My First Vote for Trump

E ight years ago when he won the office for the first time, I said that the primary danger to look out for in the Trump era was people lowering their professional and ethical standards to try to defeat him, or because they envied his success. I was right.

I also mention that only to make it maximally embarrassing to say that I will cast a vote for Donald Trump and J. D. Vance today. That involves changing my standards too. I used to be much more precious about my franchise, and consequently I’ve refused to vote in every election since 2004 because I never felt I was able to send the appropriate or worthwhile message with it. This pose I now deem excessively precious. I was taking myself too seriously — and my vote not seriously enough.

My chief objection to voting for Trump in 2016 was his character and what he would do to the country with it. But I was wrong on key aspects, namely that I predicted he would break his promise to appoint sound judges. He kept that promise. I had to reassess.

Trump-Vance is the ticket likely to be closest in my lifetime to the broad strokes of my national-conservative politics. That must count for something. I also feel compelled to lend Trump my popular vote from New York State in case there is another split between the Electoral College and the popular vote. The idea being to hedge with whatever I’ve got against a radical, Constitution-resenting tantrum from the other side. If Trump wins the popular vote, it is likelier to bring about salutary reflection on the other side. Being honest with myself, I found that even if my reservations and objections about Trump remain valid, I would still feel relieved if Trump and Vance won, but apprehensive if Harris-Walz triumphed. Millions feel this way.

It’s time to take my own side of the argument and support Trump with my vote.

I agree with Andy McCarthy that Trump’s stretching of the bounds in office was minimal (a shakedown of the Pentagon budget for border-wall money). It was also contained by the courts. January 6 was far more offensive, but its primary danger wasn’t to our constitutional system, it was to the safety of the people in the Capitol. And I agree with Andy that Democrats since Obama’s “pen and phone” moment have been committed to using raw executive power to change facts on the ground, rather than pursue their aims through legislation. Elected Republicans have shown themselves unable to contain this abuse. The remedy therefore is for Republican voters to block Democrats from the executive.

I believe that most cultural politics in the English-speaking world is just an endless reiteration of the English Civil War, with its tripartite division of Establishment Church, Catholic, and Low Church factions dividing and recombining as power shifts or new controversies arise. The Harris-Walz ticket is firmly in The Establishment camp. The Democratic ticket is committed to legislation such as the Equality Act, which is a direct threat to make Catholic and Low Church Protestant convictions legally painful to hold, and to induce us to adopt the doctrinal revisions and moral fads that many Mainline Protestant institutions — and their former seminaries in the Ivy League — have adopted only in recent decades.

Progressive cities and states continue to harass Catholic adoption agencies, Catholic health-care institutions, and no doubt soon they’ll soon target the schools and charitable organizations. In all these battles, my great ally is the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment properly understood. The Harris-Walz camp does not recognize the Constitution’s free-exercise clause as a fundamental right. They view it as an unfortunate and revisable exception to their recently adopted understanding of equality: equality as “equity.” The Trump-appointee judiciary is my best defense. I view it as a duty to my children, and the rational conclusion of all my other convictions, that I must eject this Establishment-Progressive worldview out of every office that’s in my power to affect.

I didn’t choose these fights, and I preferred a different champion in the primary. But it is my responsibility to recognize the fight I’m in and acknowledge the man taking shots for me. I think it is morally reprehensible to free-ride on the rest of the country’s votes for Trump, and then to preen that I’m too pure to pull a lever for the outcome I prefer.

And finally, a vote is about the future. And J. D. Vance is the future of the Republican Party I want to see. I share with him a generational perspective on our movement, on the quality of American institutions, and on the goods that conservatives can achieve for the next generation. He framed his change of mind on Trump as a combination of personal ambition and humiliation. “If I’m going to represent these voters,” he averred, “I’m going to have to suck it up and support Trump.” Me too.