Making a Morally Intolerable Choice

Voting for Trump is morally intolerable. So is doing nothing to stop Harris. Either way, I violate my conscience.

W e come to the choice. However long it may take to resolve the counting, tomorrow will deliver us either to a Kamala Harris presidency that extends Democratic control of the executive branch to 16 out of 20 years between 2009 and 2028, or a return of Donald Trump to the presidency. As an opinion writer and an advocate for a set of ideas, I have my own choices to make — what vote to cast, and whether and how to defend that vote to my readers.

So I will put my cards on the table now.

I am, for reasons that should be apparent, not voting for Harris. In fact, I believe that Harris and her campaign are so reprehensible and dangerous that it would be morally intolerable not to vote for Trump in order to stop her. The case for doing everything possible to stop the Democrat is stronger than it was in 2016 or 2020. But I also continue to believe that it would be morally intolerable to cast a vote in favor of returning Trump to power. In fact, the positive case in favor of supporting Trump is much weaker than it was in 2020. No matter what I do, any vote I cast — including not voting at all — will violate my conscience.

Saying It Out Loud

Under normal conditions, it would scarcely be necessary for a conservative columnist to explain voting Republican. Outside of Donald Trump’s two presidential campaigns, I have voted Republican for every office at every level of government for the past 30 years. But I dissented from Trump twice before, voting for Evan McMullin in 2016 and (having come to regret McMullin as a protest vehicle) writing in Mike Pence in 2020. I have rarely in my life had cause to be as immediately proud of a vote, even a symbolic one, as I was watching Pence stand in the storm against demands that he violate his oath and his conscience on January 6.

I explained my thinking in 2020 at immense length, covering a columnist’s duty to be candid with readers, a citizen’s duty to make a binary choice, the respective cases for and against Trump and Joe Biden, where I felt I’d been right and wrong in my assessments of Trump in 2016, and why we should make a fresh choice every four years rather than feel obligated to commit to previous choices. I won’t repeat all of that here.

But I confess that I am more hesitant this time around to make a public choice. On the one hand, as I have warned regularly and at some length, I expect a second Trump term to go badly and accomplish little that is good. If I say publicly that I intend to vote for Trump, I will be told that I never really believed any of that. On the other hand, as I have warned regularly and at much length, I believe that Harris is a menace to our constitutional order, to our fundamental liberties, and to the rule of law. If, having said all of that, I insist on yet again casting a protest vote, I will be told that I never really believed any of that, either.

The coward’s way out is to say that my vote doesn’t matter, because in truth it doesn’t. I live in New York, a state that Trump has twice lost by 22–23 points. That gives me the luxury of voting to send a message rather than to affect the outcome. I did something like that the last time I voted for a Democrat: I cast a ballot for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s last reelection in 1994, over Bernadette Castro. I would not have done that if I thought that Moynihan had a real chance to lose (he won by 14 points), but I was 23 then, very much concerned with the character of our government during the Clinton years, and still thought there was something to be said for symbolically supporting the sort of person who should be in the United States Senate.

But as a columnist with a national platform, I still believe that I should try to publicly reason through how I would vote if my vote actually mattered.

It’s Worse This Time

My argument in both 2016 and 2020 balanced two kinds of threats that are still with us. Trump is individually bad; the Democrats are institutionally bad.

Trump is a man of demonstrated bad character, not just privately but pervasively throughout his public life. He has little regard for laws, less for norms of behavior, and none for truth. He is, at a minimum, a low-grade serial sexual predator. He has no business exercising the vast discretionary powers of the presidency. He’s bad for the civic health of the country. He’s worse for the civic virtue of the Republican Party. Most elected Republicans, and most public supporters of the party, would not do the sorts of things Trump does — but many have gone along because he was doing them.

That was never more on display than in Trump’s disgraceful course of conduct between the 2020 election and January 6, 2021, which ought to have disqualified him for all time from the presidency. As I argued at the time, the Senate should have convicted Trump following the second impeachment and barred him from again holding public office — a failure for which primary responsibility rests with Republican senators. As National Review editorialized when Trump announced another presidential bid in November 2022, his current campaign is “an invitation to double down on the outrages and failures of the last several years that Republicans should reject without hesitation or doubt.” They have not, and yet again have forced the country to choose between a man of bad character and handing the keys to power to a party that is even worse.

The Democrats’ systemic assault on our constitutional order — on the Constitution as written and ratified, on the legitimacy of our elections and institutions, on our individual liberties, and on the very American idea itself — runs far deeper and is more long-standing than any one individual. It pervades the party and is if anything exacerbated by its intellectual class in journalism and academia. It has been ongoing since Woodrow Wilson’s introduction of living constitutionalism and the administrative state. Unlike the episodic abuses of Trump, it follows a path that has been frighteningly successful in undermining our American constitutional system. Our system has a strong immune system against the sort of threat presented by Trump and a very weak one against what the Democrats do.

It’s getting worse. Hillary Clinton was a Midwestern former Goldwater Girl, was first lady of Arkansas, sat on the Walmart board of directors in the days before woke capital, and voted for the Iraq War. She was married to a man who signed rafts of conservative legislation. She is at least a politically cautious character with some past understanding of Middle America. Joe Biden, hollow man and friend of dubious race-baiters old, new, and newer that he is, is nonetheless a child of the 1950s with a vestigial sense of himself as an institutionalist and the vocabulary of an older, patriotic, blue-collar Democratic Party. Even when Biden has joined up with progressive campaigns to wreck the Supreme Court and blow up the legislative filibuster, at least he has had the instinct to slow-walk them.

With Harris, the brakes would be off, and progressivism would be at the wheel in ways incompatible with liberal democracy. Outside of her high school years in Quebec, Harris has spent her whole adult life marinated in San Francisco progressivism. Her authoritarianism and contempt for restraints are, as much as anything, a product of a life in which she can’t even see that there’s another side to her view of things. That’s especially visible in her obsession with sex and race and her anti-Catholicism. It’s why she laughed in Biden’s face in 2019 when he told her that her proposals to trash the Second Amendment by executive order were unconstitutional. She’s never evidenced the slightest understanding that anything she wants to do might be restrained by law.

The Rubicon, for me, is Court-packing. Harris, unlike Biden, openly backed it in 2019. Now that it has resurfaced in 2024 under the guise of term limits, she is for it again. I won’t rehash here all of my arguments here, here, and in earlier pieces linked therein for why I regard this as such a disqualifying and dangerous thing for an American presidential candidate to embrace — every bit as disqualifying and dangerous as what Trump did leading up to January 6. The Senate Judiciary Committee was right in 1937 to warn that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Court-packing scheme was a proposal that “should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” Yet Harris sees FDR’s plan as a how-to manual. It’s banana-republic stuff.

There’s a reason why I told people for years that only two things could make me seriously consider a vote for Trump: Court-packing and the Democrats nominating Harris. Now, we face both. That alone has required me to think long and hard about whether I needed to revisit where I was four or eight years ago in different situations against different opponents.

The Worst Campaign Ever

It is not merely the case that Harris would be a bad president surrounded by bad people who would pursue bad policies, attempt bad things damaging to our constitutional system, and succeed at some of them, doing permanent harm to the nation along the way. All of that was true of Hillary and Biden, and the past four years have illustrated that.

It’s also this: The Democrats’ campaign to hang on to power has been utterly reprehensible. Taking all of its elements together, it represents something that should produce revulsion in the heart of everyone who wants America to be a self-governing republic and a decent society. Harris and Tim Walz are not personally responsible for all of that, but they are part and parcel of a unitary approach that is both ominously Orwellian and cruelly callous.

Start with the big, overarching fraud: the years-long effort to gaslight the American people into believing that Biden was not deteriorating before our eyes and ought to be rewarded with another four-year term, lasting until he was 86 years old. Harris and the entire party — with only a very few honorable exceptions such as Dean Phillips — went along with this fraud until it was exposed beyond denial in June’s debate with Trump. If you ever wondered if Edith Wilson’s cover-up of her husband’s incapacitating stroke could be repeated today, now you know. And virtually the whole national political press went along with it, to their everlasting disgrace. Robert Hur was calumnized, including by Harris (who publicly called him a liar and questioned his “integrity”), for telling us truths that nobody now can deny. Harris was even among the bitter-enders who spent weeks publicly trying to prop up Biden’s reelection campaign after the debate fiasco. And then, the instant that Biden dropped out of the race, they all immediately pretended that none of it had ever happened. Harris to this day won’t say why Biden isn’t running anymore, and hardly anybody bothers to ask her. She won’t say what she was doing behind the scenes between the Hur report in February and Biden’s departure in July. She’s always been at war with Eastasia.

Then, when the party bigwigs installed Harris as the nominee without so much as a single vote from the rank and file, we got a propaganda campaign of unparalleled audacity — again, with the complaisant obeisance of our supposedly adversarial political press corps — to completely reinvent Harris as a centrist avatar of “joy” totally unencumbered by the entire record of her political career and owing nobody any answers to the sorts of basic questions that a republic should ask of its leaders before giving them power.

Of course, the Biden administration’s bald-faced falsehoods have been central since the outset. They denied inflation was a problem. They denied crime was a problem. They denied the border was a problem.

Their entire campaign has been built upon one colossal falsehood after another, not incidentally in the fashion of the usual campaign-season folly, but centrally. They have spent millions running against the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 white paper, which is basically a think-tank suggestion box, knowing full well that it is not a Trump or Republican product. They have persistently pretended that they didn’t create the border crisis by executive actions that were always in their power to reverse, and instead constantly harp on a failed bill that they never needed for authorization. And, of course, they have created out of whole cloth accusations that Republicans had some secret plot to impose a national abortion ban.

Abortion is the greatest moral evil of our time, killing a million American children in 2023 — more Americans in a single year than have died in every war since Appomattox. Harris and Walz are the most gleefully pro-abortion ticket in our history, they have made their embrace of abortion the central issue stance and theme of their campaign, and they have blanketed the country with lies about anyone or anything that stands in the way of abortion. To vote for them would be material cooperation with evil. To compare with the fight against slavery, this is not like the 1848 contest between Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass, which divided anti-slavery Whigs over how much they could compromise with Taylor and how bad Cass really was; a pro-lifer voting for Harris would be like an abolitionist voting for John C. Calhoun.

Harris throughout her career has treated abortion as trumping any other rights or values, to the point of trying to lock up pro-life protesters and journalists. Two weeks ago, she rejected religious exemptions from participating in abortions on the grounds that abortion is “a fundamental freedom” — implicitly rejecting the notion that the free exercise of religion is similarly fundamental. She and her party are running a contemptible campaign of lies (in some cases, based upon illegally leaked medical records) to convince women and medical professionals that pro-life laws prevent women from receiving life-saving medical treatments. This campaign can succeed only if — as it seems to have done — it persuades people to misunderstand the law in ways that get women killed. That is a cost that is acceptable to Harris and her allies.

True, Trump and his party have been weak and defensive on abortion this campaign season, even stripping the pro-life plank from the platform. But does anybody think things will get better for the pro-life cause if the Harris-Walz “all abortion all the time” campaign succeeds? A Harris victory will be read by everyone in electoral politics on both sides of the aisle as a popular endorsement of abortion; a defeat will be proof positive that the issue is no magic bullet for Democrats and will at least raise some questions over whether it’s possible to go so far in that direction that some voters rebel.

Then, there’s how Democrats have approached Trump and the worst people in his movement. On the one hand, they have repeatedly treated them as an electoral opportunity, not a threat, such as when they spent tens of millions of dollars in 2022 to help these “threats to democracy” win Republican primaries. On the other hand, in a two-pronged effort to elevate Trump within his party while kneecapping him in the general election, they have pursued a campaign of abusive prosecutions and bogus legal arguments unprecedented in American history. They went to the Supreme Court to try to get Trump kicked off the ballot. They waited years to bring criminal charges against Trump, preferring to use the January 6 congressional committee to prosecute their case to the voters — then reversed course and started charging Trump, in many cases based on years-old evidence, for bogus crimes in multiple jurisdictions timed to go to trial during the general election. Special prosecutor Jack Smith has battled to get either a trial date before the election or, failing that, to dump his grand-jury evidence into the public in a one-sided filing. The manipulation and abuse of power involved is yet another tactic that ought to be expelled from the American body politic by a horrified electorate.

You Get Nothing

And yet, for all of that, if I vote for Trump, what do I get? I desperately want to see Harris defeated. But I don’t actually want to see Trump back in power, and he and his campaign have offered me and others of my views nothing. In 2020, despite my misgivings about Trump, I was at least tempted in his direction by the fact that he had appointed great judges, had a solidly conservative and principled vice president, and had stocked his administration with many more good people than bad ones (and the good ones had tended to last longer and get more done). But what now? Trump picked J. D. Vance as his running mate, an ominous choice for conservatives and one who may exacerbate rather than curb Trump’s flaws. There’s been, unlike in 2016, no reassuring list of solid candidates for the judiciary. There’s been lots of credible talk about a litmus test to blacklist from hiring people who won’t repeat Trump’s lies about 2020.

I accept, in the world of coalition politics, that candidates will promise other people things that I don’t like. There’s no such thing as an intellectually coherent presidential campaign because there’s no such thing as an intellectually coherent popular majority. But this is something different: We are back to the 2016 problem of being asked to take entirely on faith, having seen Trump at his worst, that we will get a responsible administration like the first Trump term (or rather, like the first Trump term prior to Election Day 2020). I do not believe most of the threats of terrible things that Trump supposedly would do, some of them even things he’s threatened himself, but how sure am I that he won’t do some incredibly bad things in office? Not all that sure.

At the end of it all, that puts me back where I have been twice before. In all candor, I’m rooting for Trump to beat Harris, because Harris and everything her campaign represents is an evil — or rather, a collection of evils — that needs to be driven out of decent society. I’m also rooting for Trump’s campaign to do well because that increases the likelihood of Republicans winning a bunch of Senate seats, which will be good and important no matter who controls the White House.

But I still can’t vote for Trump. I’m once again writing in Pence, who has earned the protest vote. Somebody still has to be able to stand up at the end of this all, no matter which side wins, against what follows. Is that a morally intolerable choice on my part? Yes, but any choice on offer would be. Is it vanity in a commentator, to stand apart and let others get their hands dirtier saving the republic by lying down with a bad and irresponsible man? I suppose it is. But when all the choices are bad, I prefer to choose to keep telling the truth about how bad they all are.