It should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read my Substack that I am no fan of Donald Trump. While I strive to avoid a partisan mindset and respect good faith actors whether they are conservative or progressive, I do not believe that opposition to Donald Trump makes one a partisan. He is a singular character in American history, the sort of leader Alexander Hamilton warned us against, and I believe it is important for patriotic Americans of all stripes to recognize him for who he is and defeat him in November.
Gallons of ink have been spilled detailing the many failings of Donald Trump over the years. I won’t attempt to reiterate all the arguments but will focus on three areas that I find disqualifying, and which would be enough for me to vote for a much more progressive Democrat than Kamala Harris if I had to (fortunately, I don’t).
Unfit
To be honest, I find it difficult to understand why Trump’s unfitness to be leader of the free world is not self-evident to the vast majority of Americans. He was found liable by a jury of sexual assault, which he had previously bragged about. He lies constantly. He refused to accept an election defeat after his legal attempts failed (more on this later). He plays on fear, anger and division to stoke his base. He says stuff like this about his opponent:
“Crooked Joe Biden became mentally impaired,” he added. “Sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way. There’s something wrong with Kamala. And I just don’t know what it is, but there is definitely something missing. And you know what, everybody knows it.”
I was raised a conservative during the “moral majority” days when Republicans claimed to care about the character of their leaders. But their support of Trump has shown this to have been a farce, easily discarded for political gain. The fact that Trump locked up the nomination again in 2023 shows that even when given plenty of morally decent, truly conservative options like Mike Pence, Republican voters still chose Trump.
Republicans claim to be concerned about the rise of “wokeness” but fail to recognize that Trump’s election and behavior is a major reason it rose to such prominence during his presidency and has become less salient since his departure. Republicans claim to care about law and order yet nominated a convicted felon who refused to protect or return classified material when demanded by the Feds. And Republicans claim to be the protectors of family values yet line up behind moral abominations.
But don’t take my word for his unfitness. I strongly encourage you to read this compilation of statements by members of his own administration and party who witnessed it first-hand. Or this list of over 100 former G.O.P. officials who have endorsed Harris. Or consider that once-prominent Republicans like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Dick and Liz Cheney, and even Mike Pence have either declined to endorse Trump, have said they would not vote for him, or even endorsed his opponent. What do you know about judging someone’s fitness for this office that they don’t?
Unserious
Trump is a notoriously undisciplined, incurious and insecure person. As President, he spent hours every day watching cable news and responding on Twitter. He lashes out defensively when corrected or told something he doesn’t know and is clearly intimidated by expertise and intelligence. It is rumored that a major motivation for his running for President was being mocked by Obama. His interest in the office is driven by his fragile ego which depends on the adoration of crowds, the feeling of being a winner, and his penchant for grifting.
The Presidency is a serious job. Trump got lucky that he inherited a relatively stable geopolitical scene and economy (until the pandemic hit), but 2024 is not 2016. There’s a shooting war in Europe. The middle east is aflame. China is playing the long game but could be emboldened if we abandon our allies and turn inward. Trump is easily manipulated, has an inflated sense of his dealmaking ability and has claimed he’ll end the war in Ukraine before he even takes office. Military experts don’t take that claim seriously, unless he intends to abandon Ukraine and gives Putin what he wants. Our democracy will likely survive a second Trump term (though I believe his lack of respect for the rule of law represents its greatest threat since the Civil War), but the stakes for Ukrainian democracy are much higher.
His unseriousness extends to a callous disregard for anyone but himself. After calling Pence a “coward” on Twitter during the January 6 capitol riot, Trump was told that Pence had to be evacuated to a secure location. His alleged response? “So what?” Trump’s disdain for John McCain, whose military service he had degraded and whose funeral he declined to attend, was so well-known that the White House actually asked that the USS John S. McCain be moved so he wouldn’t see it during a foreign trip (it apparently wasn’t).
This “so what?” attitude extends to his business “success.” Success in business is often a consequence of one’s willingness to take risks. The nature of risks is that they often fail. For every Donald Trump who inherited a lot of money and proceeded to make risky bets with it that ultimately made them wealthy, there are many more whose bets failed. But you generally don’t hear about those, yet we ascribe great talent and business acumen to those statistically inevitable few who succeed. And Trump’s success isn’t just due to luck - he also tilted the scales in ways that more scrupulous individuals would eschew. He has leveraged bankruptcy law to his benefit, inflated and deflated his net worth to avoid taxes or get better interest rates, lied about the cost of improvements to get out of rent controls, has failed to pay his contractors, and used every trick in the book to avoid legal consequences. In short, his continual claims about being cheated are a projection - he’s the cheater.
These are the behaviors of an immature, lawless narcissist, not a serious person fit for one of the most serious jobs in the world.
Unmoored
The final, and possibly most dangerous, problem with Trump is his disconnection from reality. While I could point to the many conspiracy theories and false stories he’s spread on social media, the most salient and important example is his behavior around the 2020 election. January 6 is the most dramatic example of the consequences of his irresponsible rhetoric and claims, and I’ve already written about the lies and unfounded speculation he and his supporters have spread about it. But it’s much bigger than this, as it’s the lies before and after that event which undermine Americans’ faith in our democracy.
A number of prominent conservative legal experts released a thorough report evaluating Trump’s claims of election fraud called Lost, Not Stolen and summarized it thusly:
Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden's election was not legitimate.
This report includes a review of his failed court cases, and a state-by-state review of the evidence (or lack thereof) about election fraud. If you believe the 2020 election was unfair, I highly encourage you to read this report. These are not liberal partisans who supported Biden. These are conservative judges and lawyers who know how to evaluate evidence and discern the truth. They, like Trump’s own attorney general, consider Biden to be the duly elected president.
Of course, refusing to accept defeat is Trump’s modus operandi. He called the 2016 Iowa caucus (which he lost to Ted Cruz) “stolen” as well, and spent the months leading up to the 2020 election sowing seeds of doubt in the election before ballots had even been cast. Election experts had been predicting a “red mirage” on election night, as many states count in-person votes (which favor Republicans) before mail-in ballots (which favor Democrats). As they feared, Trump claimed this as evidence of cheating as he called for states to “stop counting” as his early lead narrowed.
Trump’s unwillingness to accept reality, his reflexive insistence on his own rightness, and his lack of concern for the consequences of spreading self-serving falsehoods are a dangerous combination. I heard from Republican acquaintances who supported Trump in 2016 that it’d be fine because he’d surround himself with serious people like Jim Mattis. Those people are gone. In their place will be sycophants and yes-men like J.D. Vance who have remade themselves in a cynical ploy to gain power. Will these people tell Trump what he doesn’t want to hear when it matters? Will they undermine and misdirect his worst impulses? Will they care about the unintended consequences of a cruel and incompetently executed “mass deportation” regime, an abandonment of Ukraine, inflationary tariffs, or purges of career bureaucrats in exchange for inexperienced loyalty hires?
The argument against a second Trump term is not just about his personal character flaws or narcissism. It’s about the risk of giving an unserious, unfit man these awesome powers again, this time with an administration designed to avoid the “mistakes” of the first term in which he had to keep firing the qualified and responsible appointees that stood up to him.
Republicans know that against this litany of disqualifications, the only viable strategy is to paint their opposition as worse. Which is why so much of what Trump and his campaign and partisan media say about Democrats are hyperbolic exaggerations. Democrats are criticized by the right for claiming that Trump is a threat to democracy because of his disregard for the rule of law and election results. But Trump and his supporters are the ones making statements like “you won’t have a country anymore,” predicting “World War III” and calling his opponent communist, Marxist and fascist (never mind that fascism and communism are opposing economic systems).
We’re all exhausted by the Trump era and what it has done to our politics. Both sides have gotten more extreme in reaction to each other and friends, families and churches have been split up because of divisive rhetoric about apocalyptic stakes. I do agree the stakes are high, but I’m not just worried about what Trump will do. I’m worried about what his victory - this time when we know what we’re getting - will represent. What it will tell the world - both our allies who will wonder if they can ever trust us again, and our adversaries who will revel in our chaos. What it will tell our children - about the sort of people we elevate as our representatives. What it will tell us about ourselves - about the values we thought we held in common, and the unity and shared reality we thought we were capable of.
I’m dying for a return to two responsible political parties. I want a conservative party that stands up for truth and responsible, rational governance. A GOP that cares about policy and persuasion, not personality cults and conspiracy theories. I’d love to be able to believe that a Republican victory would be fine - maybe not my preference, but fine. For the sake of the conservatism I grew up with, which is all but dead thanks to the Trumpified MAGA movement, I pray Trump loses decisively so the Republicans can finally see what an albatross he has been to the success and health of their party.
I don’t know if that will happen. Harris has been running the campaign I would have wanted - focused on a positive unifying vision and trying to appeal to centrists like me. If it turns out it’s not the campaign that a large enough minority of Americans wanted (Trump will almost certainly lose the popular vote for the third time in a row even if he wins the election), I will be deeply disappointed and worried. I hope the consequences of a second Trump term won’t be as bad as I fear, but maybe they need to be to break this national fever. Sometimes the only way to learn is through mistakes, but as citizens of the world’s foremost superpower, I really hope we take our responsibility seriously enough to not have to.