For me and millions of other Americans, the 2024 U.S. election is already effectively over. Like most Arizonans, I mailed in my ballot and it awaits the count. Now, I suffer through the remaining days of hectoring political ads and finger-waggers nagging me about how I should have voted. This country doesn’t lack strong opinions about two of the worst candidates to ever grace a presidential race. Unfortunately, I felt obliged to vote for one of them, and in an effort at harm reduction, I selected the proven authoritarian over the aspiring totalitarian; I marked my ballot for Donald Trump.
There’s no doubt that Trump is a thin-skinned narcissist. Legendarily intolerant of criticism or even disagreement, he wants broadcast licenses pulled from news networks that he thinks have been mean to him and called for government to crack down on cable operations that aren’t actually subject to government regulation. The man needs perspective as much as he needs a social studies class.
This is, many Democrats and their media supporters will eagerly tell you, evidence of “fascism.” But, as John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, told The New York Times, “Trump isn’t capable of philosophical thought.” Trump’s authoritarianism isn’t an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.
That should be enough to disqualify a candidate for president. You’d think that, in a nation of 330 million people, if one major party chooses to run a profoundly problematic and authoritarian nominee for president, the other could find somebody more qualified. But you’d be wrong. In Kamala Harris, Democrats picked a vacuous sociopath uninterested in policy, but willing to serve as a vehicle for those around her who have tried their hands at totalitarian speech controls, and who are increasingly hostile to Israel, the only majority-Jewish state on the planet, and to Jews as a people.
In 2021, The Washington Postreported that former staffers for Vice President Harris complained she “would refuse to wade into briefing materials prepared by staff members, then berate employees when she appeared unprepared.” That failure to prepare for responsibilities and public appearances feeds her propensity for word salads, leaving the impression she’s reciting the results of a dropped Scrabble board.
In a Biden-Harris administration already lacking for adult supervision — President Joe Biden’s failing mental faculties are now a matter of record, as is his inability to make decisions — that suggests a potential President Harris would have no firmer hand on the wheel. That would leave the relatively faceless minions around her free to continue to exercise their instincts. And their instincts are terrible.
Recently, the Biden-Harris administration quietly transferred a senior Pentagon official after somebody leaked details on Israel’s plan to retaliate against Iran’s ballistic missile attack. That was only the latest development for a party that’s increasingly hostile to the Jewish state. This week, an AP-NORC poll found 57 per cent of Democratic voters place “a lot” of blame on Israel “for the escalation of war in the Middle East” after Hamas’s murderous October 7 attack. Only 26 per cent of Republicans feel that way.
This past summer, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was reportedly dropped from consideration as Harris’ running mate in part because he was considered “too sympathetic to Israel,” according to The New York Times. The action, the report added, “confirmed or inflamed simmering fears about antisemitism on the left.”
That’s not an indictment of all Democrats, but it was enough to drive my wife, who is Jewish, to prefer Trump over Harris. With the safety of my family to consider, it’s a concern for me, too.
Just as worrisome for me is that Democrats saw Trump’s loud intolerance for criticism and doubled down with a totalitarian hunt for any sort of deviation from approved thought. Until they were found out through the publication of the Twitter and Facebook files, the Biden-Harris administration strong-armed social media platforms behind the scenes into suppressing debates about pandemic policy and political news that was inconvenient for the administration.
“Senior officials from the Biden administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee in an August letter. He conceded that Facebook suppressed reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents under pressure from the FBI.
Kamala Harris, herself, complained that social media companies are “speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation.” That’s how it’s supposed to work in a free country, but such free-wheeling speech obviously disconcerts the candidate and many members of her party.
Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, warns that “the Democratic Party is the party of control.” That control extends over much of government, academia, media, cultural institutions, and many corporations. After abstaining in two elections, Gurri wrote, he’s voting for Trump, “because he’s taken a stand against the forces of control.”
Analyzing America’s political realignment for Reason, Jesse Walker (no Trump supporter) agrees Republicans now represent an “antiestablishment” force — though one with plenty of other ideological baggage. That’s quite a shift from what was once characterized as the country club party, but this is a strange world we live in.
Normally, that wouldn’t be enough of a shift for me to mark my ballot for a man who leaves me unimpressed. I worry about what Trump might do back in office, though not as much as I fear Harris and, especially, those around her.
In 2016, I voted for Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, who ran as a Libertarian. In 2020, I picked Jo Jorgensen, the Libertarian who, as a psychology professor, was a fitting addition to the Trump-Biden race. Chase Oliver, this year’s candidate for that party, is a better person than Harris or Trump could ever be. But Oliver represents an organization imploding after a takeover by nationalist trolls who fought his nomination. Maybe that party will repair itself, but for now, I’ll look elsewhere.
I could just skip voting for a presidential candidate. But with so much of the media, academia, business, and government in the hands of hateful control freaks, I’d like to see one institution out of their hands and in opposition. Donald Trump, for all his flaws, could be an effective monkey wrench in the machinery.
National Post