John Rachal's Blog

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.

The Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) held its annual babblefest in early March, and an innocent American citizen might be forgiven for pondering how magically Trump-world has turned truth on its head, and how frequently it does so. Matt Schlapp, the grand panjandrum of the CPAC faithful, bemoaned what he considered the bitter irony of terms like truth and justice (the latter of which he put in quotation marks) when applied to his beloved leader. The wonder of his comments was that there is truth in them, and yet that truth as offered by him is coming from a kind of anti-reality zone, where actual reality is the reverse of what is proclaimed to be reality. In the anti-reality zone, the statement may be true but the reason for it is exactly the opposite of what the speaker intended. For example, Schlapp is quite right in saying that “Americans have lost confidence in institutions and government experts because truth has become a casualty to raw political power.” Well, yes. But it’s Donald Trump who, far more than any other American, has created that loss of confidence through over 30,000 false and misleading statements during his presidency as documented by The Washington Post. Trump has ridden his lifelong untruthfulness—or at least from “bone spurs” forward—to the pinnacle of American government. When lying becomes one of a president’s primary political weapons, truth is going to “become a casualty to raw political power.”

 Mr. Schlapp further mourns “The renewed prosecutorial pursuit and indictment of President Trump [as] an outrageous breach of constitutional norms.”  We have indeed seen an outrageous breach of constitutional norms—but not for that reason, with its implication that Trump’s legal woes are merely the result of judicial overreach. Let’s take only the most egregious example, Trump’s January 6^th incitement of sedition (“if you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country anymore”) and his attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, which was nothing less than an attempted coup d’etat. This would  presumably qualify as an outrageous breach of constitutional norms, though that day apparently does not occur to Schlapp or his CPAC flock.

Mr. Schlapp also claims to be concerned about authoritarianism and corruption: “We believe that the authoritarian punishment of political opponents [i.e., various legal proceedings against Trump] is deeply un-American and is more akin to the proceedings of a Kangaroo court in a corrupt Third World Banana Republic.” Those in the anti-reality zone don’t seem to have noticed Trump’s corruption or his authoritarianism, as when, for just one example, he called on his ironically named Truth Social for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”—so that he could continue as president, despite losing both the popular vote and the Electoral College. If a president’s plan is to throw out the Constitution to get his way, most folks would consider that to be pretty authoritarian.

Schlapp drones on: “For too long now our justice system has been at the disposal of unhinged bureaucrats, overzealous activist judges, and radicalized individuals who have transformed the institutions of our nation into political weapons.” Would he name an unhinged bureaucrat? Among unnamed others, he was considering Alvin Bragg, now prosecuting Trump in Manhattan. But Bragg is elected and thus by definition not a bureaucrat, and supporters of Trump should be very careful when using the word unhinged about those of us back on earth, when their guy was throwing a dinner plate with ketchup against the wall, or grabbing the wheel of his limo from a Secret Service agent and informing him that he was “the fucking president.” (The truth does occasionally accidentally emerge.) And when Schlapp in high dudgeon rants about “the Left . . . wield[ing] our judicial system against its opponents and further de-legitimiz[ing] our democracy” [emphasis added], that innocent American citizen who with her own eyes witnessed January 6 is left aghast, stunned that a Trump supporter could possibly claim to be concerned about de-legitimizing our democracy. The very thing they claim to have lost and they fight to regain–their “freedom” (consider the Q-Anon Shaman’s howl of “Freedom” on January 6)–is in fact the precise thing their beliefs and actions seek to overthrow. Yet that is the nature of life in the extreme right’s anti-reality zone: falsity is truth, wrong is right, bad is good, authoritarianism is democracy, the perpetrator is the victim, embracing the herd instinct is freedom.

So what’s a good metaphor for CPAC 2023? We can go with the anti-reality zone, or, a little more down to earth, we can go with this (both work):

I’m looking to buy a good used car. The salesman says, here’s a nice Ford, pretty high mileage, but most of the bells and whistles, excellent dependability and a long history of good performance. Well maintained. Now over here we have a Corvair. It’s also sorta high mileage. We’re pretty certain it’s unsafe at any speed. Its engine leaks oil, tires are showing some nylon, and its dials are frequently giving you info that isn’t true. It’ll tell you it’s doing 95 and you’re really doing 38. It keeps getting tickets for blowing smoke. We think we fixed the carbon monoxide coming through the heater, but you might want to keep the windows down. We tried to get the atomic explosive device out of the trunk, but it’s stuck, and we can’t be sure when it’ll go off. So what’s your pleasure?

The CPAC folks and the MAGA crowd are going with the Corvair.