not even a hint of a replacement plan. That will mean that millions of Americans will lose health insurance, and some will die unnecessarily because of that. So if I am to choose between your good health and the thousands who have already gotten sick or died partly because of your covid response, well I’ve got to go with the greatest good for the greatest number. And if I have to choose between your good health and the thousands who may unnecessarily die because you and your Supreme Court will kill The Affordable Care Act, same call. Maybe not all political choices have consequences. Maybe not all moral choices do either. You’ve certainly managed to get away with a lot. But when you make bad decisions about Mother Nature, there’s a high probability that those choices will have consequences.

The title quote is from Mike Duncan, historian of Rome, in a droll reference to Julius Caesar

Having railed against the electoral college for about twenty-five years—the rough equivalent of my screaming some private grievance across the solar system to the good citizens of Neptune—I spent an afternoon calculating what would be the theoretical lowest percentage of the popular vote necessary to win a presidential election. Armed with the eligible voter population of each state, the electoral votes of each state, the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win the election (270), and a calculator, I selected a collection of less populated states and the District of Columbia whose electoral votes would add up to 270, divided the eligible voter population of each of those states in half, and added one single vote for each state, which would tip all of that state’s electoral votes to a single candidate (Maine and Nebraska, which both divide their electoral votes, being exceptions—a solution to the electoral college problem that I proposed in an earlier blog, presuming all states did so). I then added those states’ eligible half populations plus those critical single extra votes, that is, 50% plus one vote for each state, to get the lowest eligible total population necessary to yield 270 electoral votes. Then I took that number and divided it by the total eligible voting population of the United States and thus arrived at the minimum number of voters necessary to elect a president. Never mind that a friend I consulted to confirm the legitimacy of my method looked it up on the internet and immediately found that some other fellow had done almost the same thing, using instead the number of actual voters from each state in the last election, and came up with about the same number as I did within a percent or so. So much for my afternoon of superfluous labor.

The percentage of the popular vote necessary to win an American presidential election was astonishingly and alarmingly low: 22%. It varied somewhat by which states you chose; at first, I used random states, and got 27%, but then I restricted the calculation to lower population states and got the 22%. I don’t pretend to explain that difference, but there you go. So even in a two-candidate race, a person could win the presidency with less than a quarter of the popular vote. An acquaintance dismissively told me that that would never happen, given the near impossibility of the 50% plus one vote requirement. My response to her was that of course that would never happen. But if the presidency could technically be won with 22% of the popular vote to an opponent’s 78%, just consider how much more likely it would be to win it with 49% to an opponent’s 51%. Indeed Trump won with 46.1% to Clinton’s 48.2%.

Five times in our history the presidency has gone to the person with fewer popular votes, defying the very definition of democracy. One out of nine presidents received less votes than his opponent. That certainly is the most egregious, indeed outrageous, reason to change the way the Electoral College works: majority rule is the sine qua non of democracy. But there are other reasons. The current Electoral College means that Democrats’ votes in solidly Republican states and Republicans’ votes in solidly Democratic states do not count for anything in the actual outcome, since that outcome is determined by the electoral votes rather than the popular vote. It means that people’s votes in “battleground” states, and even in individual precincts within those states, are dramatically more important than other people’s votes. Instead of looking at the totality of the popular vote, we must look at sometimes minuscule and potentially litigable margins in a few selected states. For example Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, but lost three battleground states—and thus the Electoral College and the presidency—by a collective 77,744 votes in those three states. Those folks’ near 78 thousand votes were worth more than those other folks’ 2.86 million votes. Put another way, each of those 78 thousand voters was worth thirty-seven of those 2.86 million voters; or yet another way, the former’s votes were thirty-seven times as important as the latter’s.

It also means that candidates largely ignore states they know they will win or lose in order to concentrate on the battleground states, where they know those 78 thousand votes could make all the difference. Vladimir Putin knows this also, so rather than waste his cyber resources on all fifty states to influence the election, he conveniently can sow his seed mostly in the fertile fields of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and eight or nine other purple states.

The organization Common Cause has entered the lists against the Electoral College. Their solution is to require that once the popular vote is known, all electors must cast their votes for the winner, effectively keeping the Electoral College and avoiding a constitutional amendment to eliminate it, and giving all electoral votes to the popular vote winner. Rather than being determinative, the Electoral College would merely rubber stamp the popular vote. This is more elegant than my original solution—splitting the electoral vote for each state—by essentially slicing the Gordian knot in half rather than trying and failing to untangle it. Republicans will oppose any change, since the status quo somehow leans Republican, and that for them is more important than majority rule. In fact, in view of voter suppression efforts, majority rule is the enemy to them, except when they are in the majority. But even with a Democratic Senate, House, and presidency, I wonder if there is the will to make “American democracy” a valid term.

The following post originally appeared on my Facebook page and is slightly amended here. The title quote is the question lawyer Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy during the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings in June of 1954.

I have tried over the last few years to keep my FB page a politics-free zone concerning my own political commentary, preferring to relegate it to an unvisited blog. However, in the Oscar Wilde tradition of being able to resist anything except temptation, I confess to occasionally commenting on others’ political posts, but I well know that the earth will continue to turn without panting to hear my political bon mots. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s attack on military personnel as “losers” and “suckers” is so profoundly offensive and so self-evidently disqualifying for a pretender to Commander-in-Chief that my personal disgust with this despicable man is no longer containable, and so I will speak here for my father (1914-1951), a career U.S. Marine joining at 19 and serving in China in the ’30s and in the Pacific in World War II, and dying at 37 of cancer when I was three.

In Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in TheAtlantic.com, he relies on six separate anonymous sources (presumably some sources for some statements and other sources for other statements) who confirmed that Trump used those words in describing military personnel, especially ones who were wounded, died, or were captured. Naturally Trump has denied it, mendacity being his first line of both offense and defense. If an article appeared saying that Ronald Reagan had said it, or that WW II veteran George H. W. Bush (whom Trump called a “loser” for allowing his plane to be shot down) had said it, or that his son George W. Bush had said it, we could all easily dismiss it as the ranting of a left-wing blogger, or maybe even a far right-wing blogger pining for a Trump. It would be better, of course, if Goldberg’s sources had spoken on the record. But for this president, it absolutely rings true. We know that he got a doctor to keep him from military service saying that he had bone spurs in his feet. We know from an interview with smut-meister Howard Stern in the late 1990s that he joked that vaginas were “potential landmines” and thus avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.” We know he had an Iago-like envy of John McCain and disparaged him publicly by saying “I like people who didn’t get captured.” Now, thanks to Goldberg’s article and his sources, we know that Trump was outraged that flags were being flown at half-mast for McCain’s funeral: “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he complained to aides.

On Memorial Day in 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with Marine four star General John Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan at age 29 and is buried at Arlington. According to Goldberg’s sources knowledgeable about the visit, Trump and Kelly were standing beside the grave, and with astonishing lack of sensitivity or empathy, Trump said to Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” We also know that when Trump was in France in 2018, he cancelled a scheduled visit to the World War I Aisne-Marne American Cemetery at Belleau Wood—sacred ground to Marines—and asked, according to Goldberg’s multiple sources with firsthand knowledge, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The private reasons not to go were the “losers” buried there and his unwillingness to get his hair wet. The publicly stated reason was that since it was raining the helicopter couldn’t fly and the Secret Service wouldn’t take him—two more lies, absurd in their simplicity. Also on the same trip, in a different conversation, he referred to the 1800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood and are buried at the cemetery as “suckers” for getting killed. And finally, if one other Trumpian quote disdaining service to country and valorizing the unfettered pursuit of wealth is needed, there is this: After then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford gave a White House briefing, Trump asked his aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” The idea of service to country is alien to Trump. He seems to be constitutionally incapable of moral reflection, asking only what’s in it for him, meanwhile taking pride in being neither a sucker nor a loser by finding, all those years ago and with Daddy’s help, a way to evade the military service that would possibly have gotten him killed as it did over 50,000 other Americans and would definitely have detoured him from his profits in commercial real estate.

My dad, United States Marine Corps master sergeant and another Arlington Cemetery resident, would quite possibly, perhaps probably, have been a good lifelong Republican, and we would likely have had a round or two of political arguments. But he was not a sucker, and he was not a loser, and the man who as Commander-in-Chief apparently thinks he was is not fit to spit-shine his boots. Semper Fi, Dad—a concept totally beyond the moral grasp of Donald Trump.

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.