Trump: No

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Thursday, October 15, 2020

 

President Trump has delivered on some important issues. If Roe v. Wade is overturned in the next decade, his appointment of conservative justices will be a cause of a great advance in human rights. He signed a law that included some of the tax relief for parents I’ve been advocating for 15 years, and eliminated the individual mandate that was the most objectionable feature of Obamacare. Whether we’re talking about religious liberty, school choice, or Title IX, Trump’s policies are much better than those of Joe Biden. On many issues, Trump has far exceeded the expectations I had when he won the 2016 election.

 

I’m still not voting for him.

 

It’s not because I have exceptionally high standards for presidential candidates, or yearn for the resurrection of the pre-Trump Republican Party, or find it impossible to overlook some points of disagreement with Trump. It’s not even because his continuation in office may in the long run prove destructive of conservative causes. So it may, but keeping the bird in the hand is a good rule of prudence.

 

I’m not voting for him, rather, because his character flaws keep him from meeting the threshold conditions to be entrusted with the presidency. All presidents have lapses in judgment, honesty, and self-control; many of them have even been wanting, at least sometimes, in decency and public-spiritedness. Trump is alarmingly deficient in all of these qualities at once, and their lack has marked every day of his presidency.

 

You don’t have to believe any anonymous sources in the news to see it. You need only watch the president and listen to him. On any given day, he will be calling a former member of his administration a “moron,” or taking shots at one of its current members. Or live-tweeting his feelings about the cable-news shows he is watching. Or casually endorsing some nutty and slanderous theory, as when he suggested that top military leaders “want to do nothing but fight wars” to profit defense companies. Or confusing allies and opponents alike with some half-baked idea.

 

Some of the harms Trump’s behavior causes are intangible. Those harms include a more degraded and less honest political culture, the cheapening of the president’s word, and a decline in trust. Even those who wrongly dismiss such matters as unimportant should be able to see that Trump’s character defects have frequently undermined his effectiveness. One example came in early 2018, when Trump bumbled away an opportunity for a legislative deal that would have achieved two of his stated goals: funding for a border wall and legal status for illegal immigrants who came here as minors.

 

During his 2016 campaign, Trump made some Republican congressmen cringe by promising to protect “Article 12” of the Constitution, which doesn’t exist. He hasn’t gotten much more informed about the structure of our government since then. His lack of interest in his proper constitutional role sometimes expresses itself in distracting bluster, as when he claimed that he had “total authority” over states’ lockdown policies. Sometimes, though, it results in extra-constitutional actions. Like President Obama, Trump has exceeded his legitimate powers to make the government implement policies Congress has not enacted. The saving grace, such as it is, of Trump’s power grabs is that several of them have been too poorly designed to have lasting effects. When Trump decided on his own to suspend enforcement of the payroll tax, for example, most companies just ignored him and kept collecting it.

 

Sometimes, though, his defects compound rather than counteract each other. The administration’s practice of family separation combined callousness and carelessness. Law enforcement sometimes requires separating parents and children. But previous administrations had not implemented a “zero tolerance” policy of criminal prosecutions of all illegal border crossers in part because, especially in light of extant court orders, it would predictably have led to a large increase in the number of children being taken away from nonviolent parents. This administration overcame such scruples. Some of Trump’s appointees said that taking children away from their parents was a useful way to deter illegal immigration, and news reports have indicated that Trump agreed. The policy was pursued, chaotically, until political and legal pressure forced its end. An inspector general would later report that more than 3,000 children were taken from their families, but the exact number could not be known because the government was not keeping track of separations and reunifications.

 

All presidents seek to advance their own political interests as well as the national interest through their official actions. Unusually, Trump either fails to understand or fails to respect the difference. Trump attempted to use congressionally authorized aid to Ukraine to get that country to “start a major investigation into the Bidens,” as he himself explained after it had become a controversy. It is a matter of public record that Trump encouraged Ukraine’s government to work with his personal lawyer, and that this lawyer had explained to it that he was working for Trump in his personal capacity rather than for the U.S. government. Whether or not this scheme amounted to an impeachable offense, as I believe, it was surely an abuse of his office.

 

Trump’s record in office has also included a long list of gross racial provocations. Conservatives have been inclined to minimize them, in part because liberals have sometimes exaggerated them. But there’s no way to justify Trump’s telling four Democratic congresswomen, three of them born in the U.S., that they should go back to the countries they came from. It’s one thing to push for a tough and humane policy against illegal immigration; it’s another to make false generalizations, again and again, about the “tremendous amounts of crime” associated with it.

 

Religious intolerance has also been part of Trump’s toolkit. During the last presidential campaign, he said he would ban Muslims from coming to the U.S., a pledge both unenforceable and at war with American principles. To his limited credit, he backed off once in office — instead settling, eventually, on a travel ban on various countries that makes sense only as a means of doing something that vaguely resembles his pledge while being able to survive in court.

 

So often described as a foe of political correctness, Trump is instead its unwitting ally. It posits that the only alternative to left-wing views is bigotry, and he lends credence to that conviction. His presidency has accelerated the growth of our divisions and so been a gift to radicals of the Left and of the Right.

 

***

 

The president’s weaknesses have been on glaring display during this year of contagion. It is true that even the wisest governmental response would not have spared us all the death and economic loss, and true as well that several other countries have fared roughly as poorly as we have. Samuel Johnson set forth a great conservative truth when he wrote, “How small, of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Perspective should not, however, come at the expense of accountability. When Trump has exerted a distinctive influence on the course of the pandemic, it has on balance been for the worse.

 

There is plenty of room for debate about how we should have handled COVID-19, especially given our imperfect and evolving understanding of it. There’s no case for supporting economic shutdowns while also minimizing the threat, for discouraging the expansion of testing, or for spreading conspiracy theories about the pandemic. There’s no case for engaging in negotiations over COVID-relief legislation only sporadically and unpredictably. Or for holding dense indoor rallies. Resolute, steady, and sober leadership would have been welcome. Trump hasn’t provided it, and can’t.

 

Would Joe Biden do better? He was always a fabulist, sometimes a demagogue, never a man of principle; and now he is also fading. He leads an increasingly left-wing party. Will the brake pads be worn out? Will he even press the brakes? He says he now favors taxpayer funding of abortion. He may seek to enlarge the Supreme Court to make room for more justices who won’t make room in American law for unborn children. If there’s a persuasive case for recognizing abortion as a grave injustice and voting for Biden anyway, I haven’t seen it.

 

In most elections, it is entirely reasonable to consider only those candidates with a real chance to win and select the one who has the superior policy preferences, or the greatest likelihood of producing good consequences, or the most impressive record. One would vote for a third-party candidate in such circumstances for purely expressive reasons, such as to register support for a philosophical tendency.

 

This way of thinking about elections assumes that one or more of the plausibly victorious candidates meets the minimum standard of acceptability for the office they seek. If that condition does not hold — if one of the major-party candidates is unfit for office because of his unusually low character and the other because of his party’s conventional policies — then the case for third-party voting, or writing someone in, or even leaving a ballot line blank, becomes stronger. In that case, a voter is making a different kind of statement. He is refusing to support a candidate he cannot in good conscience wish to exercise power.

 

The voter who decides that neither Biden nor Trump deserves his support will be accused of irresponsibility, of escapism, of indulging a sense of moral purity, of wasting a vote. There is, on this view, an obligation to pick among the top two candidates. It is worth resisting this supposed imperative. If a vote that does not determine the outcome of an election is wasted, then every vote is wasted — and wasted all the more if it is cast for someone the voter does not want to be president. The Biden supporters and the Trump supporters who tell you “it’s a binary choice” want you to vote as though the election result were wholly in your hands. And if that scenario were not contrived enough, they implicitly add that at the same time you don’t have the power to elevate a write-in candidate. You must imagine both that your power is counterfactually absolute and that you cannot choose options that are plainly before you (writing someone in, voting third party, etc.).

 

If you are not Mitch McConnell, or Kamala Harris, there is nothing you can do to keep Trump or put Biden in the presidency. What you can do is endorse one of these candidates, or refuse. You can determine, wholly, which of those you do. The truth is that neither of these candidates is worthy of the public’s trust. So don’t vote for either one of them, and don’t let anyone tell you that you have to.