Leading up to the election, I’ve had a lot of conversations with right-wingers in recent weeks. They’re not necessarily conversations about “Trump Bad, Harris Good,” but rather, something I find more productive– questions about specific topics in the election. It’s been really interesting to see how the wanton proliferation of disinformation has so broadly permeated American society. But it’s also an important opportunity for us to examine specific topics that are playing out, as well as take a hard look at specific issues that we care about and look at the record on these issues. As far as comparing opinions, I’m including a bit of anecdata here, but I’m going to cite real world data when available. It’s important to start and end with facts rather than feelings, jingoism, or fabrication that has permeated the past couple of elections.
Campaign Finance.
Perhaps the most troubling thing to me about this election is not the talking points but the broadly unfettered access that multi-billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have to politicians– the guys who put JD Vance on the ticket, in fact. Republican voters I’ve talked with all seem to agree on the basic notion that Citizens United, for example, was a terrible decision and that we need some sort of broad policy reform to limit especially dark money coming into electoral politics. The problem? They still seem enamored of the Republican candidates who support deregulation of campaign finance laws, and who supported Citizens United in the first place. It’s been interesting to follow not just the rhetoric on this subject, but how it has evolved.
Fascinating to me was also to follow a conversation out of the Fifth Circuit, which went from one of the sometimes more progressive circuit courts in the days of yore to being a far-right activist court beginning in the Reagan Administration. One judge, for example, once argued that corporate money in politics shouldn’t be restricted because that’s the price we have to pay if we want to also have big government. If you want to feel visceral disgust at how bad the Fifth Circuit is, check out this article that chronicles how the Court has been making decisions.
Disinformation.
There are lots of common refrains responding to the question of why it is okay for Trump to call immigrants rapists and criminals, accuse them of poisoning the blood of our country, or suggesting that they all be rounded up in concentration camps and deported. “He didn’t say that.” (He did say that). “He said it but he didn’t mean what he said– it was taken out of context.” (It was backed up by plenty of additional context). “You’re misinterpreting because the mainstream media (“MSM”) spins everything.” (I do not derive my primary sources of information from the so-called mainstream media).
Disinformation continues to proliferate. I’d love to blame artificial intelligence, but AI isn’t even the biggest culprit in this election. It’s the bot farms, the actual human-staffed troll farms, and a media-illiterate population. I am thinking particularly about the older generation, which for whatever reason seems more susceptible to this kind of disinformation, as in the case of my friend’s father, who recently told me in one of these conversations about how such-and-such because that’s what “they” want you to think. In a circuitous rationale that eschewed both facts and central logic, he parroted the broadly-debunked conspiracy theory that the FBI was involved in instigating the January 6th riot. And, of course, he’s not by any means alone in thinking that. Another one is the notion that Trump says he doesn’t buy into Project 2025 so we have to believe him (even though it was largely written by… his people).
Or my father-in-law, who says, yeah, Trump is a globalist, and not a Christian like me, and sure, he’s in the pocket of a secret underground globalist society (that literally operates out of a basement in London, in a conspiracy theory so esoteric that I had to Google hard to even find mention of it). But, he says, I’ll vote for him because we must protect the unborn babies.
Bonkers.
There is, perhaps, a globalist cabal controlling things, sure– but it’s not the Jews or the United Nations. Rather, it’s nothing more than the increasingly unregulated and growing body of corporate capitalists who now control an insane percentage of all global wealth. Why don’t we try and, you know, regulate them? Maybe restrict the access of corporations and really rich people to campaign finance? Or, you know, perhaps increase the tax rates on billionaires by a couple of percentage points? Americans broadly agree across partisan lines that big tech has too much power. Just a thought.
Energy, Sustainability, and Infrastructure
It goes without saying that these are generally the biggest things I’m thinking about. The Trump Administration’s record on environmental and energy policy sucked, frankly, but it perhaps wasn’t quite as doom-and-gloom as critics often claim. The Trump record ranges from Rick Perry arriving at the Department of Energy thinking his job was going to be all about oil and gas drilling, only to be dismayed to find out that the vast majority of the Department’s budget is spent dealing with the legacy of a fragmented, aging, and extremely expensive arsenal of nuclear weapons and other nuclear topics– to the scandal-plagued tenure of Scott Pruitt under the EPA, who blew taxpayer money on unfathomably dumb stuff in an attempt to limit public access, eliminate transparency, and turn over the government’s regulatory functions to the industries that agency was meant to be regulating. A post mortem analysis shows that so many of the efforts of the Pruitt/Wheeler EPA were handily derailed by courts that pointed out that, well, laws do still exist, so it’s not actually clear that a whole lot of damage was actually done. But the EPA and the DOE certainly didn’t accomplish much of note.
The Trump Administration got very little done as far as infrastructure in spite of big promises. Lest we try and brush this off as partisan deadlock, there have been a lot of bipartisan success stories around infrastructure spending, my favorites being the cases of the Republicans who screamed about how government spending was communism and then later bragged about the communist money coming to their districts. My favorite, which is underreported in the mainstream media, was the administration’s forcible shelving of what could have been a game-changing policy package to modernize the power grid. Even after, uh, you know, talking about doing just that thing.
Fast forward to the Biden era and I do not agree with anywhere near all of the policy positions of the Biden or the prospective Harris administrations, including Harris’s reversal on a ban on fracking. But I am certainly glad to see that the EPA and DOE are making moves around things like power grid modernization and the GGRF frameworks, which have the opportunity to productively transform capital markets and therefore the way housing and energy projects are built.
I’m glad to see moves being made on things like national rail infrastructure. Amtrak has been killing it. Is it everything I’ve dreamed of? No, by no means. But it’s a start after languid and boring infrastructure policy for the past decade or so, since the demise of the Obama-era HSR plans. I’m glad to see a Secretary of Transportation who is actually smart and talking about stuff that urbanists care about.
“The Best People,” who are not voting for the guy.
At the end of the day, perhaps the weirdest thing to me about the entire Trump phenomenon is the fact that so many voters are gleefully voting for the guy in spite of the fact that a huge percentage of his own administration is emphatically begging people not to vote for him. You know– the “best people” that he bragged he would pick to fill his administration. Who later turned on him. I guess the deep state got to them, too, or whatever? Anyway. This list includes not only administration officials but also staunch Republicans in the Trump orbit. And it includes everyone ranging from quotidian Washington douchebags to decorated veterans of policy, military, and legislative circles, including many veteran Republicans. Newsweek has a partial list, and this, too, is a partial list:
- Bill Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, a veteran policy wonk who advanced a number of Big Government ideas under Republican administrations, including advancing the rate of incarceration and dismantling the separation of powers to give the president virtually unlimited authority. Barr lost his favored placed in the Trump regime when he refused to help steal the election.
- John Bolton, 26th national security advisor, policy veteran and aggressive policy hawk who has advocated for military interventions for regime change.
- Dick Cheney, former Vice President who orchestrated the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan under George W. Bush and was a proud proponent of the “drill, baby, drill” agenda of the Bush Administration and, generally, any effort to privatize government functionality, increase opacity, and turn over control to the oil industry.
- Dan Coats, director of national intelligence who butted heads with the president about the president’s refusal to acknowledge well-documented Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
- Ty Cobb, Trump administration lawyer who called the administration a “disaster.”
- Mark Esper, decorated military veteran who served as the 27th Secretary of Defense. Esper was deposed after refusing to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, and also after he and the president butted heads on ideas about renaming military installations named after Confederate military leadership (or, indeed, flying the Confederate flag on US military property).
- Alyssa Farah Griffin, press and communications official in various capacities within the Trump administration, who challenged the efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
- Stephanie Grisham, press secretary who also resigned after January 6th.
- Hope Hicks, who testified against Trump in the hush money trial. Hicks notably also briefly dated White House wife-beater Rob Porter before later getting engaged to an investment banker twenty years her senior.
- Cassidy Hutchinson, twenty-something staffer who decided that while jingoism and junior varsity fascism were cool, attempting to overturn an election was not.
- John Kelly, a decorated veteran of the Marine Corps, low-key racist, and iron-fisted Chief of Staff under Trump, who would later confirm many of the allegations against his former master, saying that Trump “has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.”
- Sarah Matthews, who served six months as deputy press secretary before she also decided that overturning a lawful election was a bridge too far.
- James Mattis, called Trump’s tenure a “stain.”
- H. R. McMaster, a decorated veteran of the United States Army who served as National Security Advisor from 2017-2018.
- Mark Milley, an Ivy League educated decorated general who resigned in the aftermath of Trump’s infamous Bible photo op.
- Omarosa Manigault Newman, reality TV show personality who perpetrated one of the worst security breaches in White House history.
- Mike Pence, Trump’s own Vice President.
- Karl Rove, evil mastermind of the Bush White House. Including this because the Heritage Foundation types seem to love the Karl Rove types.
- Anthony Scaramucci, who held the White House press secretary role for a term so short that his name became a term, similar to the idea of a Friedman Unit.
- Mark Short, advisor to Vice President Mike Pence. Short was barred from the White House after Pence refused to help Trump overturn the election.
- Miles Taylor, chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, who wrote a then-anonymous book issuing a scathing critique of the administration.
Add to this 304 alumni from the McCain, Romney, Reagan, and Bush campaigns and administrations and hundreds of Republican national security officials and former officials from Republican and Democratic administrations. Some have refused to comment, like one-time Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom one commenter called the worst in that role in modern history.
Why the asides criticizing these people if I think it’s notable that they’re opposing Trump now? Because if a few dozen of the people he personally selected turned out to either be anywhere ranging from lackluster (Rick Perry, Mike Pompeo, Rex Tillerson) to disastrous (Scott Pruitt), how can we possibly trust that he’ll make good on his promise to pick the best people again? Of course, we cannot.
The defense against this list is that “well, of course they oppose him! They’re part of the Republican machine! He’s trying to disrupt the machine politics!”
We can’t write these folks off as part of the Deep State.
Because he personally handpicked most of these people.
I would buy the “Republican Machine” argument if the proof were, in fact, in the pudding. I can appreciate the notion of Trump wanting to disrupt institutions that have dysfunctional or complacent leadership. I cannot think of a federal agency that I would actively like to be larger or a bureaucratic structure that I’d like to be more convoluted. Similarly, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the private sector who wants more regulation– but there are plenty of folks who think regulation as a general idea is fine as long as it is implemented transparently and effectively. The so-called Fourth Branch of Government– the regulatory and rulemaking process- is very complicated and sometimes very opaque.
But rather than consider how Trump says he wants to do things, we instead go to the evidence that these agencies weren’t terribly well-run. The government did not shrink. The deficit did not shrink. Know what did shrink? The economy.
Ultimately, I attribute this unflagging reliance to the American affinity for the nostalgic idea of monarchy. It’s definitely well-rooted in increasingly extremist, evangelical dogma. My father-in-law will always reduce arguments to his belief that all of this is fleeting and ephemeral because Christ is going to return, and God will judge the wicked, so it doesn’t matter. None of this matters. This world is of Satan. It belongs to Satan. Or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t have time for eschatology, man. I have bills to pay. Plus, we Jews don’t really do that whole end-of-the-world hellfire-and-brimstone crap– Judaism is full of enough doom and gloom.
Suffice it to say that evangelicals love Trump because they want a King, and they view a rich guy in a gold filigree tower who bosses people around as a king. Of course, that’s not the same King as the one referenced in the Christian Bible.
Most Christians don’t care about the Christian Bible, of course.
But that’s a story for another day.
Conclusions
Both parties are, in fact, not the same. There is not a shadowy cabal that is controlling what we think. There are just multi-billionaires and other really, really rich people who have an increasing sway in the way society is run, because, in large part, policymakers and presidents have gradually eroded the safeguards that keep these people– and what they can do with their money- in check. This has been done disproportionately under Republican administrations, with the worst offenders arguably being the Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump administrations, providing multi-trillion dollar handouts to the rich in the pursuit of the widely discredited fairytale of trickle-down economics. The effects of the wealth transfer have also been exacerbated by decisions like Citizens United (2010) under the tenures of increasingly right-wing courts (appointed by Republicans).
Societies generally fall for two main reasons: first, dirt– and second, wealth inequality. Bad environmental management that contaminates soil or washes away productive topsoil is the cause of the first one. We saw this in Mesopotamia and in the Roman Empire. We’re not quite at a crisis level with that one, but it’s not good.
The second one is looking far worse, though. The unchecked wealth accumulation of the richest fractions of a percentage point of the population has all been the product of a mass dismantling of the tax code under Republican administrations. Have Democrats done enough to fix this? No– absolutely not. Democratic administrations face the tyranny of minority rule, in which Republicans are guaranteed disproportionate rates of power in Congress given that voters for the US Senate in Wyoming have sixty-seven times more power than do voters in California. Yes, you read that right.
Beyond the topic of the tyranny of minority rule, though, I’d point out that the Biden Administration has done an unprecedented number of things in consumer protection and antitrust, which are vital topics for me and for many Americans facing the threat of increasing monopoly power and decreasing economic competition. Merrick Garland has already gone after Google and the DOJ has started to talk about forcibly breaking up the tech giant’s effective monopoly. I already mentioned the important things about infrastructure and energy policy, but the current administration’s legacy on consumer protection, healthcare, and many more topics are vital elements of a government that is accountable to the electorate.
We will not see any of this under a second Trump term, bluster and bitching aside. We will definitely not see any of this under a JD Vance presidency, which seems increasingly likely as the former president appears increasingly unable to coherently express his thoughts, recently talking about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis at a campaign rally.
Am I in love with the idea of the Harris presidency? Not really, as long as she’s gladly welcoming ex-Republicans that I might have called “right-wing extremists” back when that meant Project for a New American Century and not “putting brown people in concentration camps.” I guess that’s politics. So, too, is it “politics” for American politicians to continue to facilitate Israeli war crimes in Gaza with American-made weaponry– and as much as this disgusts me, I absolutely believe that any outcomes under a Trump presidency would be far worse because, as he points out frequently, we will be fundamentally unable to hold him accountable. But what’s also politics is that we have the ability to make course corrections that will allow us to continue to make more course corrections in the right direction. Toward a net-zero-carbon, sustainable, and equitable future– for cities, for towns, for farmers, for immigrants, for workers.
And that’s why I am voting for Kamala Harris in November.