John Rachal's Blog

(Written the day after the event)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**As there are Fuck Joe Biden signs.

***Written prior to Biden dropping out

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today that arc bent heavily in that direction.

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

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

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

I have finally allowed myself to recognize the horrendous inevitability of a Trump victory in November. In what Maria Popova calls “the interplay of hope and cynicism,” hope is losing, though not altogether lost. It is clear simply by looking at and listening to Biden that his age is an enormous impediment to his re-election, despite his having done a reasonably good job as president—an infrastructure bill passed (which neither Obama nor Trump could do), the anti-inflation act, progress on the cost of prescription drugs, fairly savvy leadership in helping organize Ukrainian support, getting us out of Afghanistan—however terribly ugly—all while presiding over the lowest unemployment rate in several decades, a record-breaking and booming stock market, and inflation down from 9% in June of 2022 to 2.4% as of this writing. But while Biden seems frail, with an elderly gait and a soft, subdued speech pattern, Trump, forty-two months younger, comes across as forceful, in charge, younger than his age, and oratorically masterful (despite oratory filled with lies, bombast, ignorance, conspiracy, and pandering). On “presence,” Trump wins hands down. And the polls are reflecting that.

But besides age and presence, Trump will win because of a confederacy of the possessed. These include: (1) the cultists whose grievance he has inflamed and turned to his advantage; (2) the natural authoritarians (estimated by one academic to constitute about 30% of any given population) who, like Trump himself, actually admire the Putins and the Orbans and wish for that kind of authoritarianism here in America; (3) the elected Republican leaders who either admire Trump or, at least equally likely, fear him, and support him out of that fear; (4) a considerable majority of the wealthy, who know he will not raise their taxes; (5) the isolationists, who wish to retreat into their caves or under a rock, unwilling to help other democracies struggling to stay democracies; (6) the racists, who rightly see in Trump a reflection of themselves; (7) the nostalgists, who imagine, at least for themselves, his first term as a time of economic and social well-being and who have forgotten or forgiven January 6^th; (8) the severely pathological conspiracy-mongers, who embrace fantasies such as Democrats like Hillary Clinton literally sucking the blood of trafficked children; (9) the Christian nationalists, for whom God is a Republican and Satan is a Democrat, and who simply hate Democrats on principle, often without being able to explain why; and (10) a wide distribution of the MAGA-hatted uninformed and ignorant who love bombast and who accept and admire Trump’s lies and could not possibly care less about liberal democracy here or in the rest of the world. These constituencies, inexorably overlapping, are all in some sense possessed—either by money, by grievance, by paranoia, by racism, by fear, by fundamentalism, by a despotic temperament, or by a Snopes-like instinct devoid of any concern for anything other than their own advantage.

When this formidable alliance is arrayed against Joe Biden, joined by a few traditional Republicans who just don’t think Trump is that dangerous, the likelihood that the worst and most dangerous president in American history will be re-elected seems a very safe bet. This despite John McCain’s campaign manager calling Trump “the most dangerous American who has ever lived” and his own former high-ranking subordinates Pence, Barr, Tillerson, Mattis, Kelley, McMaster, Esper, and Bolton stating publicly that he is unfit for office. Aside from the problems of age and presence, Biden is losing young voters, brown and black voters, Arabs and Muslims opposed to his failure to overtly condemn Israel’s killing of innocent Gazans, along with older Americans who find him too progressive as well as some on the far left who consider him not progressive enough. Biden has few enthusiasts; Trump has a solid and unwavering base of a third of the country. Our politics are demonized and fiercely tribalized; whatever center there was cannot hold. Add to this the inherent advantage that the Electoral College, favoring small states, gives to a Republican candidate, and further add the Supreme Court’s intentional stalling on the decision concerning immunity from prosecution of a president, and the path for Biden narrows considerably. And of course it would help if he had a more popular vice-president, especially given his age.

My wife says he should have committed to being a one-term, transitional president early on, in time for other candidates to come to the fore. She is right. His failure to do so will cost him and the country. After Charlottesville, Trump said there were “some very fine people on both sides,” thereby valorizing the moral worth of the neo-Nazis marching that day. We have heard his Hitler-esque comments about “poisoning the blood of our nation” and eliminating the “vermin” who he says infest the country, and he sure wasn’t talking about the thugs on the far right. We are about to re-elect America’s first fascist, the first man to serve as president who has, by his own words, allied himself with Nazism.

And yet I will not abandon hope. I have often been wrong. Let me be wrong on this.

(Title from the witches scene in Macbeth)

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

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