John Rachal's Blog

Last night was the first and probably only debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris virtually demolished Trump; her margin of victory among those polled on the question of who won was 26%. So what was the most alarming thing Trump said or refused to say in the debate? That Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating the pet dogs and cats of people in that community? That “everybody” wanted to see Roe v. Wade overturned? That he refused to answer whether or not he would sign a bill implementing a nationwide ban on abortion? That he refused to answer the question of whether he wanted to see Ukraine win its war with Russia? (Close, very close, but not quite the most alarming.) That he lamented the deaths of Russian soldiers but did not specifically lament innocent Ukrainian citizens’ deaths? (Again, very close). On those last two, and on his claim that if elected he would end the war before his inauguration, he all but stated what we have long known: He would abandon Ukraine. The man he admires, Vladimir Putin, would be given an American imprimatur in Putin’s invasion of a free country.

Trump’s entire campaign is premised on scaring us into voting for him. Crime is “down all over the world” but has reached astronomical levels here due to Harris and Biden. (Another lie of course; moderator David Muir corrected him by noting that the FBI reports violent crime is down.) If “she” gets elected, “this country doesn’t have a chance of success”; he even at one point said World War III will follow. The classic demagogue, Trump campaigns on fear—fear that hell itself will ensue if he is not elected. But he does say things that really are scary though he doesn’t mean them to be.

A case can be made that the most alarming thing he said was to praise Viktor Orban because the autocrat—some have said dictator—of Hungary has visited Trump twice this year and praised him. Trump is easily suckered by flattery, but in this case the flattery appears genuine. Orban does like Trump. When Harris said that European leaders laughed at him, Trump’s response was to say how much Orban thought of him, claiming that Orban said that “the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump,” and that China, North Korea, and Russia were afraid of Trump, which Orban admired.

So did Trump refer to any mutual respect, much less chumminess, he might have with leaders of actual western democracies? No, he did not. Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland did not come up. Certainly not Zelensky of Ukraine in eastern Europe. Nor did Japan or South Korea. Trump chose Viktor Orban as his soul mate, apparently the only European leader who does like Trump. Here is the man Trump is so proud to be aligned with according to journalist and Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag, A History; Twilight of Democracy; and Autocracy, Inc.:

“First, Orbán’s control of the media raises obvious concerns, since it is difficult to hear the voice of opposition leaders in a country that systematically favors the ruling party. [One interviewee Applebaum cites estimates that 90% of Hungarian media is controlled by Orban’s regime.] Second, under Orbán, parliamentary districts were redrawn. The districts are superficially plausible, unlike the geometrically absurd dimensions of many districts in the US, but the upshot of the redrawing is clear: liberal-leaning districts in cities contain more people than conservative rural districts, which gives conservatives more voting power. The effect is obvious: in both 2014 and 2018, the Fidesz party received less than 50 percent of the vote, but retained a two-thirds majority in Parliament after both elections. Finally, Orbán and his party have reshaped the judiciary. They expanded the number of seats on the constitutional court, and also forced justices over 62 to retire. By 2015, 11 of the 15 justices on the court, which decides if laws are constitutional, were nominated by Orbán and confirmed by his Parliament. It is not so difficult to retain power when one enjoys broad control over the press, election procedures, and the judiciary.”  

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is designed with Viktor Orban’s model in Hungary very much in mind. Though Trump falsely claims to have no knowledge of Project 2025, the Orban tactics of creeping authoritarianism and permanent power (Orban has been prime minister for fourteen years) are precisely the tactics Trump hopes to implement in America if re-elected. The Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts has cited Orban’s policies as the model for “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This is why Trump so admires Orban. He has done in Hungary exactly what Trump hopes to do here.

There are a few fundamental laws that govern the life of Donald Trump. The first and most fundamental, the one from which all the others directly or indirectly flow, is that self-interest is the North Star of all his actions. National interest, public interest, even family interest are all secondary, even tertiary, to the one consuming goal of his life: the pursuit of what is good for him. Money is good, fame is good, ostentatious self-glorification is good, adulation from others is good, subservience and loyalty from others are good. Anyone who disagrees with him is both wrong and bad. Private sector work is good (despite six bankruptcies); public sector work is, if not quite bad, not really work (Kamala Harris has never had a job, he says). Military service is particularly bad—filled with “suckers” and “losers” as Jeffrey Goldberg first reported. Goldberg cites two other quotes acquired from anonymous sources close to Trump: With Marine General John Kelly at Kelly’s son’s grave in Arlington, a son who died in Afghanistan, Trump asked “his” general: “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” The fact that he doesn’t get it is precisely the problem—he simply does not have a psychological make-up capable of understanding national service; for him it’s a waste of your life, a strange acknowledgment that self-interest and your own safety might not be paramount. This same obliviousness was evident when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford gave a presentation and Trump asked an aide, “That guy’s smart. Why did he join the military?”

A second Trump law is to never, ever admit that you were wrong. Admitting error is weakness, and a projection of pretended strength is critical to the man who, at some subconscious, reptilian level, knows he is weak. In this same vein, he can never apologize, for the very reason that to do so is to admit error and thus weakness. When charged with something for which he should apologize, he must never retreat; he must double down on the original claim. The most egregious example is his January 6^th coup attempt. The election, he must continue to claim (and in total self-delusion may actually believe), was rigged, and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are now “patriots,” all deserving pardons. Offense is always better than defense; not only should you never apologize, you should accuse your enemy of the very thing you are guilty of. I-did-nothing-wrong-Trump of course never attempted a coup, but Biden and Harris actually committed one—Trump actually uses the word coup—when Biden stepped down and passed the baton to Harris.

For Trump, and for dictators and despots the world over, lying has no moral opprobrium at all but instead is a legitimate means of self-service. All lies—unless they issue from former opponents such as “lying Ted” Cruz or current ones like Kamala Harris—are, for Trump, natural statecraft, as natural as breathing, akin to a trick play in football. One is a fool not to lie: they are useful in that they hide unpleasant truths, glorify oneself by taking unjustified credit, smear enemies, or divert blame to others: thus he never had a sexual relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels or Playboy model Karen McDougal; he never sexually assaulted Jean Carroll; his inaugural crowd was the largest ever. The lies can be easily disproved or fact checked by a vigilant press such as The Washington Post’s documenting over 30,000 lies and untruths just in the four years of his administration, or by a knowledgeable insider: Trump claims he never called U.S. military service members suckers and losers, while a trusted general like John Kelly says he most certainly did. So you never retreat and just double down on the lie—No, I never said that—and move on. You never trouble yourself that a lie might have a moral dimension, even if you do possess a moral imagination. Whether the lie claims something good or denies something bad, it is always for self-advancement, and that is good. Hence lying itself is good. In Trump’s inverted moral universe–to the extent he has one at all–lying is a virtue.

When things go south, the Trump Way is always, always blame others. Externalize all blame since taking responsibility for your bad actions or statements is for suckers. He couldn’t, for example, go to the World War I graveyard in France because (he claimed) the Secret Service said it was unsafe to helicopter there because it was raining, when the real reasons were that he did not want to go because the cemetery was filled with “losers” for getting killed and he didn’t want to muss his hair in the rain. While the rule is to blame others for the bad, the corollary is that you claim credit—and the devotion it entails—for anything good, even if you in fact worked against that very good. Trump claims that he was and will be the best president for black people since Abraham Lincoln. From his demand for the death penalty for the eventually DNA-exonerated Central Park Five, to his dinner at Mar-a-Lago with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, to the recent “black jobs” comment, to his support for voter suppression laws, his racism is undisguised.

The fact that forty-seven percent of Americans will vote for this ignorant, dishonest, and dangerous narcissist—after all we have seen with our own lying eyes—continues to amaze me. He accuses Harris of being a flip-flopper. This from a man who once said Hillary would make a great president and whose views on abortion have shifted with the wind literally overnight. His own flip-flopping is never the result of a reflective and conscientious change of mind, or even the result of necessity in the process of political compromise. Rather it results from his attempt to ingratiate himself with whichever voting bloc he is addressing at the moment. Every statement, every act, no matter how feigned, is designed for personal and political applause.

In his pretense of religiosity he has used the Bible as a political prop, and in his pretense of respect for military service he used Arlington National Cemetery as a political prop. The photo of a grinning, thumbs-up Trump standing by the graves at Arlington of those he believes to be “losers” with some family members who support him is a desecration nothing short of nauseating. This political stunt had nothing to do with actual respect or reverence for thirteen deaths in an American war, nothing at all. It was all for perceived political gain, namely to blame Biden and by extension Harris for those deaths in the evacuation of Kabul, an evacuation Trump himself had set in motion as president. The fact that federal law prohibits the use of Arlington for political purposes is one more law to be ignored and broken for his personal gain.

If Trump is re-elected, it will be, to use one of Trump’s favorite accusations, a disgrace. If he is re-elected, shame, shame on us—our greatest national shame since slavery.

(Written the day after the event)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**As there are Fuck Joe Biden signs.

***Written prior to Biden dropping out

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today that arc bent heavily in that direction.

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

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

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