The Way Through is Donald Trump for President

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Editor’s Note: The endorsement of a candidate is the author’s alone, not Ordinary Times editors or contributors

Well, it’s getting to be that time again, that time every four years at which our ritual in collective self-governance comes to a head, and we elect the President of the United States, as well as scores of other political offices at the federal, state, and local level.

This cycle, there is widespread dissatisfaction for both of the major candidates for President. I wouldn’t fault an American voter for refusing to vote for either one of them, as I personally did not vote in the 2020 cycle. But for me, this cycle feels different, in that this is a year in which I want to assert some responsibility for American culture and politics going forward, whereas in 2020 I wanted to disclaim that responsibility.

So as unfortunate as it is for many, we are left choosing between the presidential candidate of the two major parties. And in that context the best choice is quite clear. It is Donald J Trump.

A New Path

For those of us of a certain frame of mind, this cycle brings at least one satisfaction. Since January 6, 2021 (and even a few years before that truth be told), there has been a loud narrative that Donald Trump represents a unique and imminent threat to continued health and even existence of the Republic, and that removing Trump from power is the overwhelming priority of all good-faith political advocacy to the exclusion of everything else.

Here at Ordinary Times, David Thornton has been circulating this point of view. And of course, the protagonists for train of thought extend well beyond the League, including Never Trump ex-Republicans like David Frum or William Kristol, scoundrels and puppets like the Lincoln Project or Jennifer Rubin, and left-of-center haters and media personalities like Will Stancil and Medhi Hasan. And to a significant extent, this narrative has been at the forefront for most of this cycle.

But just because this narrative has been at the forefront doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody believes it, and in this case it should be apparent by now to have been pretty clearly repudiated no matter who wins the election. There is simply no reason why any American should have to ignore other concerns, such as inflation, border security, abortion, or the inadequacies and failures of important Democrats, just because Trump is one of the candidates.

In particular, it has to be mentioned that in order to evaluate the downside risk of any hypothetical choice or event, you have to consider both the magnitude of the harm if such a thing actually happens and the probability that the thing occurs. The Resistance/Never Trump narrative with respect to January 6 falls apart in exactly this way. We are told over and over again in lurid detail how it would be bad if the Trump coup would be if it actually succeeded, without any idea at all as to how likely it was to succeeding, or for that matter how likely it would to be attempted again. In this way we can see this narrative is an attempt to short-circuit our pluralism and deliberative processes, i.e., that for a small number of people, their aesthetic preferences and petty grievances are the sine qua non of informed choice for this election, but there is no reason at all for the rest of us to go along with that.

And for the most part, we’re not. That is the lesson of the past say, 18 months or so of this cycle. That, well beyond just MAGA diehards, including substantial parts of the previously Trump-unfriendly professional class, Americans have felt the need to address important aspects of our political culture and therefore have called it out as they see it. And if that happens to dovetail with a Trump-friendly narrative, so be it.

Trump, A Conventional Candidate

Ok, let’s stipulate to all of this for a moment. So far, none of this actually justifies an affirmative case _for_ Trump. So let’s address that.

First of all, we can and should vote for Trump to repudiate the nuts-and-bolts failures of the Biden-Harris Administration: inflation, border security, Middle East foreign policy, Covid mismanagement, Afghanistan, and any other items where some cohort of voters is naturally inclined to favor a typical Republican position.

Inflation and border security seem to be the biggest issues for this cycle but frankly any of them will do. This is especially compelling because, more than any other cycle I recall, the failures of this Administration are not merely adverse events that happened on their watch, but the direct result of Administration policies and executive actions. Or, in the case of Covid mismanagement, tightly coupled to the failures of the liberal Establishment at other levels of government, the permanent bureaucracy and the punditocracy.

Bad Faith Politics

Those things mentioned above are perfectly sufficient reasons to vote for Trump, but for me not even the most compelling ones. I was planning on voting for Biden roughly until a year ago at this time, with very little enthusiasm of course, but so intending nonetheless. The main reasons why I have changed my mind since then is one: because of the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023 and the response to it from American left-of-centers.

And also because of the ongoing pattern of corruptions, distortions and misrepresentations from American liberals regarding basically any meaningful political issue for the last fifteen years or so. At the time, it was clear that the legal persecutions of Donald Trump were wildly oversold, both in terms of liberal punditry and within the legal system itself. A lot of people could rationalize that the “victim” in this situation was Donald Trump and even if in some way the court system was treating him unfairly, that he’d done enough misdeeds of various kinds over the years to the point where he deserved whatever he had coming. And in some moments, I might even think that way myself.

Unfortunately, even if we don’t care very much about Trump’s legal problems, we must address the ongoing corruption of our culture by liberals who repeatedly distort and misrepresent any arising circumstance and their concomitant abuse of explicit authority and/or “softer” cultural power. We won’t be able to heal America until we as Americans can talk to each other in good faith, and we won’t be able to do that until the incidence and power of liberal misrepresentations are diminished.

For example, after the Supreme Court rulings which at least for while has taken the starch out of Trump’s legal problems, we had the Biden drama. Legacy media and lots of liberal pundits, especially the more partisan ones, told us every thing was fine. It was just a stutter, and we really shouldn’t be picking on Biden for that. Well, eventually the Democrats forced Biden out of the race and then we had the Harris campaign. And as it turns out, in this new world of political convenience, that Kamala Harris is the candidate for border security, lower inflation, in favor of fracking and against electric vehicle mandates. And, allowing tipped employees to get their money tax-free was actually her policy initiative.

Well, in any sort of fair meaningful consideration of these things, the liberal line here is a bunch of obvious, ridiculous, grotesque lies. Any fair-minded person ought to be shocked and revolted just in hearing them. Of course, for the most part we’ve just adapted to this, but we shouldn’t. This is what our votes are for. We can insist that left-of-centers advocate their intentions in a fair way, and if they don’t we can and should punish them.

Kamala is Horrible

In our collective past, we’ve had quite a few politicians who have been inarticulate in various ways: Eisenhower, either of the Mayor Daleys of Chicago, George W Bush, Trump, Biden. No matter how they spoke or why there was always some level of thought and intention inside, and for most of them it wasn’t especially hard to figure out. Not so with Kamala Harris.

She is completely unengaged with in any meaningful substance of governance, e.g., here, here, and here (and many others).

Frankly, it’s a disgrace to her and the Democratic Party that she’s running for public office in the first place.

Green Shoots of Governance

We’ve all gotten used to the negativity and polarization of American politics, and it’s important to point out that it doesn’t have to be that way. Over the last three or four years, and even somewhat back into the Trump term, there has flown under the radar a significant consensus on some important things. Not everything, of course, and not even a bipartisan consensus as much as an _apartisan_ consensus of issues that haven’t been meaningfully addressed due to the circumstances of the political balance of power.

I’m thinking in particular of things like opposition to terrorism in the Middle East and in favor of diplomatic solutions there. There’s also opposition to transgenderism, improved border security, reorientation of foreign policy to oppose China (along with Russia/Iran/North Korea), and YIMBY policies for domestic land use.

It’s a disappointment that the Trump campaign hasn’t addressed any of these with any conviction. But disappointment or not, he represents a dramatic improvement over any Democrat, especially since under Biden the Democrats are controlled by their staff and pressure groups, and are incapable of throwing them under the bus for the best interest of the United States as a whole.

Trump has no real reason to oppose any of this, and without the Democrats in power there could be enough people both Right and Left to create momentum to move these issues forward.

Horse Race

There is a conventional wisdom that the race is essentially tied and nothing more can really be said about it. I’ve read this from people whose opinion I respect on the matter, thinking in particular of Sean Trende and Nate Silver and others as well. I thought this myself up until about two weeks or so ago, and I’ve overestimated Trump-era Republicans before so I’ve been reluctant to be too bullish on Trump for this cycle.

But now, I’m not buying it. Trump hasn’t sealed the deal yet but he has a clear advantage, for a few complementary reasons. First, if the polls in aggregate are exactly right, the race is very close. Maaayyybe Trump wins, but very tight. But given what we know about politics for the last 20 years or so, a polling error is much more likely to favor the Republicans than the Democrats. Or to put it another way, the polling for Kamala and the Democrats is a coin flip where heads they lose, tails we tie. Realistically, any polling error at all in the Republicans’ favor basically renders the presidential race out of reach for Kamala Harris. Basically, at this point she’s counting on a polling error in her favor, and I don’t think that’s very likely at all.

In addition, extrapolating from prior elections the Republicans have the advantage in most or all of the hard, not-sample data we’ve seen so far, such as early voting (especially in Nevada) and party registrations.

Finally, probably most important, Trump has the momentum now and likely will still have it through Election Day. Kamala Harris is uniquely uninspiring and seems to hurt her campaign every time she opens her mouth. Beyond that, the recent attacks from liberal thought leaders are not landing, and even in a weird way would combine to Trump’s benefit if they were taken seriously.

The latest thing is Trump = Hitler, which the American people are tuning out as an obvious Godwin, even if they have never explicitly heard Godwin’s law. Then there’s the idea that Trump is really a stalking horse for Elon Musk, and that Trump himself is too old and slow for the job. Of course, if Trump really is a would-be dictator, it’s just as well that he lacks energy and that he’ll be co-opted by people representing the leading edge of American technological advantage and progress.

Overall, this race feels a lot like 1988 and or 2004. A flawed Republican is running against a flawed Democrat in a situation where the Republicans have a strategic advantage. And, over the course of a long cycle, the Republicans figure out some demographic arithmetic, build a campaign and a message to bring out a winning coalition, and grind out a tough win. As a useful shorthand to summarize where the race stands, my gut feeling is that Trump is more likely to win the popular vote than Kamala is to win the election.

Epilogue

At the risk of going in an entirely different direction, the prospect of a second Trump term in office is not all rainbows and butterflies. There are still things like the Trump Bible, Mark Robinson, bragging about how Trump’s inauguration had a bigger crowd than Obama’s (narrator: it didn’t), or, on a nuts-and-bolts level, the woeful lack of teamwork and execution in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. All these things are real, and we’re likely to see more of them for a while.

It’s important to note that these things are more than just expressions of Donald Trump’s ego and paranoia. In fact, for the first 8 months or so of 2023, Donald Trump was for the most part a MacGuffin in his own campaign. I.e., he was there, but basically a prop for other people to maneuver around, which was one of the reasons I incorrectly underestimated the strength of the 2024 Trump campaign.

Anyway, a lot of the spastic flakiness in right-of-center American politics has other causes, two of them in particular: first, the GOP is run according to the wishes of its primary voters to the detriment of its general election voters. Second, there are way too many Republicans at the grassroots level who are way too comfortable getting in touch with their inner asshole. And I suspect that’s also going to be with us for a while.

But even there, the way through is to rebuild the store of trust and common purpose among Americans. So to that end and many others, vote Republican in 2024. Vote for Donald J Trump.