John Rachal's Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republican representatives and senators assure us that President Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” will “rein in the national debt.” They assure us that the only folks who will lose Medicaid are people here illegally and able-bodied recipients unwilling to work. They assure us that we need the bill to cut taxes—but they will never be honest enough to add the necessary four words “mostly for the wealthy.” In truth, estimates are that the senate version of the bill will add $3.3 trillion to the debt. Back in the day, Republicans and conscientious Democrats were concerned about the debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the House version of the bill 7.8 million Americans will lose their insurance, a majority of whom already work. Polls show low levels of support for the bill nationwide—a Fox News poll showed 38% favored and 59% opposed, while The Washington Post had it underwater by 19 points and Pew Research by 20. And yet it will pass. I join with Old Testament Jeremiah in asking, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?”

Donald Trump was once asked what his favorite Bible verse was. He said he didn’t want to say, that it was too personal—which almost certainly meant that he didn’t know one. For about three decades my favorite Old Testament one (among quite a few I’m not at all crazy about) has been Micah 6:8. You can be Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jew, Taoist, Zoroastrian, agnostic, or atheist and still like it: “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.”

I can’t help but ask, Did the Republicans in Congress who passed the “Big Beautiful Bill” with not a single Democratic vote do justice in giving great tax breaks to the wealthy and adding trillions to the national debt? Did they love mercy in stripping ten million of their health insurance? Did they walk humbly with anyone other than Donald Trump, with whom they were humble indeed?

Trump voters might say this is just a little thing, totally forgettable. But it’s not. In fact it is a single, tiny part of a much bigger enterprise to turn the United States into, say, Viktor Orban’s quasi-dictatorship Hungary. Project 2025 used Hungary as a model.

Last week the Smithsonian Institution took down a part of a display concerning presidential scandals in its National Museum of American History. The parts that remained untouched were Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Richard Nixon’s Watergate, and Bill Clinton’s impeachment (though neither Johnson nor Clinton was convicted and removed from office). The part that was removed—theoretically temporarily—involved Trump’s two impeachments. Gone. Atomized. This is not whitewashing history, it’s erasing it, like a person airbrushed from a Stalin-era photograph. As David Graham of The Atlantic notes, the current display now has this sentence: “Only three presidents have seriously faced removal.”

Graham mentions this as just one of five “assault[s] on truth” from the administration just last week. He also notes that the Trump administration has been “pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president’s political priorities” and that J. D. Vance is an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board.

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was a Jewish, German World War I veteran who kept one of the most important diaries of World War II as he and his non-Jewish wife sought to survive Hitler’s rise and fall (they did, but barely). In I Shall Bear Witness, the first volume of his journal published posthumously in 1995, Klemperer mentions that he is asked why he did not focus on the large events of the war that seemed more important in charting its course. His reply was that he chose to focus instead on the “mosquito bites” that he and others experienced and that collectively add up to a dictatorship and genocide.

The Smithsonian’s action is one of those mosquito bites—by itself just an itch to be forgotten next week. It is barely making the news. And yet it is emblematic of Trump and his lackeys’ grand mission to transform a democracy into an autocracy one act and a hundred lies at a time, accumulating and gaining momentum, and leading us in a direction no patriotic American should want.

Also posted on Facebook, 8/5/25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have entrusted the nation to a geriatric Nero who grins as the institutions he has set alight burn. I cannot think of a single area of the political, economic, military, national security, religious, educational, judicial, journalistic, or social landscape of American life that will be improved after another Trump term. I believe that every single major aspect of the America we have known, despite its many failures to achieve a more perfect union, will suffer under the presidency of a man who is a cruel, brutish demagogue focused on retribution against his perceived enemies, achieving near dictatorial power, basking in the adoration of his admirers, and enhancing his own personal wealth.

Healthcare? Medicare and Medicaid will be attacked and probably trimmed or even turned over to private entities, while RFK—totally unqualified—will undermine vaccines and medical research and spread his ignorance; meanwhile Trump has already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, calling it a “rip off.”

Education? Higher education is already being threatened as too “woke,” while k-12 will see further right-wing Christian-izing, taxpayer funds will increasingly flow to private schools, and curricula seen as “woke” (learning about slavery, e.g.) will be shunted to the sidelines and book-banning will increase. Research grants will be increasingly subject to Trump’s political correctness while others, including medical research, dry up altogether. Trump has also promised to eliminate an entire cabinet department: Education.

The economy? No. Income inequality will be greater; second-term Trump tax cuts will benefit primarily the wealthy and corporations. Tariffs will provoke counter-tariffs, destabilizing international trade (as they did with the catastrophic Smoot-Hawley bill in 1930). With his 25% tariffs on our friends Canada and Mexico and 10% on China, coupled with planned deportations of immigrants who pick our crops, build our homes, and clean our hotels, the average American family will see inflation rise and higher prices, potentially hitting $2000 per year. Another four trillion will be added to the national debt, approaching $40 trillion—this from the man who promised in 2016 to eliminate the debt after two terms.

Race, ethnicity, and gender issues? Obviously not. Trump’s recent anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) moves, even including blaming a recent collision of a military helicopter and commercial jet resulting in 67 deaths, on DEI, and his press secretary’s defense of that as “common sense” and her allusion to people of a different skin color in that defense make clear the White House view. As for gender-related matters, Trump, Vance, and Musk have all made their misogyny clear (Musk: “A Republic of high status males is best for decision-making”).

The military? With Hesgeth confirmed as Secretary of Defense, and even three Republican senators (Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell) voting against him requiring VP Vance to break a senate 50-50 tie, the military will be weakened while China outpaces the U.S. technologically. Besides Hesgeth’s alcoholic and sexual escapades, he has no managerial experience. His only qualification is being a Trump toady. Trump’s threats to NATO could be effective in pushing all NATO countries to pay at least 2% of their GDP for national defense, but he could endanger NATO itself, and be perfectly willing to abandon a threatened NATO member he doesn’t like. The country will become more authoritarian, and a complacent Republican congress will let it happen. Seeing Trump’s isolationism and his affection for other authoritarians, China will be sorely tempted to take Taiwan, knowing that Trump will do nothing about it. American arms will cease to flow to Ukraine, and Putin, not satisfied to gobble up the 20% of Ukraine he already has, will continue his war until Ukraine is devoured.

International relations? America’s standing in the democratic world will inevitably suffer, as American democracy itself, even the Constitution, will increasingly come under internal attack, as birthright citizenship in the 14^th amendment already has. American isolationism will further erode democracy worldwide and tempt China, Russia, and possibly others to further crack down internally and rattle their sabers externally. Trump’s world view that international agreements are a winners and losers game rather than a mutually beneficial outcome will alienate allies and make America less secure, as David Frum has pointed out. Meanwhile the government’s hard turn to authoritarianism will follow the Project 2025 playbook, with Victor Orban’s Hungary as a model.

Law enforcement? A less prosperous economy will increase street crime while white collar crime among the political class will be given free rein. Trump is already purging the FBI of agents, potentially thousands, who had anything to do with investigations of him as well as those who raided Mar-a-Lago in search of documents including top secret ones that he had stolen. The Trump rule will echo that attributed to Peruvian strongman Oscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.” If Kash Patel becomes FBI director, whatever is left of the FBI will become the American equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition.

Corruption at the highest levels? No doubt at all—the man who claimed to drain the swamp will bring corruption to levels not seen since the Gilded Age of the 19^th century, with his own corruption worse than any previous president. Trump has already illegally fired in his first week seventeen Inspectors General, who investigate government ethics violations, mismanagement, fraud, and corruption in his undisguised plan to eliminate any independent investigation into his business and actions. Elon Musk’s businesses will invite major conflict-of-interest situations, another area IGs investigate. Federal judges such as Aileen Cannon will lean away from the law and toward Trump and his agenda. The corruption will not just be of the rewarding-friends-and-punishing-enemies type. The presidency itself, as it did in Trump’s first term, will become Trump’s personal money-making and power-grabbing machine.

Religion? Fissures in Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state will widen; Christian nationalism will prosper and insert itself further into government, while divorcing itself completely from the central teachings of Jesus; attacks on Muslims and Jews will increase. A majority of evangelicals and Trump himself will continue to pretend to adhere to Christian values, despite calling Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde—who  implored him at the inaugural prayer service to show compassion and mercy to fearful marginalized groups including gays and immigrants—a “so-called bishop” and demanding her apology for her “inappropriate comments,” as if saying what Jesus would have said was inappropriate and offensive.

Political division? Much worse. We will continue to be, as we already are, a house divided. But finding middle ground will become even more difficult. Republicans cannot even agree whether Russia is friend or foe; likely Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who will be in charge of all American intelligence matters, has defended Putin and coddled former Syrian President and mass murderer Bashar al-Assad. Collegiality in congress, especially the House, will further evaporate, and more votes will strictly follow the party line. Friends and families will continue to divide along lines of those who support the Trumpian strongman vision and those who recognize it for the counterfeit of American values that it is. The nation will move closer and closer to oligarchy and plutocracy.

Truth itself? Trump’s daily lies will continue, and we will be numb to them; Fox News will continue to spew its far right propaganda and ignore news unflattering to Trump, even when it knows what it says is untrue as it did about the outcome of the 2020 election, and knowing that feeding rage feeds its coffers; mainstream, unbiased journalism will be under constant assault and will assume a permanent defensive stance and frequently self-censor regarding Trump; trust in institutions will flatline, while belief in absurdities will soar; demagoguery will flourish while truth-speaking Republican politicians will be vilified and disappear; Facebook has already eliminated fact checkers in submission to Trump and his far right supporters bemoaning how they are being censored, while free speech criticizing Trump will increasingly be professionally and even physically dangerous; right wing social media “influencers” will multiply and spread disinformation on a scale previously unseen; artificial intelligence and deepfakes will metastasize to the point that facts and truth will be buried under a mountain of lies, deception, and “conspiracies”; for those not quite consumed by all of this untruth—what Steve Bannon called “flood[ing] the zone with shit”—they will lose faith that anything is true or be overwhelmed in trying to combat it.

The three main components of a democratic society, as identified by Anne Applebaum, are fair elections, a free press, and a fair, politically unbiased judiciary. All will suffer erosion over the next four years. Of course Trump is not the apocalypse, and some good things will happen. Some waste may be avoided, NATO countries will probably increase their defense spending, some Republicans may balk at the worst of Trump’s offenses, Democrats may flip the House in 2026, and some small percentage of Trump voters may come to see Trump and Trumpism for the vengeful and anti-democratic threats they are. But the trend will be downward, perhaps precipitously. The grand scope of American life will be less free and more coarse, harsh, divisive, and expensive for a majority of Americans. We may, just barely, be fortunate enough to emerge in January 2029 still having some of the building blocks of a Republic. The question, as Franklin warned two and a half centuries ago, is whether over the coming four years we can keep it.