Bret Stephens: A conservative case against Trump

With less than a week to go before the election, Kamala Harris has yet to come up with a compelling rationale for her candidacy, other than to accuse her opponent of being a fascist. Ask her a question to which she doesn’t have a canned answer and she struggles for a coherent response. The most notable difference between her current presidential bid and her previous one in 2019 is that she has repudiated many of her past views. Is it because she’s hiding her real convictions — or because she has few real convictions at all?

Yet I’m going to vote for her. Other conservatives should, too.

Why? Because Donald Trump is worse. He isn’t worse because he’s a fascist: If he were, his outspoken opponents would have wound up in prison, not on MSNBC. He isn’t worse because his presidency was an unremitting failure: The (pre-pandemic) economy thrived, Operation Warp Speed was a triumph, the world was more at peace than it is today, and there were important diplomatic achievements such as the Abraham Accords. Nor is he the only one who can disrespect political norms: It’s Harris, not Trump, who is campaigning on ending the Senate filibuster and perhaps packing the Supreme Court.

But Trump is worse in ways that matter profoundly to the rule of law, the health of capitalism, and the future of freedom at home and abroad. Conservatives who claim to care about these things should also care about what Trump may do to each of them — and, crucially, do so in the name of conservatism.

Consider:

Law

Conservatives are indignant about the flimsy civil and criminal cases progressive prosecutors have brought against Trump — cases they almost certainly wouldn’t have brought against anyone else.

But politicizing justice is exactly what Trump sought to do during his presidency. He tried to strong-arm President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine into participating in a dirt-digging expedition against Joe and Hunter Biden. His Justice Department tried to block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner in 2017, almost certainly out of presidential spite against CNN. He appointed a hack as an acting attorney general and took legal advice from conspiracy theorists, including Sidney Powell.

Oh, and he incited a mob to obstruct the lawful transfer of power and has never recognized the legitimacy of the 2020 election. The only question honest conservatives should ask themselves is this: If a Democrat had behaved this way, how would they feel?

Capitalism

This year, for the first time in history, interest payments on the federal debt, $870 billion, exceeded our $822 billion in military spending. The overall federal debt has more than doubled in the past 10 years alone, to nearly $36 trillion.

Conservatives are supposed to be against overspending government. But an analysis from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates Trump will add about $7.75 trillion in debt.

Conservatives are supposed to be against higher taxes. But “tariff” — which Trump says is his “favorite word” — is just another word for tax, and his plans to impose massive new tariffs on imported goods will inevitably be paid by American producers and consumers.

Conservatives are supposed to abhor inflation, but Trump’s fondness for big spending and low interest rates is inherently inflationary.

Conservatives are also supposed to dislike government regulation. But as the Financial Times columnist Ruchir Sharma noted in July, “Trump ended up adding more than 3,000 new regulations a year, in the same range as his predecessors going back to Bill Clinton.”

Freedom

The left overstated (and in doing so, damaged) its case that Trump was Vladimir Putin’s “asset.” But Trump was and remains a sycophant to the Russian president — and to China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. What president can lead the free world when he’s so consistently effusive about its enemies?

Trump’s supporters rejoin that his policies toward these countries were often better than his rhetoric. True — but mainly because he was surrounded by advisers like Gary Cohn, Jim Mattis and John Bolton, who didn’t let him get away with his worst policy impulses. Other advisers, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, did do Trump’s bidding: What we got was the dishonorable negotiation with the Taliban that laid the ground for Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Today, my Trump-leaning friends acknowledge that his pledge to cut off aid to Ukraine would be a victory for Putin and a calamity for the West — but that it’s counterbalanced by what they see as his stronger support for Israel. But the Middle East and Ukraine are, at bottom, different fronts in the same war. Allow Putin to succeed in Ukraine, and Israel’s threats from Russia’s allies in Iran, Syria and Yemen will multiply.

Like many unhappy conservatives, I look at this election as a choice between misfortunes. Faced with a similar dilemma in 1800, Alexander Hamilton offered advice that should resonate with at least a few right-leaning voters today: “If we must have an enemy at the head of the government,” he wrote to a fellow Federalist, the House speaker Theodore Sedgwick, that May, “let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.”

Bret Stephens writes a column for the New York Times.