John Rachal's Blog

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.

As Ukraine enters its second winter of war, American support for continuing aid to Ukraine in the form of arms and humanitarian assistance has dropped from 65% in June, almost sixteen months after Putin’s invasion, to 41% currently. This erosion of support was probably as inevitable as it is odious. Trump and other right-wing Republicans oppose the aid, and so naturally Trump voters, whose moral compasses seem so often wanting, oppose it as well. Their tax dollars shouldn’t go to some country we don’t give a damn about! Putin’s not a threat to us! And, as I and many others have noted elsewhere, Trump’s failed attempt to extort Zelenskyy is the very thing that led to the former president’s first impeachment.

I have already mentally compared Zelenskyy to Churchill (see “Churchills, not Chamberlains” in a previous blog). So it is “altogether fitting and proper,” to use Lincoln’s words from Gettysburg, to note what Churchill said to then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 after the latter claimed “peace for our time” by sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler, resulting in the Munich agreement: “You had a choice between dishonor and war. You have chosen dishonor, and you will have war.” After Zelenskyy’s country was invaded and he was advised to skip the country, he said, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” I swear I can hear Churchill cheering.

In 1948, ten years after the infamous event that became known to World War II history simply as “Munich,” Churchill published The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his monumental memoirist history of the war. In the chapter “The Tragedy of Munich,” he offers a moral lesson for the future that our time, and our country, should heed:

“It may be well here to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. . . . There is, however, one helpful guide, namely, for a nation to keep its word and to act in accordance with its treaty obligations to allies. This guide is called honour. It is baffling to reflect that what men call honour does not correspond always to Christian ethics. . . . Here, however, the moment came when Honour pointed the path of Duty, and also when right judgment of the facts at that time would have reinforced its dictates.”

His future is our present. He continues:

“For the French Government to leave her faithful ally, Czechoslovakia, to her fate was a melancholy lapse from which flowed terrible consequences. Not only wise and fair policy, but chivalry, honour, and sympathy for a small threatened people made an overwhelming concentration. Great Britain, who would certainly have fought if bound by treaty obligations [as France was to Czechoslovakia], was nevertheless deeply involved, and it must be recorded with regret that the British Government not only acquiesced but encouraged the French Government in a fatal course.”

It should be noted that France and Britain had already sacrificed Austria without a fight. It was not until September 1, 1939, a year after Munich and after France and Britain had shamefully allowed a weak Germany to violate the 1919 Versailles treaty by re-arming to the point of military supremacy in their vain hope of “peace,” that the war officially began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Who knows how long the U. S. would have remained isolationist had not Japan done Britain and France—and Europe itself—the enormous favor of attacking Pearl Harbor over two years later?

It should also be noted that in 1994 the United States, along with the United Kingdom, Ukraine and, of all countries, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, which provided Ukraine with security assurances in exchange for its surrendering of its nuclear weapons.

So let’s change the countries and a few tenses in Churchill’s lead sentence of his second paragraph: “For the American government to leave her faithful ally, Ukraine, to her fate would be a melancholy lapse from which will flow terrible consequences.” Not only is helping Ukraine and its “small threatened people”—in the form of money and arms only, let us remember, not American troops—“wise and fair policy,” but also the right thing to do, the honorable thing to do, the absolutely necessary thing to do.

Tom Nichols (former Republican and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College; also five-time Jeopardy champ), has a great November 16 essay in the digital The Atlantic. He argues that Trump has finally crossed the line from mere authoritarianism to full-blown fascism, which he defines and characterizes in a compelling paragraph. He notes how he (Nichols) was reluctant to use the word fascism earlier partly because he was aware of how emotionally potent words are sometimes used and inflated for their dramatic effect, like war on poverty, war on drugs, and war on terror, and how that very inflation ultimately diminishes their impact.

I remember expressing the same idea when I reviewed a book on ageism years ago that, among various other sins, compared in some detail ageism (prejudice against old people) to Nazism, as if a Holocaust survivor might agree and say “oh yeah, they’re about equal.” The problem, of course, is that when you hyper-inflate your use of a dramatic word, or draw a comparison between two very unequal things, a critical auditor or reader sees the disjunct between what you want him to think and the actual reality, and that undermines your credibility. It also can be a disservice to history, as the ageism authors proved, by equating non-equal things in order to enhance the ignominy of the speaker’s (in this case the authors’) particular bete noire. I suspect this was Madeline Albright’s reluctance to characterize American politics of just a few years ago as fascist because she had experienced it first-hand as a young girl in Europe. Nichols was wary of the “f-word” when applied to Trump early on, observing that he could see Trump’s potential fascism but did not want to use the term because Trump had not yet “crossed the line.” But Nichols says that now Trump has crossed that line in two recent bellowing, semi-stream-of-consciousness speeches, one in which he described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” and the other, in Claremont, New Hampshire, where he says:

“We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

This is Mein Kampf language, pure and simple. Note that there is not a reference to “radical right thugs,” such as Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the modern American equivalent of Hitler’s Brownshirts. The word vermin is also right out of Hitler’s playbook, suggesting that the Jews of Hitler’s era, and the immigrants, antifa, and Black Lives Matter of ours, are “sick” and less than human, and need to be “root[ed] out.” Given Trump’s limited vocabulary, his use of vermin may suggest that at least some of the speech was ghost-written, and if so, that just tells us how surrounded he is by fellow fascists.  The choice of vaguely archaic, almost biblical verbs–drive out, cast out, throw off, root out--implies Hitlerian purification, but the means of purification are not specific–concentration camps? Deportation to–somewhere? Imprisonment? Murder? Civil War? Meanwhile Trump’s “poisoning the blood of our country” is exactly the same as Hitler’s semi-sacred, race-pure Aryanism, and it’s designed to summon from the deep the grievances and resentments of whites who are unable or unwilling to see contemporary fascism when it stares them in the face.

Add to all of this Trump’s promise of “retribution” if he is re-elected. Has there ever been a presidential candidate whose party platform consists of his personal, self-proclaimed victimization and his consequent infliction of “retribution”? And is our nation so currently debased that over forty percent of its voters have been conned into thinking that is what they want?

As I’ve suggested before, this is no longer just about one man vs. another, an honorable Democrat vs. an honorable Republican. This is about voting for democracy, or voting against it.

If Lauren Boebert, congresswoman from Colorado and recent evictee from a theater while protesting “Do you know who I am?” (the video suggests an angry and entitled sex worker), can get re-elected to Congress, and if criminal cult leader Donald Trump can get re-elected as president, then the apocalypse is just up the street. A new poll had Trump at 47% and Biden at 46%. Sure—margin of error. Yet how is it possible that half the country prefers– most of that half even panting for–the moral equivalent of Mussolini? Why isn’t it Trump 6% and Biden 94%? One sociologist has somehow arrived at the figure that in any general population, roughly 30% have “authoritarian tendencies,” while another poll, based on four questions, finds that 65% of Republicans do. But half the country? Here in America?

I read a lot of good people, including John McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt along with a half dozen of The Atlantic writers, such as former Republican Tom Nichols. They brilliantly warn of the dangers Trump poses. But what, in fact and in some detail, would a second Trump term look like? What would Trump’s promised “retribution” look like?

What new and damaging laws (especially but by no means exclusively in voting and protecting minority rule) would be passed? What specific “guard rails” would be bulldozed? Would all federal employees have to serve at the will of the President? What specific acts of corruption at the top and throughout both federal and state governments would take place? Would state legislatures allow themselves to substitute their own preferred electors to the Electoral College if those legislatures did not like the results of their state’s voters? How corrupt, or at least far-right, would the judiciary become with Trump’s firings and appointments? Would impeachment of appointed and elected officials for their liberal views–not for their demonstrable misconduct–become a wave, like the current attempted impeachment of elected Wisconsin and North Carolina supreme court justices whose views are not congenial with conservative party lines and who, in the case of the Wisconsin justice, has not even yet ruled on her first case? Would liberals on the Supreme Court be impeached? Would the two-term limit for presidents, imposed by the 22^nd amendment in 1951, be revoked, or even simply ignored?

Or what about these: Would the rights of minorities, including LBGTQ people, shrivel? Will the active duty military be called in to shoot White House protesters in the legs as President Trump asked of General Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the killing of George Floyd? What new tax cuts for the wealthy would be passed? After having promised to erase the national debt in eight years but in fact creating 25% of the current total in a single term, how much would the national deficits and debt increase after four more years of the former president? Would Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare be “repealed and replaced” by “something great”? How would our institutions be undermined as good people resign or are fired and replaced by sycophants and extreme right-wingers with little actual respect for democratic values despite their professed and hypocritical advocacy of them? Would some “enemies of the people” (a Stalin phrase that Trump has used) simply be imprisoned or even actually “disappear”? Would Trump continue to dangerously hint that some people who have criticized or stood up to him should get the death penalty as he did with General Milley? How much would a critical or simply objective free press be muzzled, and a right-wing press be governmentally enabled and subsidized? Would inconvenient science, such as human-caused climate change or another pandemic, succumb to political fetters? (Bleach injections, anyone?) Would the party of Lincoln devolve further from its current authoritarian embrace to outright fascism?

Internationally, how much would the already fairly weak fight against the global threat of human-caused climate change be set back? How much would the balance of democratic power and influence shift away from the U.S. and over to more democratic but militarily weaker nations in Europe and Asia? How much would autocratic and dictatorial countries, especially Russia and China, profit and advance? Would China, for example, decide that it is time to take Taiwan by force, given America’s weakness or even complicity? Is Ukraine’s struggle against a communist invader—the same one that the GOP once vilified—a lost cause without American support? What other actions might Putin take with his friend in the White House? Would our military be hollowed out of its best officers and twisted into an arm of the political far right? Do we really want the extremely volatile Donald Trump–remember the ketchup on the wall?–to have his finger on the nuclear button?

How much more would truth itself be corrupted and turned on its head as Trump morphs among his adorers into a semi-divine, faultless leader, in the manner of Kim Jung Un? And finally, after a mere hundred and some-odd years as the world’s leading industrial, scientific, military, and maybe even cultural nation, would the re-election of Donald John Trump cause our country to drift into irrecoverable decline as a democratic nation, leader, and world power?

History does not follow some inexorable laws and linear path—notwithstanding Karl Marx’s vision that it does. History is not like astronomy, say, where an eclipse is predictable to the minute hundreds of years in advance. So I’m not saying that this conjured dystopian future, this thought experiment, is probable. But it is more than possible that we may find out whether the past will be prologue. We have a choice, and the world is watching. History will judge us.

Donald Trump is many things: Former president, father, wealthy businessman, draft dodger, convicted sexual abuser, bully, cult leader, tax cheat, self-proclaimed “chosen one,” and, as Maggie Haberman has titled her biography of him, con man. The term is short for confidence man, in which the con man seeks to gain the confidence of his “mark,” typically someone who is sufficiently credulous as to fall victim to the con man’s self-benefiting schemes. I wrote my master’s thesis fifty years ago on a fictional con man—also known as a picaro—and the genre has been explored by Melville, Twain, Faulkner, and other authors, usually humorously (except in Melville), where the reader is in on the con and enjoys the naïve credulity of the marks.

But there are also real con men, as Haberman demonstrates, and the results are not so funny. Donald Trump is exhibit A, and he is supremely gifted at it. At a recent rally he offered the following, both conning and cunning:

“I am the only one that [sic] can save this nation because you know they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. And I just happened to be standing in their way. And I will never be moving.” 

This is perfect Trump (though those two words should probably never be used together, being a species of grammatical offense). First, of course, is “the chosen one” theme, the messiah theme: “I am the only one that can save this nation.” It is hubris on a Himalayan scale. No one can compare to him; no one else alive is capable of the great and necessary salvation that he alone can deliver. He bathes in the glory of God’s anointment of him as American savior. Well, he would, if he actually believed in such a God. In fact, he really doesn’t; he himself is his god. Religion is merely a useful tool to keep all of those evangelicals in his column—those who normally would think only Jesus could save the nation. Trump’s capacity for solipsism, self-delusion, and narcissism is so titanic that “trumpism” is destined to enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a brand new psychopathology deserving its own category. Already diagnosed with several disorders, soon he will have his very own.

The second way in which those three sentences are perfect Trump lies in his almost uncanny capacity for frightening his followers into thinking that his claimed victimization and persecution are theirs. When applied to him—but only when applied to him—prosecution is persecution. Seeing himself as the Messiah, the deep state wishes to crucify him; but really, he says, through him “they” are maniacally “coming after you.” I am, he says, simply the means by which they are persecuting you. I am you. At some reptilian level of consciousness, he understands that if only he needs to worry about the criminal prosecutions against him, and if only he is the object of so much national revulsion, then his needy and aggrieved masses—no longer terrified for their own well-being—will fall away like autumn leaves. So he must convince them that his fate is theirs, and all their fears and grievances are justified. He and they are bound together in a grotesque co-dependent embrace.

Finally, the sentences’ astounding vanity ends with his self-portrayal as the invincible knight, standing alone against the dark forces of some imagined satanic army in a Manichean struggle of good vs. evil. If he fails—that is, if they don’t vote for him in droves—his martyrdom will also be theirs. But no; he will crush the evil; he is the immovable rock upon which that evil will founder. Retribution will follow. A great cleansing will take place. Paradise will ensue.

This is Trump’s central illusion, his greatest con, that he is the chosen one, a new and much greater Moses to lead the re-invented Israelites out of Egypt to the Trump promised land. It is his greatest conjuring trick, tricking not only his adorers, but himself as well.

Meanwhile, impeachment. Impeachment? Seriously? Of course. When your own twice impeached candidate swims in a fetid sewer of corruption and lies whenever his lips move, what else can you do? Well, you pretend that the president’s son isn’t being punished enough by a Trump-appointed prosecutor for lying on a gun application and should thus do jail time.  So let’s stoke this tiny flame into the imaginary conflagration of “the Biden crime family.” That tag may resonate with the credulous 40% of the country who will follow him to hell, but for those who are not conned, and for those who can still remember just about any day during (especially January 6th) or after Trump’s administration, well, that dog won’t hunt. 

So Brazil, the Vatican, China, a presidential candidate from Indonesia, and a collection of African nations have all offered “peace plans” for Ukraine to consider, not to mention Putin’s helpful suggestion that if the West would simply stop supplying Ukraine with weapons, peace could easily and quickly be achieved. This is likely also Donald Trump’s “peace plan,” i.e., his plan to end the war within 24 hours by selling out the country he could not browbeat in that infamous call to Zelensky that resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. What these alleged peace plans seem to have in common is very much akin to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 deal with Hitler: OK, you get to keep the Sudetenland in exchange for your promise not to take any more land in Europe—“peace for our time,” proclaimed Mr. Chamberlain. As Brazil et al. would have it, Zelensky should just say, “President Putin, you can keep Crimea and eastern Ukraine if you will just please promise not to hurt us anymore or steal any more of our land. And don’t worry about the tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians you have targeted and killed and the billions of dollars in towns you have destroyed and buildings and infrastructure you have levelled. And certainly don’t worry about anyone trying to hold you accountable for war crimes.”

Would the Vatican sacrifice a third of its art and other treasures to an invader in exchange for promises of peace? Would Indonesia give away a third of its islands to an invading Japan for those same promises? Would China give Inner Mongolia to an invading Russia? Would Brazil surrender a third of its territory to an invading Portugal hell-bent on reclaiming it as a colony? And what are those promises worth?

The answer to the last question is Nothing, and the answer to the preceding questions of course is No, provided that the invaded country had some means of resistance (the Vatican being a special case). Nor should Ukraine suffer the ignominy of Chamberlain’s “peace for our time,” and calls for Ukraine to do so are shameful. Here’s my peace plan: Russia withdraws all of its forces from Ukrainian territory; Russia pays Ukraine one trillion dollars in reparations, most of which is to be exacted from Russian oligarchs and Putin himself; Russia returns all of the Ukrainian children it has kidnaped; Russia loses its membership on the Security Council of the United Nations, and Security Council votes henceforth will be valid by majority rather than unanimous vote; Russia turns over all of its accused war criminals, from Putin down to rank and file soldiers, to the United Nations upon that body’s agreement to send them to the Hague for war crimes; Ukraine becomes a member of NATO; Russia acknowledges that it was the unprovoked aggressor in the war.

But in fact, so-called peacemakers should butt out. Ukraine will determine Ukraine’s future. Ukraine will decide what its peace should look like.