John Rachal's Blog

Support for Ukraine in its just war with Russia is the twenty-first century’s moral imperative just as abolitionism was the moral imperative of the nineteenth century. If you would have been opposed to slavery then, you must be supportive of Ukraine now. That is, you must be willing to provide Ukraine with the weaponry it needs to defend itself and not be grudging and tightfisted about it. Had you been a Southerner in 1850, a word or act against slavery would have been courageous because it could be dangerous. Today, the only danger Americans face in giving Ukraine weapons is a small dent in the nation’s bank account. (By contrast to the less than $100 billion we have given Ukraine, an estimated $600 billion is lost to that bank account each year due to uncollected but legally due federal taxes.*) But there are other dangers if we and other democracies don’t help Ukraine. I have always hated a bully (see “Was the Third Kid Wrong?”), and Putin’s bullying is a huge part of this war. But there are other bullies and authoritarians and totalitarians looking on, and so the stakes are truly higher. Not being able to improve on Tom Nichols’ wise assessment, I quote him:

If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.

Like Nichols, I normally consider South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham to be little more than a Trumpian lickspittle. Well, Nichols didn’t call him that, but he was being nice. But Nichols notes approvingly that Graham stood with two Democrats to complain about American and German reluctance to send Abrams and Leopard tanks, respectively, to Ukraine. Many months ago, I saw that Graham said the same thing that was on my mind then and now: Russia needs a successful Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the German patriot who attempted but failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944. No other politician was, or is, saying that. By contrast, Speaker of the House McCarthy, likely to be the weakest Speaker in memory after caving to far-right demands from fellow House Republicans, has already said that Ukraine should not get a “blank check,” and a recent poll showed that almost half of Republicans say we are already giving too much to Ukraine. This is the same amoral stand—indifference—taken by too many pre-Civil War Northerners toward slavery. Lincoln could not even use slavery as the moral impetus for the North going to war, knowing how unpersuasive it would be to so many. He had to argue that the casus belli was to preserve the Union.

It was not too many decades ago that the GOP considered Democrats soft on communism—primarily the USSR. Those tables have now turned. Trump practically embraced Putin, and Trump still has influence. We cannot return to the isolationism of 1914 or 1940. For those getting wobbly on support for Ukraine for fiscal reasons, and for others unmoved by Russia’s scorched-earth policy and the grim deaths of old women and children due to Putin’s indisputable war crimes, they should consider that if Putin wins, we and other democratic nations lose, and we might even find ourselves in a wider war. Robust, full-throated military and humanitarian support for Ukraine is the first international moral test of this century.

*The figure for total tax evasion, also known as the tax gap, varies. Several years ago it was calculated at $496 billion per year and estimated, on that basis, to be $667 billion c. 2018. As recently as 2021, the Department of the Treasury said that the wealthiest one percent of taxpayers accounted, all by themselves, for $163 billion in unpaid but legally due taxes, or 28% of the unpaid amount owed by all taxpayers, which would be $582 billion.

(This piece was written prior to the Republican National Convention to be held in 2024, but after Trump declared himself a candidate for the 2024 election, I decided that his entry into the race, and the danger he represents to our country, were sufficient justifications to post now and not to wait and see if he became the nominee.)

I once before noted on Facebook that I reserve my political commentary for an unvisited blog, being unwilling to annoy any of my Facebook friends with my ruminations in the form of original posts mired in politics. Facebook should be for fun, right? I do, I confess, sometimes reply to others’ political posts. On that one occasion when I broke my rule with an original post, I excoriated then-President Trump for his appalling comments and views of the American military. Anyone who supports American military veterans and active-duty personnel and still votes for this person for Commander-in-Chief—well, I’ll simply say that that is very, very hard to understand. (If you wish to see what he said and did or did not do, see “’Have You No Sense of Decency Sir?’” on my blog at https://johnrachalblog.wordpress.com/ Just put the title in the search box. Same for titles below in parentheses.)

But the upcoming election is so important that I feel obligated to break my rule once again. I really had hoped that the Republican Party would not have nominated this man or one of his clones. Had they done so, you would not be reading this. Though a Democrat myself, I was hoping the GOP would nominate someone who fell somewhere within the broad middle of the American political scene—right of center, naturally, but a person who was not a narcissist, not someone who was “utterly amoral” and a “pathological liar” (as Ted Cruz once said), not an authoritarian, not a friend to other authoritarians, not a person devoid of moral or spiritual values (see “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” on my blog), not a person far too incompetent and too ignorant to hold the office once held by Lincoln.

This election is ultimately about three central themes: character, truth, and democracy—not individual policies. Except for those who are irreparably fervid in their devotion to Mr. Trump, few arguments are needed to illustrate the “character” or the “truth” problems. He lied for years about then-President Obama’s citizenship, finally acknowledging that Obama was an American citizen, but notably never apologizing for the lie. After avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War by having a doctor report that he had bone spurs in his feet, he attacked American military hero John McCain out of sheer Iago-like jealousy of the high regard in which most Americans held him for his refusal to take early release from the North Vietnamese when they discovered who he was (see “When Amorality Meets Character”). In a late 1990s interview with Howard Stern, he said that during that war fear of venereal disease was his “personal Vietnam” and vaginas were “potential landmines.” He has used the Bible as a political prop in front of a church. When asked what his favorite Bible verse was, he claimed, since he didn’t know one, that he “wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal,” and he was too slow to even think of The Lord’s Prayer. Mr. Trump appears to be so insecure that he lied about things as silly as the crowd size at his inauguration compared to Obama’s (photos clearly revealing the lie). He lied about his affairs and groping women, even though the latter is on audio tape. Most dangerously, he has continued to lie about the 2020 election.

Most of this you probably know, but please stick with me a little longer.

There is a Mafia-like quality to him, as I am not the first to note. He is certainly a bully, and like a lot of bullies, he is a sycophant in dealing with other bullies. He bullied Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all but demanding that he “find another 11,000 votes” (see “’That Way Madness Lies’”). He admires, among a few other authoritarians, Vladimir Putin, taking Putin’s word in Helsinki that he had not interfered in our 2016 election despite our intelligence community’s conclusion that he had (see “Vlad’s New Puppy”). The Russians have a name for someone who can easily be manipulated to serve the purposes of others: a useful fool. Putin worked for Trump’s election because he knew that in Trump he had a useful fool. Even Trump’s infamous call to President Zelenskyy served Putin’s purposes: After congress had authorized military aid to Ukraine in the election season of 2020, the then-president tried to extort Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into Hunter Biden by suggesting—“I would like you to do us a favor though”—that the aid was contingent on Zelenskyy’s announcement. No need to even carry an investigation out, just announce one. Zelenskyy didn’t. (See “Two Mobsters Walk into a Bar….”)

That didn’t go so well, and led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Trump called Putin “savvy,” and he has said nothing negative about Russia or supportive of Ukraine. Anyone supporting Ukraine’s struggle and opposed to Russia’s invasion, as I certainly am, would necessarily be appalled at the re-election of this man. Imagining anyone as reckless and undisciplined as Mr. Trump being in charge if Putin decides to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is extremely disturbing:  Trump’s bromance with Putin could lead him to call Putin’s choice of a tactical nuclear strike “savvy” and do nothing, or he could go to the other extreme, lashing out wildly and embroiling us in a world war.

My suspicion, however, is that Trump would do little for Ukraine, strengthening Putin’s hand. That too would be a tragedy for our country and for the world—not to mention gutsy Ukraine. It would be a tragedy for democracy globally. Not only would that failed phone call to Zelenskyy stick in Trump’s craw, but his submissiveness to Putin would disincline him from supporting Ukraine through weapons shipments and providing intelligence. Since the end of World War II the United States—and especially the GOP—has regarded the Soviet Union and then Russia as an adversary (despite a brief intermission in the Gorbachev years). Now, Russia is, in fact if not in official stated policy, the enemy. And now, more than at any previous time since the Cuban missile crisis, is hardly the time for America, under a re-elected President Trump, to roll over and hand Putin and Russia an unparalleled victory signaling American submission and an ignominious tolerance of Russian war crimes and expansionism. Indeed, it is never the right time to do the wrong thing.

Truth is critical to democracy. Where it thrives, democracy flourishes. Where it is suppressed or attacked, democracy fades—or dies.  Authoritarians and dictators the world over inevitably need to suppress truth, both burying their own misdeeds and substituting not only individual lies but an entire alternative “truth” since the road to autocracy is by definition a matter of controlling the narrative in favor of the would-be autocrat. This was nowhere more evident—and nowhere a more serious threat to American democracy—than on January 6^th, 2021, when Mr. Trump said to his rapt, even adoring listeners, “if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore” (see “1776 This Was Not”). He has repeatedly used the term “enemies of the people” in reference to a free press, echoing Stalin. Dictators and would-be dictators abhor a free press, and always, always move to supplant it with their own propaganda. The United States now has two competing truths, one which is real and where serious journalism and many of Mr. Trump’s former staff continue to reveal his moral, psychological, and legal unfitness for office; and one which is not real and where Fox News, Newsmax, 4chan, and Q-Anon flood the airwaves and internet with creepy fantasy and bizarre conspiracy tales.

I know that, if anyone has read this far, some might say, “Well, OK, he lies sometimes and behaves like a child sometimes, but he’s still better than the Democrats and their dangerous agenda.” No. He is not. He is a false Messiah. I use this phrase quite intentionally, hoping that my Christian friends and relatives will recall the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus warns of “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.” Liz Cheney, as principled a conservative as they come, knows a ravening wolf when she sees one. So do many who worked for the former president. Mr. Trump has promoted himself from prophet to, in his own mind, the Messiah, having said “Only I can fix it” and referring to himself as “the chosen one.” For those who even one decade ago saw and still see themselves as pro-business, family values, law and order, anti-Russian, conservative Republicans, they are entitled to wonder what has happened to their now-cultish party.

Yet too many have drifted away from that long-gone GOP to the current radical, extreme right-wing, cult-like GOP where Mr. Trump and the poison he inspires in others threaten our democracy. Those “others” include far too many GOP politicians who once spoke harshly of Trump (I’m looking at you McConnell, McCarthy, Graham, Cruz, Rubio, DeSantis) and who know he is potentially a mortal danger to our country, but now fear saying so and ride the wave of his demagoguery. Even stealing classified documents gets a pass from Fox and its elected collaborators. Marco Rubio wriggled like a worm on a hook and called it a “storage problem”; one wonders what he and Fox and company might have said had Obama carted top secret documents off to Chicago. Storage problem. Sure.

So I am not talking about mere policies; conservatives and liberals will always debate policy. I am talking about character, truth, and democracy. We have a choice: in favor of those three themes, or opposition to them. The choice really is that stark.

I wish I could feel more optimistic about 21^st century America. It is generally conceded among those who do not have to cheerlead for Democrats that the Republicans will take over both the House and Senate in the 2022 elections, and anything approaching a Biden agenda will ground to an unceremonious, broken-down halt. Indeed, American factionalism is so profound that only three Republican senators could see their way to support the eminently qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by Justice Breyer. Almost everything else is strict party-line, except for Democrats Manchin and Sinema who sabotaged Biden’s already much-compromised Build Back Better program. Republicans do seem willing to join Democrats in supporting Ukraine with weapons, but for about everything else, Republicans especially seem willing to put party (and thus power) above country, morality, fairness, and personal integrity. Romney and perhaps Collins and Murkowski in the Senate and Cheney and Kinzinger in the House seem to be the only exceptions.

The party-and-power-over-all-else doctrine seemed perfectly illustrated by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who after January 6 did the right thing by blaming Trump for the insurrection, and who now says that if Trump is the nominee in 2024, he will “absolutely” support him. So he is saying that the man that he himself said is responsible for the storming of the Capitol and the intended violent overturning of a fair election will be his man if Trump succeeds in winning the nomination two years from now. That turnabout is worthy of our sober reflection. McConnell, who said the right things in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection—including the fact that Joe Biden actually won—is willing to allow his integrity only to go so far. The president who was impeached twice, who lies from the minuscule (his inauguration crowds) to the epic (saying he won in 2020), who publicly admires Vladimir Putin, who more than any other single human being is responsible for turning normal conservatives—your uncle or mine—into deluded right-wing extremists, and who is and for the last five years has been the single most dangerous internal enemy of American democracy is now the man McConnell is “absolutely” willing to return to the White House.

Perhaps McConnell has been sobered by the fact that Trump still commands the collective adoration of the Republican party, given that 71% still believe, amazingly, that Biden is not the legitimate U. S. president. Thus, unwilling to buck that near consensus, McConnell trades his integrity for expediency. He is too smart, unlike some of the lesser fry of the GOP like Gaetz, Jordan, Cawthorn, Greene, et al., to be unaware that Trump is unequivocally the most demagogic, autocratic president in our history. He absolutely knows this, as do those marvelous contortionists Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham. Even if McConnell couldn’t see it for himself, his wife could tell him, having served in Trump’s cabinet. And yet, rather than say that he could not and would not support a second Trump term, he is willing to embrace a proven would-be despot, to put democracy at extreme risk, to invite the return of a sewer of presidential corruption, to subject the country to another corrosive four years of the degrading of truth as a critical democratic value, and to ignore the probability of future catastrophes Trump could beget during another term in the Oval Office.

This symbiosis of congressional cowardice and collusion, fed by half the populace who cannot see or choose not to see the poison Trump has injected into the body politic, depletes the strength of American democracy. As fantasy substitutes for reality and grievance displaces truth, democracy fades. The toxic mix of cowardice and collusion, fantasy and grievance, is enormously abetted by so-called news channels and a social media which daily, hourly, heaves gobbets of lies and disinformation at an addicted public craving new alleged outrages upon which to gorge. This public expects its Republican leaders to slay their imagined dragons. So McConnell and Trumpism Inc. choose to pretend the dragons are real rather than suffer the fates of apostates like Cheney, Romney, or, worst of all, Mike Pence, who would be dead today had he fallen into the hands of the January 6^th mob—the same mob engaged in “legitimate political discourse,” says the Republican National Committee. When Trump told his already stoked partisans that day “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore. . . . So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,” he aimed at the very heart of American democracy, while he himself scooted back to the White House.* Democrats, already reviled by the crazy right as child sex-traffickers, and scorned by the merely deluded right as anti-American, have no standing to convince half our population that Trumpism corrodes democracy. Only Republicans can do that.

*June 28, 2022 testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to the January 6 House Committee revealed that Trump did indeed want to lead the mob at the Capitol in person, even wanting to go into the House chamber. He even grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, saying “I’m the fucking president,” when the Secret Service agent driving the car would not take him there and returned him to the White House.

Three weeks after the February 24 invasion

There is no off ramp for Putin. None. He is far too committed to what he has already done, killing thousands of Ukrainians (2,100 so far in Mariupol alone), targeting residential areas and hospitals in a war of terror. He has turned several Ukrainian cities into wastelands. He knows there is no turning back. He must win, and he must intimidate the West and NATO into a willingness to allow Ukraine to go under. He threatens the use of tactical nuclear weapons, of which he has thousands and the United States has some 230. Lenin had a motto: “You probe with bayonets; if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” So far, the bayonet has not hit much NATO steel.

I am still hopeful that—short of Western military intervention—once he has destroyed the country and killed tens of thousands, he will be unable to occupy the country for the long term and that a Ukrainian Resistance and sanctions will somehow bring him down. But hope is not a dependable strategy. He has terrified us into thinking that World War III will ensue if NATO takes any military action. Putin has already said that we have committed an act of war merely by supplying Ukraine with weaponry. I am off the fence now: Enact a no-fly-zone as a start. Eliot Cohen, noting both Putin’s military weakness (despite his one advantage in tactical nuclear weapons) and NATO’s strength, has pointed out that American aircraft have fought the Russians in third countries, including Syria, Korea, and probably Vietnam. A NATO military presence over Ukraine is not the same as attacking Russia on its own soil. If Putin thinks he has a right to be on his enemy’s soil wreaking desolation, we have a right to be on our friend’s soil stopping him. We should at least bring a knife to the knife fight—and probably a gun. Our unwillingness to even support Poland’s offer to supply its own Migs to the Ukrainians and “backfill” the Poles’ reduction with our F-16s suggests that we are too afraid to even come to the fight, and are willing to watch the Russian Bear gobble up a country and murder its people, and not just its soldiers. We should be Churchills, not Chamberlains.

Short of that, we have the Hope Strategy—an unsustainable Russian occupation of Ukraine, a strong Ukrainian Resistance, Russian war fatigue, China choosing not to throw Putin a lifeline, and eventually Putin’s fall. And maybe the Hope Strategy will eventually be enough. But there is an alternative possible scenario: The West will tire of their own sacrifices in imposing sanctions, and rather than rising up against Putin, Russians may be duped by Putin’s propaganda and stand with him, while dissidents disappear. Ukraine will be in his pocket, and more countries may be on offer. He will smile at the political and moral weakness—the mush—of the much-vaunted NATO, America in particular. And what is left of Ukraine will glower at America and agree with Putin at least on that.