Another No to Trump, Biden, and 2020 PTSD
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Editor’s Note: If you would like to read more pros and cons on voting for President Trump, further essays on the subject, each from a different perspective, can be found here, here, here, here, here and here. These articles and the one below reflect the views of the individual authors, not of the National Review editorial board as a whole.
2020 has been the longest year since 2016, the last time we elected a president. Its problems look so quaint in retrospect: A contentious race that amplified our rapidly polarizing polity, a Democrat running on a radical agenda, a narcissist on the Republican ticket. These 2016 problems were baked into 2020’s cake from the beginning. Then came the coronavirus pandemic and its consequences on our families, friends, school, work, and wallets. And yet, as we arrive at Election Day, the more I hear about 2016 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Mostly, I hear about it from people who, no matter how many battleground states Joe Biden leads in or how great his national lead becomes, can’t shake the feeling that Donald Trump just might pull this thing off — after all, he did it in 2016. PTSD is only the right term for half of those people who use it though, as many invoke it to explain why they are optimistic that Trump will be given the chance to Make America Great Again, again. The Babylon Bee’s Frank Fleming put this feeling best when he explained: “Right now, 538 gives Trump a 10% chance of winning. And how likely is Trump to seize that 10% chance? It’s 50/50.” Fact check: True.
By any measure, a Trump win this time around should be more, not less, shocking than his victory over Hillary Clinton. She was significantly less popular than Biden is, and held far more tenuous polling leads both nationally and in most swing states. But it won’t be. The shock of 2016 was never a data-driven one. It was borne out of surprise that Donald Trump — a reality TV star — would be serving as our president. After four years of watching him deliver State of the Union addresses, flying on Air Force One, and chatting up foreign leaders, a win would be a continuation, not a revolution. A protraction of the status quo, not a departure from it.
That would be for better and for worse. As irritating as I have sometimes found calls for us not to “normalize” Trump and his behavior — he is the president, after all — many of those calls have been righteous. From our president, we shouldn’t grow used to proposed religious tests for entering the United States, or allegations of moral equivalency between the United States and Russia on foreign soil, or implications that a federal judge is incapable of discharging his duties because of his ethnicity. (But then again, I don’t think the personhood of our most vulnerable, or the gender of biological men and women, or the status of the Chinese and Iranian regimes as our primary geopolitical foes should be up for debate either.)
As corrosive a figure as I believe Trump to be though, he is not — I don’t think — the threat to the republic his most virulent critics call him. There have, of course, been the lapdogs who encouraged and rewarded the president’s worst instincts and made the last four years worse than they had to be, but by and large, our institutions have held up fine to the Trump stress test. So I wouldn’t expect most Americans to spend their days reminding themselves not to normalize their commander in chief.
Still, in the great debate (to Trump or not to Trump) I choose the latter. Ramesh Ponnuru said it best: Trump’s “character flaws keep him from meeting the threshold conditions to be entrusted with the presidency.” Andy McCarthy makes the definitive case in the other direction — “just look at the alternative” — but I rejected binary-choicism in 2016 and intend to so once again. Not because I think voting for Trump would be a great moral stain on my character, but because of a simple but profound point made in the 2012 animated film, The Lorax (I later came to find out its biblical origins, Ecclesiastes 11:3): “A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.” If I were to vote for Trump, I’m not sure what lines I would have left to draw to preclude odious, nominally conservative candidates from getting my support in the future. I’m a Republican and a team player, so it’s frustrating to me that I have found myself unable to pull the lever for the GOP candidate in the two presidential elections in which I’ve participated. But to vote for Donald Trump is to signal that I am okay with the party’s current trajectory and to invite the continued deterioration of its candidates’ quality. I am not, and so I’ll be writing in on Tuesday.
Left-flank critics of my position will say that I’d prefer Trump to Biden. I’ll confirm for them that if a gun were put to my head and I was asked to choose the next president from that pool of two, I would choose him. My friends on the right might jump in there to condemn me for trying to keep my hands clean despite my preferences. Guilty as charged, but I could never be proud of casting a vote for Trump, and there is no gun to my head.
None of this should be taken as an effort to convince others to make the decision I have, much less as a condemnation of those differing conclusions. You don’t owe your vote to anyone, and if you’re going to be persuaded one way or another by someone, it should be by Ramesh, Andy, Charlie, Kevin, or Jay, not me. This column is meant merely to give a voice to those like me, as well as to preemptively say a word against election-related 2020 PTSD. We survived the last four years, just like we did the eight before that — we’ll do the same for the next four, regardless of who heads the executive branch. This election will have consequences — serious ones even. But they won’t be existential one way or another, and I don’t think any of us should lean toward despair lest we fall into it.
