Trump: Maybe

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, October 15, 2020

 

I don’t know. Still, at this late hour, I just don’t know.

 

Yes, yes — I know what I think of Donald Trump. I think that he’s a shallow, ignorant, capricious, incorrigible, self-destructive fool. For a while, I was convinced that he would change. If he became the nominee, he’d change. In the final stretch of the election, he’d change. Once he had won, he’d change. After the inauguration, he’d change. Having settled into the role, he’d change. But he didn’t, because he can’t. This is who he is, and who he has always been. Most people walk around the White House and feel the weight of history pressing down upon their shoulders. Lincoln’s eyes follow them around the room and Washington’s name slows their tongue. The building itself intimidates. But not Trump. For all the effect his surroundings have had on him, he may as well work from the parking lot outside of a Denny’s.

 

This is not a trifling objection to his “manners” — although manners do, indeed, matter in a free republic. Rather, it is an understanding that Donald Trump has had a negative effect on our American institutions and that he will continue to do so. He will not say whether he intends to accept the results of our elections. He talks about judges as if they work for him and lambastes them when they show that they do not. His outward commitment to the Constitution is nil. He has done little to stall the rise of executive imperialism that was one of the most dangerous features of the Obama years. He has coarsened our culture and our politics.

 

Day in and day out, his behavior sucks up all of the oxygen in our political culture and ensures that our only focus is on the presidency. He has no dynamic range; all that he says he says at full volume, and he leaves no space for civil society. Every question is binary, and all in the system are either heroes or losers, whose role in his drama is contingent upon how supportive they are of his goals. He is, as he has been from the beginning, a character in a bad reality show.

 

He has not learned what he does not know. As a political outsider he brought a different set of skills to the presidency, which, if combined with a willingness to adapt himself, could have been a virtue. But there has been no such adaptation. One part of the “art of the deal” is knowing your environment, and the environment in which a real-estate deal takes place is different from the environment in which one must negotiate with Congress or with the dictator of North Korea. Trump does not grasp this, so he ends up undermining his own position — or, worse, throwing away America’s moral capital on worldwide TV. He is exhausting, embarrassing, infuriating, and more.

 

So yes, I know what I think of Donald Trump. It’s just that I also know what I think of Joe Biden, and I know what I think of the contemporary Democratic Party, and it is by no means the case that the Democrats as presently constituted represent a better option.

 

I have often heard it asked, “How can anyone who follows politics be undecided at this stage?” But this, I think, is an entirely mistaken question. Indeed, I would expect more people who follow politics to be undecided at this stage than is typically the case. When one admires a politician’s character and judgment and his policy prescriptions, it is easy to cast one’s vote for him. By contrast, when one admires a politician’s policy prescriptions but believes that his character and judgment represent a threat, the choice becomes considerably more difficult. From what I understand, millions of people now find themselves in the latter camp. Why? Because it’s genuinely hard to work out what to do.

 

For a few years now, it has been clear that there are two types of self-described conservatives who are critical of President Trump. The first type is the conservative who has decided that if this president is in favor of something, it must, by definition, be wrong, and who has in consequence abandoned everything that he has ever believed. For these people, this election is an easy call, because there is nothing much at stake. Trump is bad; so is everything he touches; time for a new guy in the White House; case closed. The second type has a tougher row to hoe, because he has the same political beliefs as he did in 2016 or 2012 or before, he likes a great deal of what President Trump has done if not said, but he worries that, if given a second term, this president is likely to do a good deal of damage to the country and to the conservative movement. I am of the latter type, and it is not a great deal of fun.

 

I am not, I suppose, a truly “undecided” voter, in that I cannot vote for Joe Biden and I will not vote for Joe Biden. I am pro-life, Joe Biden is not, and, for me, that’s the end of that. So the question becomes, “Can I vote for Trump?” Or, put more starkly, the question becomes, “Given what remains important to me, which risk do I consider greater?”

 

This is a nearly impossible query to examine. As of now, it seems highly unlikely that a second Trump term would achieve anything much at all beyond blocking the excesses of the Left and ensuring that Kamala Harris gets nowhere near executive power. Even at the best of times, second terms tend to prove dicey, and, in the absolute best-case scenario, a newly reelected President Trump would have a majority of one or two in the Senate. Even if Trump were to win, we would see no substantial legislation or reform; we would see a further hollowing out of talent in the executive branch; and we would see the striking of no treaties or international deals of which the Democratic Party did not already approve. Naturally, if Trump were to win while the Republicans lost the Senate, we would see a dramatic slowing down of the appointment of good judges, too. Worst of all, come the midterms we would likely see meaningful Democratic gains in the House and Senate, as well as in the states — and, potentially, a landslide Democratic victory in 2024.

 

If the Democrats were sensible, I would likely sit this one out. But the Democrats are not sensible. The Democrats are threatening to blow up the American constitutional order in ways that would make President Trump’s execrable excesses seem quaint. And, rather than promising to act as a check, Joe Biden is having it both ways. Thus far, he has refused to answer whether he would back the abolition of the filibuster, which would radically alter the way that the Senate has worked for more than a century and thereby allow a slim majority in D.C. to make sweeping changes to American life; he has refused to answer whether he would sign a bill to pack the Supreme Court with judges who favor his party, thereby reviving a plan that, in 1937, was “emphatically rejected” by a Senate Judiciary Committee that hoped “that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America”; and he has refused to answer whether he would acquiesce to the addition of two new states, the admission of which would be designed solely as a means by which to give the Democratic Party four additional seats in the upper chamber. How, I wonder, should I balance these permanent revolutions in American government against another four years of President Caprice?

 

And how am I supposed to balance the potential consequences of a Biden presidency for the unborn? For those who hope to benefit from school choice? For those accused of sexual assault on college campuses? How should I weigh President Trump’s indifference to the Constitution as written against the explicit plans of a party that is committed to the corrupt, self-serving, and Machiavellian idea that is the “living Constitution”? President Trump has at times said horrendous things about the First Amendment, intimating a preference for censorship and a loosening of the libel laws — although, thankfully, he has never tried to do anything about it. How might I assess that record against the Democrats’ perpetual promise to overturn Citizens United and their flirtation with “hate speech” rules? President Trump’s claim to piety is absurd and condescending, and yet he has served as a bulwark for conscience rights. Which is more important: His transparent dishonesty, or that the free-exercise clause remain intact? I do not believe for a moment that President Trump believes that the United States is the promised land, as I do. But he has chosen to use his platform to champion the nation’s history and push back against “critical race theory,” a cancerous ideology that, if unchecked, will destroy the country from within. What should I think about that?

 

What about economics? I am a free-market, free-trade, free-people sort of guy — one of those unsparing libertarian types that we are told run the world. President Trump is not. Over the past four years, Trump has happily presided over a gargantuan spending spree, he has flatly repudiated the idea that entitlement reforms are necessary, and he has lied brazenly about the effects that his tax package has had upon the budget deficits and upon the national debt. In addition, his anti-free-trade instincts have damaged a key source of global wealth and expanded the influence of the executive branch at the expense of Congress. But, given the choice, am I supposed to prefer Joe Biden and the Democrats, who are equally opposed to entitlement reform, who want to spend even more as a matter of permanent course, and who, in addition, hope to forestall a reckoning in heavily Democratic states by bailing out their budget shortfalls with dollars extracted from everybody else?

 

And am I supposed to ignore completely the other side of the Trump ledger? I do not believe that Trump “created” the good economy that we enjoyed before the coronavirus pandemic, and I do not believe, either, that his reaction to that pandemic played any meaningful part in determining how it unfurled. In my estimation, these are superstitions, born of an ugly, monarchical attitude toward the presidency. But I do know that he has made some difference elsewhere. It is because President Trump won in 2016 that we have Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, that Judge Barrett has been nominated to join them, and that the judiciary at all levels has more law-abiding judges among its ranks than it did at the end of Obama’s term. It is because President Trump won in 2016 that the Second Amendment was saved from being dismantled by a candidate who openly argued that it has no meaning or force whatsoever. It is because President Trump won in 2016 that the United States withdrew from the Iran deal and from the Paris climate accord, took steps to reverse the illegal DACA program, and reversed the Obama administration’s astonishingly illiberal Title IX rules. It is because President Trump won that the United States government expanded the Mexico City policy, blocked Title X funds from being distributed to Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, and stopped persecuting the Little Sisters of the Poor. None of this would have happened if the last presidential election had gone the other way, and all of it is welcome. Is Joe Biden offering anything to the disaffected beyond a chance to have a different president in the White House?

 

So, yeah: I don’t know.

 

I wish I did. I envy those on the right who have decided that President Trump is Hitler and that none of the things they previously cared about matter anymore. I envy those on the left who admire both Joe Biden’s agenda and Joe Biden himself, and who are not terrified by the Democratic Party’s turn. For them, this decision is easy — akin to watching your football team play. For me, it is filled with enough moving parts and what-ifs and on-the-one-hands to drive a person to distraction. I have often caught myself wondering what it must be like to watch a presidential election and be entirely happy about the results. As of today, in the first presidential election in which I am eligible to vote since becoming a citizen, I still will not know. I guess I’ll get another shot in 2024.