Declare Your Independence From Donald Trump

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive to the field before the national anthem at the College Football Playoff National Championship between Clemson University and Louisiana State University Monday, Jan. 13, 2020, at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
13 January 2020 [Public Domain]

Do you know any undecided voters? I’m not sure that I do, and it’s hard for me to imagine anyone at this late date remaining torn on how or if to vote in this presidential election. And yet, undecided voters do exist. Perhaps you are even one of them. I hope so, because this post is for you!

This post highlights the arguments I would bring up with a swayable voter to try to convince them not to vote for Trump. I’m aware this is likely an exercise in futility, but given the importance of this presidential election, I think it’s worth at least taking a shot at persuasion.

Who is this hypothetical voter? I imagine that you historically vote Republican. You are not full-blown MAGA and are not entirely happy with the direction of the Republican Party, but you find voting for a Democrat unappealing. Or maybe you’re fairly centrist but are put off by aspects of the Democratic platform. Perhaps you’re leaning toward Trump but open to changing your mind. In your ideal world, Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee. Alas, in this world, he is.

Who am I? Cards on the table, I’m not a Republican. Historically I’m not much of a Democrat either. I grew up in a conservative family in a conservative suburb of Houston with Rush Limbaugh a frequent voice on the car radio. Prior to 2020, I voted Libertarian in every presidential election. (Consider writing this post my penance for that.) In 2020 I voted for Biden. I have significant disagreements with many Democrats, but have become convinced that Trump is so uniquely unfit and dangerous that I’m voting Democratic for as long as he’s on the ticket.

I’ve written two previous posts (here and here) making a more positive case for Kamala Harris. In this one I’ll focus on the negative case against Trump, not from a particular partisan point of view but rather on the basis of values that are shared or should be shared across parties. It’s a case that opposing Trump is the correct move across the board, both for the country as a whole and for the health of conservative politics in the long-run.

An extraordinary number of Republicans are not voting for Trump

If you’re a Republican who’s open to the possibility of not voting for Trump, you should know that you’re in good company. Mitt Romney, previous Republican nominee for president and current senator, is not voting for Trump. Former vice president Dick Cheney is not voting for Trump. Former congresswoman Liz Cheney is not voting for Trump. Chris Christie isn’t voting for Trump. Jeff Flake isn’t voting for Trump. Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, isn’t voting for Trump. Half of Trump’s own cabinet either isn’t voting for Trump or isn’t willing to publicly endorse him.

If you want to dig further there’s an entire Wikipedia page listing prominent Republicans opposing Trump’s 2024 campaign. It’s a ridiculously long list! It’s not unusual for there to be a few party defections, but this is an unprecedented level of opposition from a former president’s own party and staff.

I’m not suggesting that these endorsements alone should determine your decision, but they should suggest that there are good reasons for even impeccably credentialed conservative Republicans to oppose Donald Trump. Some, such as Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, have done so courageously at the cost of their careers. Much less is asked of you, who is merely going to cast a vote. You can be a principled conservative and not give that vote to Trump.

Donald Trump is a rapist

Growing up in suburban Houston during the Clinton years, I was raised with certain expectations about what conservatives think about presidents and sexual morality. So it’s notable, and under attended by the press, that the current Republican nominee has recently been found liable by a civil jury for sexual abuse.

Specifically, the jury found Trump liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store. The act consisted, in her words, of Trump forcefully pinning her against the wall, pulling down her tights, and then:

The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

This, as the judge in the case clarified, meets the common definition of rape. The argument for not believing Ms. Carroll’s account, as best I can tell, is that she — a professional essayist — dared to recount the incident with some literary style. The argument for believing her is the corroboration of friends she told at the time of the incident, the decision of the jury hearing evidence in the case, and, well, everything else we know about Donald Trump.

So many women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct that it’s hard to keep track: there have been 19, 26, or even more of them by various tallies, often alleging a similar pattern of behavior in which he forces himself on women in vulnerable circumstances. We could add Trump’s own recollection of abusing his power as owner of the Miss USA pageant to walk in on contestants as they dressed:

“I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know I’m inspecting it. I want to make sure everything is good,” Trump told Stern at the time. “You know they’re standing there with no clothes. Is everybody OK? And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”

And, of course, Trump was notoriously caught on tape boasting about grabbing women by the pussy. “I don’t even wait,” he said. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Republicans talked themselves out of this mattering in 2016 by dismissing it as “locker room talk,” the implication being that actually grabbing non-consenting women by the pussy would be disqualifying, but just joking about it is OK. Well, we know now that he wasn’t joking, and here you are thinking about voting for him anyway.

One could go on, but there’s no need to belabor the point. You are not sitting on a criminal jury asked to convict a defendant. You are merely being asked whether Donald Trump, by the normal standards of evidence applied to politicians, is a sexual predator. No one has ever been less deserving of the benefit of doubt. If a male Democratic president were caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, admitted on record to barging into beauty pageant dressing rooms, were accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, and were held liable by a civil jury for sexual abuse, you would not have any trouble coming to the correct conclusion. You should apply the same reasoning to Trump, and if you decide to vote for him anyway you should do so in full knowledge that you’re voting for a rapist. But no one is making you vote for him, and you can choose not to.

Trump is a threat to American democracy

There is a long list of things that, prior to Trump, I would have believed sufficient to disqualify a presidential candidate in the eyes of reasonable voters. Committing rape is one; attempting to violently overturn the results of an election is another. Trump, remarkably, has done both and still won the Republican nomination for a third consecutive run.

The events of January 6th have been swept under the rug by a lot of voters, or sanitized as a mostly peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand. The protesters were in fact a violent mob that beat police officers, threatened the lives of members of Congress, and chanted to hang Mike Pence, disrupting the peaceful transfer of power. (In a first for a presidential campaign, Trump is running on a promise to pardon the protesters convicted of beating cops.)

Much has been written about January 6 but there’s no substitute for simply watching the footage:

There was much more to the plot to overthrow the election than the January 6 riot, far too much to cover here. I’ll highlight just one other egregious example: Trump calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, intimidating him to “find” 11,000 votes to change the outcome of the state. Raffensberger, a fellow Republican, admirably resisted the pressure, and the tape of the entire call was published by the Washington Post. This alone should disqualify Trump from future office, even without January 6.

It’s trite at this point to suggest imagining Democrats doing what Trump has done, but it’s a worthwhile exercise. Imagine that Barack Obama had narrowly lost to Mitt Romney in 2012. Then, instead of conceding defeat, Obama filed dozens of spurious lawsuits and spread baseless conspiracy theories, was caught on tape pressuring a Democratic secretary of state to find enough votes to change the election result, arranged to send fake slates of electors to Congress, pressured then-vice president Biden to refuse to certify the election, and sicced a violent mob of his supporters on the Capitol to disrupt the proceedings.

If you lean Republican, I don’t think you would have any trouble concluding that Obama would be utterly irredeemable as a politician for attempting that and would likely have called for his prosecution. Of course, this is a fantasy because Obama would never have attempted such a scheme, nor would have Bush or Romney or Clinton or Gore or McCain or Biden or Harris or any other recent major party nominee for president. Because whatever their flaws, all of them possess the basic respect for democracy and the rule of law to know that’s wildly out of bounds. Trump alone doesn’t care.

The stability of democracy depends on both sides’ willingness to abide by the rules of the game, acknowledge defeat, and return to compete again the next election. The alternative is lawlessness and violence, where the winner is determined not necessarily by votes but by who controls the levers of power and is most shameless in abusing them. This is the danger of Trump and what he threatens to steal from the United States. As election law expert Andy Craig writes:

The rhetoric about stolen elections is not a genuine legal dispute but an attempt to construct a pseudo-legal cover for destroying our representative system of government altogether. It is a strategy designed to justify extra-legal actions—essentially another coup attempt. At the most extreme, such calls are deliberate incitement to violence, which is hardly a hypothetical concern when Trump has previously done exactly that.

There is only one candidate who has tried to overturn his loss once before and who will attempt to do so again. Normal policy differences between the parties pale in comparison to the danger this poses to our constitutional order. Everything else can be sorted out later through ordinary politics; the unraveling of democracy and the rule of law will be much harder to repair.

Trump favors ruinous economic policies

In an ordinary election I’d be more inclined to write about the economic policies of the candidates. One of many ways that Trump has worsened American politics is by making the normal stuff of policy take a back seat to things like safeguarding democracy and the rule of law, things we could take for granted under normal politicians. But economic policy does matter and voters do have legitimate gripes about high inflation in the early 2020s, so it’s worth addressing.

High inflation is absolutely a valid complaint. It’s not one that can be completely laid at the feet of the Biden-Harris administration, however. Inflation was going to be a challenge no matter who took office in 2021. Recent inflation was partially a matter of policy, but it was also an inherent risk of economic recovery from the pandemic.

COVID was the greatest economic shock in a century. Emerging from the pandemic involved massive increases in demand, both from stimulus and from deferred consumption, and massive disruptions to supply chains. Economists differ on the exact details of how these factors interacted but this was pretty clearly a recipe for higher prices.

Post-pandemic inflation wasn’t just a US thing. The pattern is similar among peer countries, with inflation rising in 2021 and 2022 and then falling back down. That suggests that there’s only so much that any US president would have been able to do about it; there’s no realistic scenario in which we came out of the pandemic with a full economic recovery and no increase in inflation. You might as well be wishing for a pony.

Inflation in the US was higher early on than in other countries, and one can make a case that Biden should have anticipated that and pursued different policies. But inflation is also now lower in the US than in peer countries, and today the US economy is doing fantastic by just about any measure.

High inflation was also not the worst possible outcome of the post-pandemic recovery. There are alternative scenarios in which inflation was lower but employment took far longer to recover. It’s easy to imagine a very different 2024 election in which Democrats are hammered for presiding over recession and joblessness instead of inflation. In short, there was no easy way out of the pandemic and the recovery we got was one of the less-bad possibilities, putting the US ahead of comparable nations.

A problem for Democrats is that inflation genuinely was higher under Biden than under Trump. But that doesn’t tell you anything really useful about what to expect in the upcoming term. Now that post-pandemic inflation has been tamed, you need to look at the actual policies the candidates favor. And on that score, Trump presents a real risk of bringing back rising prices.

According to Trump, “tariff” is the “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Economists disagree. Tariffs raise the cost of imported goods. They also make the cost of domestic goods higher, since those are often made with parts and components that come from abroad. If you like buying affordable goods from around the world, you should oppose tariffs. Trump loves them.

Trump is also very enthusiastic about mass deportation. He promises to deport up to 20 million immigrants from the United States. Never mind that there aren’t nearly that many immigrants here illegally to begin with; a policy of deporting the workers who are providing you with food, goods, and other services is unlikely to make those things cheaper.

In addition to those supply shocks, Trump’s risks for inflation include far higher deficits than under Harris and possibly even long-term interference in the independence of the Fed. As Noah Smith summarizes:

Low interest rates would reduce the immediate fiscal costs of Trump’s debt binge, but they would come with a price. If there’s still underlying inflationary pressure in the economy, low rates would accelerate inflation. Even more ominously, if businesspeople and investors realized that the Fed was no longer truly independent, it could touch off an inflationary spiral, where higher inflation expectations led to higher actual inflation.

This isn’t a niche view. A recent survey of economists asked which of the candidates’ economic plans would be more likely to lead to inflation. They pointed to Trump’s by a whopping margin, 70% naming Trump compared to just 3% naming Harris.

There are fair criticisms one can make of Kamala Harris’s economic policies but Trump’s ideas conflict wildly with basic economic principles. Given executive branch leeway on immigration enforcement and trade policy, he’ll also be much less constrained in pursuing them.

It’s completely fair to feel frustrated about inflation in the 2020s. But if you’re genuinely interested in avoiding short-term supply shocks and keeping inflation low moving forward, Trump is the riskier candidate to bet on.

Trump will be gratuitously cruel to immigrants

It’s not uncommon for politicians to promise more than they can actually deliver. Typically, these are promises that at least aspire to making people’s lives better. Trump’s principal campaign promise is to make people’s lives worse. Namely, he promises to forcibly deport 15-20 million people from the United States.

This is unrealistic for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that there are only about 11 million immigrants in the US without authorization. Deporting 20 million people would mean forcibly removing more than 5% of the current US population. There is no sensible, much less no humane, way to do this.

Yet there will be unfathomable cruelty in the attempt. Immigrants who are here legally will be targeted, since Trump aims to deport nearly double the unauthorized population. Marriages will be broken apart. Children who are American citizens will lose their parents to exile or will be forced to uproot their lives to join them in a foreign country. Law enforcement will make mistakes with impunity, arresting and possibly deporting people who have every right to be here. Millions of people who are in America peacefully pursuing a better life for themselves and their families — perhaps people you know, people you hire informally, people you say you care about — will face the terror of being detained in camps, deported, and losing everything.

Trump says that he will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law last used for Japanese internment, to “liberate” cities from immigrants. If permitted by courts to do so, the law would not be constrained by use against unauthorized immigrants, but would apply to anyone from targeted countries. And Trump has been relentless in demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants. As Anne Applebuam summarizes:

He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

This rhetoric is more akin to Stalin than to Ronald Reagan. Republicans in recent memory encouraged the idea that America should be welcoming toward immigrants. Trump, with his rallies for “mass deportation now” and his rants about immigrants eating people’s dogs and cats, calls supporters instead to indulge their worst, most racist instincts. And if he returns to office, there’s no doubt that he’ll staff the government with people eager to do the same, with the full power and cruel indifference of the state behind them.

Donald Trump hates America

To say that Donald Trump hates America is a strong claim. I don’t mean that he hates living in America. He’s obviously flourished economically here: he surely likes that in America he became fantastically rich, famous, and adored by a cult-like base of fans. But he hates what America stands for.

Democracy, when voters reject him? Hates it. Accountability and equality before the law, when his crimes get prosecuted? Hates it. Free speech, when he’s the one being criticized? Hates it. America as a nation of immigrants, a land of opportunity for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Absolutely hates it with a passion.

Trump claims to be a patriot but is “fascist to the core,” in the words of his own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired General Mark Milley. Or as his former chief of staff John Kelly warns, “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

It’s why Trump refused to concede his loss in the 2020 election, why he sicced a violent mob on the Capitol, why he wants to revoke the licenses of TV networks that criticize him and shoot protestors in the legs, why he speaks dreamily of dictators, why one of his first acts as president was the Muslim ban, why he never misses an opportunity dehumanize immigrants.

Trump is plainly a fascist, an aspiring authoritarian ruler. If you’ve ever wondered what you would do if an actual fascist threatened the Constitution of the United States, it’s what you decide to do now.

Trump is an opportunity to prove your independence

I wouldn’t even try to write about post like this about previous major party candidates for office. Democrats normally vote for Democrats, Republicans normally vote for Republicans, and that’s fine. Major parties usually nominate fairly normal politicians who represent the views of their base, constrained by the norms of obeying the law and respecting the outcome of elections. There are many places where we might demonstrate our independence, but the ballot box isn’t often one of them. Usually, it doesn’t need to be.

Trump breaks that mold. He’s not a normal politician. Many Republicans can only stand to vote for him by pretending he doesn’t mean the things he says or that he hasn’t done the things he’s done. This is a grave mistake. He does mean them, he has done them, and he will be even less restrained by staff and less cognitively open to reason in a second term.

Watching the past decade of American politics and knowing many conservatives who are decent people in their everyday lives, the question I return to again and again is if there is any red line Trump could cross that would convince them not to support him. If there’s one persistent pattern to his political career it’s that he forces them to accept or ignore ever lower depths of depravity. In 2016 it was banter about sexual assault; now it’s actual rape. In 2020 it was musing that he wouldn’t accept losing an election; months later it was an attempted violent coup. What will you be forced to countenance if you restore him to power through 2028?

If you’re reading this, you’re probably old enough to remember conservative politics before Trump. Consider this: for Americans approaching their thirties, Trump is the only Republican candidate for president they’ve ever had the opportunity to vote for. To younger voters, conservativism and the GOP simply is Trump. It’s bigotry, stupidity, incompetence, insurrection, crime, and sexual abuse. If he wins this election, he will make his mark on the party even more indelibly. If that’s not the future you want for your party, you at some point need to stop going along with him.

This election is a last chance to finally move on. If not now, when? If Trump isn’t disgraceful and dangerous enough to convince you to put country over party just this one time, who on Earth would be? No less a conservative than George Will now concedes that the best thing can happen for both the country and the party is for Republicans to take the short-term loss and rebuild for 2028.

What to do? You could vote for a third party. You could leave the presidential line blank and only vote for down-ballot candidates. These are better options than voting for Trump. But I’d urge you to do what I will be doing myself, regardless of my policy differences with Democrats: vote for his opponent Kamala Harris.

Trump provides you with the rare opportunity to prove that you are capable of having the conscience and independence to vote against your party when it strays too far from basic American values, from what should be your values. Some admirably principled Republicans are doing so at the cost of their careers. For you, it would cost nothing. It’s hands-down the best thing you can do with your ballot this year.