Donald Trump’s most mystifying quality is that his collection of political liabilities are so vast that they defy all attempts to summarize them. He is a career criminal, devoted authoritarian, longstanding racist, completely ignorant of basic facts of how government works, a sex pest, and overtly corrupt, just to name a few of his most obvious flaws.
Nearly a decade into his nonstop campaigning, fresh evidence of his unfitness continues to emerge almost daily. Imagine if we discovered tapes of Jeffrey Epstein calling Joe Biden one of his best friends! It would have destroyed Biden’s candidacy. The Harris campaign and most of Trump’s critics have ignored this for the same reason most of Trump’s offenses have been forgotten: Nobody has enough room in their head to contain them all.
Kamala Harris, like all of Trump’s opponents, has shortcomings. If you were to compile the flaws of Harris and Trump on a single list, I’d guess Trump would account for at least 98 of the worst 100. Harris is not a sociopath, is not one of the worst human beings in America, is not considered dangerously unfit for office by a large percentage of her own former employees.
In short, I find the case for Harris, or virtually anybody, over Trump to be extremely obvious.
Ross Douthat, on the other hand, finds the choice to be oh so difficult. Douthat is a sharp critic of liberalism and the cleverest quasi defender of the currently existing Republican Party still remaining (though his cleverness generally involves transposing a fantasy Republican Party party onto the existing version).
Douthat’s pre-election column does not quite advocate for Trump. Instead, in it he simply argues that the choice is difficult, and that Harris’s flaws are of equivalent scale to Trump’s. What his argument actually reveals upon inspection is the poverty and sheer desperation of the case for even considering Trump.
Douthat raises several ways in which liberalism has gone astray in recent years. His critique on most of these issues has real force. Each of these individual critiques collapse, however, at the point at which he tries to present them as a comparative advantage for Donald J. Trump.
Douthat scolds the Democrats for their response to the murder of George Floyd: “After the liberal establishment was radicalized by the killing of George Floyd into a temporary repudiation of normal policing on “anti-racist” grounds.” It is true that a lot of extreme, oversimplistic arguments against law enforcement came into wide circulation for a short period of time in 2020. However, the connections between those left-wing beliefs and the crime surge is far more tenuous than Douthat allows — the police were not defunded at any scale and seemed to have undertaken a kind of soft strike in retaliation to public condemnation. In any case, Joe Biden opposed defunding the police all along, then passed increased funding for law enforcement, a stance Harris has continued supporting.
Trump, meanwhile, played an important role in instigating both the police brutality that outraged the country and the demonstrations that ensued. Trump ended the effective anti-brutality reforms begun by his predecessor and encouraged cops to brutalize suspects. It is not a coincidence that murder surged under Trump and has declined under Biden. Trump is an accelerant for violence and mayhem. Douthat is citing the awful conditions that prevailed under the Trump administration as a reason to support Trump’s return.
He proceeds to argue that the proliferation of unproven treatments on gender-questioning youth is another reason to consider Trump. (“America in that season mainstreamed experimental and unproven chemical and surgical treatments on thousands of gender-dysphoric young people … because people with a normal degree of skepticism were afraid of being called transphobes.”)
This is another real blind spot on the left. But Douthat again ignores the undeniable momentum toward his stance under Biden. Since Trump departed office, Douthat’s own newspaper has broken the scandal of youth-gender medicine, and a string of damaging revelations about the lack of evidence behind youth-gender care along with malpractice suits by regretful patients and legal action by Republican states has thrown the field onto the defensive. The Biden administration stance is now that “gender-affirming surgeries are typically reserved for adults, and we believe they should be.”
Douthat may not think this goes far enough. But what about the alternative on the ballot? Trump is not calling for more rigid adherence to scientific protocol. He is dehumanizing trans people of all ages. Douthat clearly weighs trans rights and care far more heavily than I do in his voting decision, but even if we grant his issue prioritization, what about Trump’s rhetoric and program does he find compelling?
He likewise scolds progressives for pandemic-era positions on public health, especially school closings (“issues of intellectual corruption, damage to schools and social life and mental health, there is a basic physical toll here … that undermines the liberal claim to represent sanity against populist derangement.”)
Let me grant much of his premise. The schools stayed closed for far too long. Public-health authorities and journalists who trusted them made serious mistakes, including treating the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory.
But the actual Democratic administration never went in for progressive groupthink. (The Biden administration is agnostic on the origins of the pandemic, for instance). Douthat is imagining some kind of alternate world in which the alternative to Trump is Michael Hobbes.
And the notion that matters of scientific integrity and sound public-health management militates on balance for Trump is utterly baffling. Yes, the pandemic inspired Trump’s one shining policy accomplishment, Operation Warp Speed. But Trump has repudiated that triumph. Instead, he has recommitted himself to the posture of denialism and kookery that dominated his messaging under COVID. He is currently promising to hand decisions over the entire sphere of public health to whack job Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (“I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines.”) Kennedy, for his part, is promising to immediately go to war on fluoridated water, an unambiguous public-health success. If you are worried about “intellectual corruption” in the field of public health — and you should be — I would not recommend letting Trump and possibly the dimmest member of the Kennedy family safeguard your precious bodily fluids.
There is a through-line in all the arguments Douthat throws up against Harris. He is citing excesses that occurred under the Trump administration as a reason to return Trump to office. It’s true that those excesses took place in reaction to Trump, and perhaps it feels unfair to blame Trump for the actions of his enemies.
But this is not merely a coincidence of timing. It is a fundamental disjuncture in Douthat’s reasoning. He is angry about intellectual dynamics and political movements that take place outside the official channels of government, and he is responding by proposing to make changes inside government. Putting Trump in the White House will not make the Yale faculty more moderate. If anything, the dynamic is just the opposite, as the fact pattern he raises suggests.
The most astonishing turn in Douthat’s case comes where he posits that intelligence and coherence may be an argument for Trump. Douthat complains that Harris “is still the Dan Quayle–like figure that almost everybody saw just a little while ago, still vague on policy and painful in extended interviews.” And it is true. Harris, like Eisenhower and Reagan, can wax elliptical and platitudinous, frustrating attempts by interviewers to pin her down to specifics.
This is still well within the range of historically normal. Does Douthat think this means we should consider voting for a man whose standard immigration riff focuses on Hannibal Lecter, almost certainly because he does not understand the difference between being granted asylum and escaping from an insane asylum? Who can’t read, can’t absorb briefings, or discuss any subject without devolving into pathological narcissism? A candidate whose actual policy positions are centered on ideas like replacing the income tax with tariffs and having government contractor Elon Musk identify $2 trillion of waste (over a year? A decade? I doubt there’s even a real answer), which are so unworkable that it’s impossible to analyze them seriously?
Bear in mind that Douthat’s case for uncertainty focuses on the strongest grounds for supporting Trump. And even a conservative as smart as Douthat, focusing on the best reasons to support Trump, and ignoring all the issues that favor Harris (which candidate has launched the fewest coup attempts, and so on), has still produced a list of criteria that clearly support his opponent on balance.
That is because Donald Trump is almost singularly devoid of virtue. He is a deranged, immoral man who feeds on the basest human emotions, brings out the worst impulses in both his supporters and his opponents. He is a magnet for irrationality, rage, criminality, and greed. There is nothing good about him. The case for banishing him from public life could not be any more obvious.
