The confessions of a Trump skeptic

Vote. Don’t vote. I don’t care. Just stop telling me that Vice President Kamala Harris is going to save democracy.
Do I wish Republicans had nominated a more coherent, principled, competent candidate for the presidency? Of course. But if anyone is under the impression Democrats tapped such a person, I have news. Spend some time trying to decipher Harris’s swirling, platitude-ridden, incoherent rhetoric, and you will only be further convinced that we live in an idiocracy.
Sure, there are many reasons why a movement conservative might feel uncomfortable voting for former President Donald Trump. I get it. I’m not a fan. But there are plenty of completely rational reasons to vote for him, as well. First and foremost, the existence of the contemporary Democratic Party.
Liz Cheney, and other Never Trumpers, tell me that the former president poses a uniquely dangerous threat to the Constitution, and thus, I must set aside any policy disagreements with Democrats, and put country over politics.
No doubt, this kind of self-glorification feels great, but it doesn’t really comport with reality.
For one thing, most of the Left’s scariest warnings about Trump are fiction. I’m sorry, I don’t believe he’s going to throw all his political enemies in concentration camps. Save the story for the next Mueller investigation.
Considering recent history, in fact, it’s clear to me that the Left is far more adept and willing to weaponize the state to punish their enemies. And I’m not just talking about the unprecedented lawfare launched at Trump. I’m talking about debarring lawyers. I’m talking about raiding the homes of pro-life activists. I’m talking about the spying on Catholic churches and the Justice Department’s chilling speech by smearing parents who stood up to authoritarian school boards as terrorists.
Moreover, even if Trump acted on his worst instincts, the damage would likely be confined to his own presidency. Trump is about Trump. Harris and Democrats, though, have openly embraced a string of consequential, long-term attacks on the constitutional order. Ones that we can never come back from.
Sorry, I don’t accept that a woman who once complained to CNN’s Jake Tapper that “millions and millions of people” were “speaking without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop,” is going to be my champion of the Constitution. And attacks on the First Amendment concern me a great deal more than J.D. Vance’s refusal to retroactively concede the 2020 election (though it never seems to bother Never Trumpers that Democrats have been denying the legitimacy of presidential elections for decades). Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MI), only recently argued that there is “no guarantee” for free speech when it came to “misinformation” or “hate speech,” “especially around our democracy.” If this was a properly functioning republic, Walz would be thrown to the curb.
Of course, a few years back, the Biden administration was setting up a “Ministry of Truth,” and the president was threatening social media outlets who refused to censor users. In the end, most of them did. Institutional left-wing newspapers are endlessly running think pieces warning us about the evils of unfettered speech. No honest person could possibly believe Democrats are better for free expression.
Let’s not forget, either, that Harris once promised to bypass Congress and sign an executive order seizing rifles from millions of law-abiding Americans. Though Democrats like to pretend otherwise, the Second Amendment is still part of the Constitution.
Indeed, Harris is in no position to lecture anyone about any governing norms. She frequently praises Biden for ignoring courts and “forgiving” student loans by forcing taxpayers to foot the bill. She supports trashing the legislative filibuster, empowering slim majorities to destroy any semblance of federalism. Harris has backed bills that would have overturned thousands of state laws, allowing national Democrats to strip state election-security measures, make abortion legal until crowning, compel local religious hospitals to perform gender transition surgeries, shut down religious foster care organizations, and many other outrages.
Recall that only two moderates — one who was chased out of the party and the another who has left the Senate — stood in the way of Democrats doing away with the filibuster a few years back.
None of this is to even speak of her efforts to destroy a Supreme Court. Harris not only gleefully took part in the vile smearing of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, putting gang rape accusation into the Congressional Record, but she also reportedly supports packing the court — the most serious attack on the judicial branch since President Franklin Roosevelt’s effort in the 1930s. Senate Democrats say it is “virtually certain” they will pass a “Supreme Court reform” bill that, among other assaults on the judicial branch, will empower legislators to strip individual justices of their power.
This is all just blatantly authoritarian stuff. I have no doubt she would sign on.
One of the best reasons to vote for Trump in 2020 was “but Gorsuch” — and Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is still one of the best reasons. Right now, the court is the only institution in the United States that, on occasion, properly functions. There is no telling what kind of arsonist Harris and Democrats would install. At the very least, I know Trump has a track record of not only nominating decent jurists but sticking with them under massive pressure.
Over the years, people have accused me of dropping my principles by adopting this kind of transactional political calculation. I’ve always been confused by the allegation. For me, politics are completely transactional. This isn’t my religion. And I’m not looking for a rabbi or a babysitter or a guiding light. I’m looking for a politician who will nominate young, healthy, zealous originalists. And I can support a politician today and then turn on him tomorrow. I’m not married to any of these people, and neither are you.
So, yes, I hate Trump’s economics. His promise of across-the-board tariffs is a job-killing regressive tax on all. In many ways, the real “uniparty” in Washington is found in economic policy, where we have a suicidal alliance on spending and attacks on free enterprise. Pray that gridlock saves us.
But let’s not fool ourselves, either. Democrats have long been big fans of tariffs, as well. Biden, for instance, kept many of Trump’s tariffs in place. They’re popular. At least the Trump administration supported deregulation, unwound some of the restrictive climate change boondoggles, and promoted energy production. The notion that Democrats, the party that crammed through the $4+ trillion crony spending bill to temper inflation, are going to be more responsible stewards of the economy, is laughable. Harris is an economic illiterate. And her team is going to look just like the one Biden leaned on.
It is odd, indeed, that Democrats, who support price controls, state mandates, and a slew of other economic intrusions that force corporations to bend to their will, are constantly warning us about the specter of “fascism.” Harris was one of the first supporters of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which would not only ban all fossil fuels, but force Americans to retrofit every building in the country, eliminate air travel and meat, and create government-guaranteed jobs, among many other insane measures.
There are Trump supporters on the fringe of the New Right that I would consider fascists. But I’m not sure most Democrats understand what the word means, other than “people I don’t like.”
And speaking of people Democrats don’t like, Israel is another important issue for me, not only as a Jew but as a big fan of Western civilization.
While then-President Barack Obama shifted the Democratic Party’s admiration from Israel to Iran, it was the Biden-Harris administration that brought this policy into catastrophic fruition.
By finally bypassing the intractable Palestinians, Trump gave Israel space to forge deals with most of the Sunni Arab world, leaving Iran increasingly isolated and weakened. Democrats immediately made Palestinians and Iran the center of their foreign policy, undercutting the Jewish State in deadly ways.
One of the first acts of the Biden administration was to overturn Trump-era policy, releasing hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to the corrupt dictators of Fatah and violence theocrats of Hamas without any genuine oversight.
They did the same with Hamas allies at UNRWA. (Some of its employees participated in the Oct 7 massacre.) The Biden administration then took the Houthis, another Iran proxy, off the State Department foreign-terror designation list. When not directly sending more pallets of cash to Iran in hostage deals, Biden ignored sanctions, further enriching the Iranian regime.
Judging from Harris’s word salad on 60 Minutes, we are obligated to accept that she comprehends next to nothing about the Middle East. She will almost surely reinstate the same Obama-era Israel-antagonist retreads that Biden had in the White House.
It should never be forgotten that before Israel had even identified the bodies of all their dead, Democrats were pressuring the Jewish State to reward their murderers with an “independent” state – which, inevitably, would be run by Hamas or some other iteration of the group. Repeatedly the Biden administration undermined Israel’s efforts to win the war. When Israel began rooting out Hamas, Biden and Harris began smearing the duly elected prime minister of Israel as some kind of madman. Biden personally repeated Hamas’ bogus casualty numbers. When Israel pulled off the amazing Hezbollah pager coup, Antony Blinken complained about “escalations.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
All of that is bad enough. Rather than tempering the massive antisemitic surge in the U.S., Biden, Harris, Walz, and many other Democrats have noted that there are both sides of the (but for real) pro-Hamas/pro-Israel debate. Never has Harris ever uttered a critical word about openly antisemitic Democrats in her party. How any Jew could, in good conscience, vote for that party is a mystery.
Or a conservative. We have no clue if the Trump presidency plays out. Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is whenever he feels like it. It might well be a disaster. But Harris offers me nothing.