I didn’t want this, but I can’t say it was unforeseeable.
I didn’t want this, but I can’t say it was unforeseeable.
‘L ook, it’s a binary choice.” That’s how I’ve somehow rationalized voting — not once but three times — for Donald Trump, whose second term amounts to the worst presidency of my lifetime. I still think it’s true that a presidential election is a binary choice, even if that may paradoxically be self-delusional.
I believed in January 2021, and am even more convinced now, that President Trump should not only have been impeached but also convicted and disqualified from future office. This was after his soft coup attempt to remain in office after he got drubbed in the 2020 election. It was reckless and half-baked, yes, but hardly unpredictable. So how is it possible to convince oneself to vote for a person so uniquely unqualified for the presidency that he should already have been adjudicated as disqualified to hold the office?
The venerable Thomas Sowell famously observes that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. We don’t make choices in a vacuum; it’s always a matter of “as opposed to what?”
On that score, as we pick up the pieces from Trump’s Iran capitulation, already among the worst foreign policy and national security blunders in American history, a few things are worth noting.
First, while I rue casting a 2024 ballot for Trump, that doesn’t mean I bear responsibility for the president’s malevolent or incompetent actions. I’ve been supportive when I thought he was in the right or being treated unfairly, but an unflinching detractor when — habitually — he is in the wrong. I’m a Burke to Buckley to Reagan conservative; Trump is a New York limousine liberal (when I was growing up, the breed ran my city). The most amusing epithet in modern politics is the MAGA distortion of “RINO.” What’s “Republican in name only” today is the party, not the dwindling rump of conservatives trying to hang on in what is Trump’s own smaller, louder, philosophically incoherent cult.
Yes, I voted for him in three Novembers, but Trump has never been “my guy.” In the crowded 2016 field of GOP candidates, he was the bottom rung for me. I vigorously argued against the blunder I believed his nomination would be. I assumed that he’d lose but, in voting for him, I rationalized that Hillary Clinton was a certain disaster who, among many other downsides, would lard the federal bench (including the open seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia) with radical progressives who would gradually undermine the Constitution. Trump, on the other hand, was an untested quantity: I hoped that he might grow into the job, and there was at least a chance that he’d make good on the promise to appoint judges in the Scalia mold.
In November 2020, I was content to vote for Trump. The soft coup hadn’t happened yet. Trump the man had proved deeply flawed, but he’d surrounded himself with solid conservatives and listened to them (often kicking and screaming). He’d delegated judicial appointments to their good judgment with stellar results. Judicial appointments are a priority for me, not just because of my legal background but because judges tend to serve two, three, or more times longer than the president who appoints them, and they are critical to the preservation of our constitutional order. Finally, though the Covid-19 pandemic elucidated all his worst traits, Trump’s first term had been a net plus on the economy and national security. And the alternative? Having followed Joe Biden’s career for over 40 years, I found it obvious that he was in decline — and that was from his “zenith” as a Democratic hack never capable of more than aspiration to mediocrity. Even for a reluctant Trump supporter, the binary choice was not a hard one.
That’s the thing. In an open primary contest, one may and often does have the luxury of voting for someone one supports. But in the final election, only two candidates have a chance to win. We’re left to pick one — often, to pick your poison, what you then perceive as the lesser of two evils. That doesn’t mean we support the candidate picked or are responsible for how the elected president performs. The U.S. political system for nominating major-party candidates, which has been corrupted for various reasons over the last century, produces two candidates. That’s the choice we get, but it doesn’t mean we chose the choice.
Relatedly, it is not only possible in the abstract but now proven empirically (more than once, I’d say) that this system may produce two unqualified candidates. If I’ve been right that an election presents a binary choice, this necessarily means that, if one votes, one votes for an unqualified candidate.
It is here that I part company with friends who insist that it’s not a binary choice. I respect that position, but I’ve never come around to it (although I may be getting there, I guess).
Yes, the system does indeed give us the option of voting for someone other than the two major-party candidates. But I’ve always seen that as a cop-out. I don’t mean that patriotic people who avail themselves of this option are consciously derelict. And man, oh man, in the pique of these Trump-era days, I’d love to be able to say, “Don’t blame me, I voted for George Will.” At a gut level, though, that just doesn’t work for me. It feels like leaving to the adults the necessary decision of which excrement sandwich on offer is the less unappealing.
Everyone brings his or her own experiential baggage to this sort of thing. Mine includes 20 years as a prosecutor. I was fortunate to have a run of great cases, including a couple of historic ones. Part of what makes such cases notable, and frequently controversial, is the warts. Very often, the accused are heinous actors who are probably guilty, but the government’s evidence is not ironclad, or the investigators have comported themselves abominably in obtaining it. We leave it to twelve of our peers, who serve as jurors by legal compulsion not choice: What’s it gonna be, guilty or not guilty? There’s no third option, no escape hatch.
Okay, yes, there could be a third outcome: The jury could hang. Yet think about why that happens. The judge sternly instructs the jurors that each must make his or her own decision, and that, while they should listen respectfully to counterpoints, they must not nullify their own sincere view — guilty or not guilty — just to arrive at unanimity. The criminal justice system grudgingly accepts hung juries but always with regret, because it just means the case has to be tried all over again and that it will be left for someone else to make the tough, binary choice.
It seems to me less an imposition on voters than on jurors to demand that the hard choice be made. I could be wrong. Maybe it’s an ill-conceived analogy. After all, if we could redo November 2024, knowing what we know now, I don’t see how I could choose between the two abysmal alternatives on offer. Maybe the least bad option in such an election scenario really is to register dissent by casting a futile vote for a third person, or to decline to vote at all. But, for me, it always comes back to the same thing: Having had no patience for the occasional juror who refused to deliberate and thus subverted the justice system’s necessary function of making the hard decision, I can’t let myself off the hook so easily. (And I say that even as someone who lives in a blue state, where the outcome was a foregone conclusion — where my vote mattered only to my conscience, not to the country.)
So, I’m stuck — with an appalling Iran deal, with lawfare, with brazenly statist intercession in the economy, with a president who abominates America’s allies while indulging anti-American tyrants, with all of it. I didn’t want this. But I did vote for it. And when I look in the mirror, I can’t say it was unforeseeable.