That "is a sore loser" point is really important! It's not just that he complained a lot about the election. He encouraged his protestors to march on the Capitol on January 6 and then when they started a riot he sat in the White House and did nothing about it for several hours. Since then he's started describing these rioters as heros and talking about pardoning them. In my opinion this is a much bigger threat to the rule of law and democracy than court packing.
Also I think you're overstating the dangers of the filibuster and court packing. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution and I don't know of any other liberal democracy with a de facto 60 percent threshold for passing legislation. If we abolished the filibuster you'd still need agreement by the House, Senate, and president to pass legislation. That seems like plenty of checks and balances.
I'm not in favor of the filibuster but there are plenty of liberal democracies, including the UK and Canada, where the legislature has the power to overrule judicial interpretations of the Constitution. I like the US system better, but I don't think it would be a catastrophe if we ended up with a UK-style system with legislative supremacy.
While it's true that places like the UK and Canada are doing kind of okay with legislative supremacy, there are important protections (full free speech, as noted in my piece) that they're missing out on.
It's certainly true that what Trump did on January 6 was bad. Exactly how much weight to put on it, everyone will have to judge for themselves. The Harris guest post, naturally, ends with a whole section on it.
Wow! Brilliant article. I've always just hated Trump because this according to everyone in my circle Harris is "obiviously better". This article really did a great job making a rational honest case for Trump.
Two excellent articles! Posting the strongest possible case for each candidate on the same forum is laudable, and more of this should be normal political discourse. Well done.
The filibuster has no Constitutional sanction. McConnell packed the current court by preventing Merrick Garland’s nomination any consideration in 2016, and rushing thru Amy C Barrett’s confirmation.
You can change the meaning of words all you want but any honest person knows that preventing nominations is not the same thing as changing the rules of how many people are nominated
I've been eager to read more sober election analyses, looking at policies, and I appreciate this effort to write one.
That said, I couldn't stop laughing when your first point in favor of Trump was, "preserving US institutions". Trump is the guy who, because he didn't like an election outcome, called Georgia officials and tried to pressure them to just find more votes. He hatched a plan to send alternate slates of electors for each swing state, and for Pence to choose his electors over the ones that voters had actually selected. Those are blatant attempts to subvert our institutions. And many of those actions are likely illegal, as well. But Trump hasn't been tried, in part because his packed supreme court has helped delay action and reduce the ability for him to face any consequences for his actions.
Suppose that his plan had worked, somehow. Would the new precedent be that both sides always just send their own slates of electors in every election and we fight over which ones are chosen? Would the vice president always just choose who wins? Wouldn't that just lead to permanent single party rule? Do you think Kamala could just certify her own victory this year, regardless of the vote?
You said that Kamala is a threat because she at one point agreed with some proposal to enlarge the supreme court. She can't unilaterally do that. If you're going to hold candidates to everything they've proposed, you're going to have to answer for tons of crazy things Trump has proposed. For instance you have to say that Trump's immigration policy is "mass deportation of every illegal immigrant in the country", rather than the more moderate changes you described. You'd have to say that his trade policy is huge tariffs on everything.
In contrast to this hypothetical court packing that you fear, Republicans already did abuse the rules to boost their supreme court margins, by refusing to appoint a justice in the last year of Obama's presidency and then appointing a justice in the last year of Trump's.
I am sympathetic to a number of your other points. I'm generally not in support of DEI programs. I don't think of myself as woke, though it does seem like wokeness spiked more in 2017-2020 than in the last 4 years. It's quite possible that the left will go crazier under a 2nd Trump term than under a Harris presidency. It's possible that Trump's foreign policy would be better, and that would be worthy of a lot more debate. Deregulation might be a good thing, that's probably case by case basis. Crime is bad, and it spiked in 2020. I voted Republican for many local offices because of that, but I don't think that Trump has much effect on local policing (and, of course, he presided over the increase in crime while Biden presided over the subsequent decline). Censorship is bad, but neutrality is hard to achieve (I initially supported Elon buying Twitter in the hopes it would bring more free speech, but in the end he just boosted his own content, started censoring the other side, and is now trying to influence an election).
If Republicans could field a candidate that supported reasonable right wing policies, without Trump's personality, his ceaseless lying, grifting, and sometimes outright criminality, I'd be open to voting for that candidate. But it's hard for me to vote for him, as is, and it's hard to take his supporters seriously, when they are willing to casually overlook those problems.
Sorry if you’re going to purity spiral over one guy for some reason when all major politicians are dishonest liars including Harris, Obama, Walz, Clintons then you clearly won’t vote for anyone who is opposed to the establishment because in your mind the establishment defines who is an “unreasonable” liar vs reasonable one.
I love the two essays. There is one big error in this one - you say "Trump successfully pressured Alabama to almost immediately reverse a law that courts had interpreted as preventing IVF fertility treatments." This is factually wrong. The AL SCT held (correctly in my view) as a matter of statutory interpretation that the state's wrongful death act provided a remedy to the parents of embryos in cold storage. In the case in question, the clinic involved (according to the clinic) had allowed a random person to wander in, access the cold storage units, remove embryos, and drop them, destroying them. The Wrongful Death Act had previously been amended to say that it allowed claims regardless of viability for fetal death (after a prior version had been held to not cover a pre-viability fetus a pregnant woman lost in a car accident). You can argue the statutory interpretation issue either way (it does not mention stored embryos) but the decision is a perfectly reasonable one. What AL then did, in 2 weeks!, is pass a broad tort immunity statute for fertility clinics. There's a word for this: "special interest legislation" and "rent seeking". (OK, 5 words). The clinics stage managed a panic to get the law passed (Trump had nothing to do with it) without debate or scrutiny. But exempting a business (which is what fertility clinics are) from tort liability for what is essentially negligence isn't good policy.
In general I am very grateful for what you're trying to do here and I am not an expert on many things you talk about in this post.
However, for the sake of rationality, in the section on trans issues: "women getting beat up by people with XY chromosomes" is such hot take it shouldn't be allowed in a rationalist analysis of any candidate. Imane Khelif is indeed a cis woman (not trans) with a potential DSD and the sport we're talking about here is Boxing - where beating each other up is the whole point. There is a complex discussion to be had about athletes with DSD and I really don't wanna get into it here, but that statement alone makes the other points you raised in this presentation very questionable.
I really hope you take more time to research in the future.
Now I realize there are extra-complex cases, and this is probably one of them. Perhaps a more straightforward example of my point would have been the U Penn swimmer Lia Thomas.
I didn't question if she has XY chromosomes, it's that she is not trans, and on that even your link says: "It is not true that athletes with variations in their sex traits, or DSDs, are the same as transgender athletes. Conflating the two is considered to be inaccurate."
That might seem nit picking, but another example would do you good here anyway, because that example isn't part of the whole 'trans people in sports' discussion, it's about genetic advantages based on DSD.
Whatever, it is a hugely complicated conversation.
I still think the way you phrased it is coming in piping hot and unfortunately does not lend confidence in your rational presentation of actual benefits of a trump presidency.
Yeah. Although to be fair, I didn't say she was trans, I specifically called her "a person with XY chromosomes." I agree that the context of the section was trans people.
I wasn't writing it "piping hot", but I can see how it might come off that way.
I'm sympathetic with many of your arguments here. But none of it addresses what to me is the overwhelming problem with Trump: that he has shown consistently, through his words and deeds, that he has contempt for the institutions of democracy, and has every intention of making himself an autocrat. If Harris is elected and enacts bad policies, in 2028 Americans will have the chance to elect some other Republican (who doesn't plan to overthrow democracy) to repeal those policies. If Trump is elected, and succeeds in what he says he wants to do and has tried to do before, American's won't get that chance in four years, or maybe ever again. To me, that outweighs all of your legitimate points in his favour. It would outweigh almost anything.
But then again, I'm not an American, so what I think hardly matters.
He already tried to overturn an election result once, on January 6th 2020. What makes you so confident that he won't again?
And what do you make of his statement to supporters in July that "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote"?
On Jan 6, he didn't come even slightly close to succeeding. He never used the military, and the protesters didn't bring firearms.
His "in four years, you don't have to vote" I see him saying the country is in crisis right now, but in 4 years it'll be on a good track and you can relax and not worry too much about election results. Because the country will then be in a good place regardless. Not that he'll end democracy.
I'll decline your offer of a bet. I'm not in the habit of betting, and this question strikes me as difficult to operationalize precisely, since I can envision a wide variety of ways this outcome could manifest. I'm more interested here in understanding your view of my first question. What makes you think he won't attempt something like Jan 6th again? Or is it that you think he may attempt it, but is highly unlikely to succeed?
It's not easy to describe to someone else -- it's my entire psychological read on Trump, from having following his actions and speech for a decade. How do I describe that to another person?
But basically I think there's just about nothing in him that wants to dismantle democracy or whatever the concern is. He's been a businessman for almost his whole life, and his mindset comes from there. As President, he was actually pretty good about following the law -- he didn't ignore courts. When he lost, he was like a toddler who refused to give the ball back, but that doesn't mean he wants to be President for life. I don't buy that he "knew he lost".
Anyway, you're welcome to disagree, but I think the odds are less than 1/1000 that he's, say, president in 2030. As noted in my article, I think the odds of institutional damage are higher under Democrats.
I'm not sure that concerns here are hard to operationalize precisely for a bet.
I don't mean to be rude but I find this piece painfully dishonest—certainly not the "rational case" it presents itself as. The most egregious quality is the way that it consistently cites Harris's 2019 and 2020 positions as being current, but when it comes to abortion it only considers Trump's 2024 positions—in fact, his *late 2024* positions, since he was discussing a national 15-week bans earlier this year! There's no discussion of, for instance, his statement that he'd punish women for having abortions. Trump's current stance on abortion is clearly born purely out of political contingency…which is fine! But then the same should apply to Harris. After all, Trump actually has a record here: he appointed strongly anti-abortion judges, such as the one who issued a ban on Mifepristone.
The inconsistency reaches comical proportions in the next section, Transparency and Consistency, which criticizes Harris for not explaining any of her changes in position and contrasts her in this regard with…J.D. Vance! If we're going to compare like with like, wouldn't it make more sense to compare how Harris has handled changes in position with how *Trump* has handled them? But then again, Trump hasn't ever been known to change his stance on an issue.
My main criticism of the article is that it fails to provide a comparative analysis of why Trump is the superior candidate. When you're trying to show that Candidate A is better than Candidate B at achieving a particular goal, or that they score better in a category, it's not enough to just list a bunch of reasons as to why Candidate A is good in that category. Otherwise it is very easy to run afoul of selection bias.
Imagine for example, that there are 3 reasons to think that Candidate A has good policy on a topic, and 17 reasons to think that candidate B has good policy on the same topic. Let's also assume, for simplicity, that each reason should be weighed as being equally good. If I didn't make a fully comparative analysis between candidates A & B, but instead wrote an article listing the 3 reasons to think that Candidate A is a good bet, and maybe 1 or even 2 of the reasons to favor candidate B, a reader might come away convinced that Candidate A is obviously the superior option, when that's not true at all!
Now of course it's impossible to provide an exhaustive full-on comparison of how the candidates ultimately stack up across every conceivable domain, but if you've taken on the burden of showing that one candidate is superior in a particular domain, I think we are owed at least a general comparative analysis. I understand one doesn't have the space to list every argument for and against a candidate, but one can at least gesture at them. E.g. for candidate A vs B, one can say, "there are a lot of reasons to favor B including X,Y,Z and much more, but I think they are all outweighed by this argument in favor of candidate A".
Just to give a few examples of where I think this is applicable:
On the topic of preserving institutions, merit & intellectual tolerance: Here I would have liked some engagement with the obvious counter that Trump's fascistic and nepotistic tendencies would diminish the meritocratic standing and intellectual climate of the federal government. Some of these concerns even seem to overshadow the anti-meritocratic elements of the Democratic administration in scale. For example, there is the worry that he will drastically modify the nature of the civil service away from a meritocracy towards an ideological bent based on things like project 2025, Trump's statements, and the actions of his associates. Then there is the well-founded worry that he will restrict and suppress the merit-based findings of administrative forces when they inconvenience him and act to diminish the independence of institutions like the federal reserve in order to impose his ideological or personally-motivated aims.
There are additional reasons to worry about the impact of Trump on our institutions, like his conduct with the last election. Anyways, these are just a few examples, but I think they serve to illustrate my point, which is that I think your analysis is only superficially comparative (no offense), and my key takeaway is that as a result it doesn't provide a compelling argument to favor Trump. I would have liked an explanation of why such worries are ill-founded or at least outweighed by Trump's other advantages in those domains.
Beyond my point about comparatives, I feel that some of your arguments are rather dubiously supported. For example, on the section on creativity, missing is a reason to think that more creativity is generally better. I don't subscribe to that premise at all, in fact I think it's reasonable to think that levels and types of creativity should be contextual. For example, we want more creative Feynman's in a world where the field of theoretical physics is dominated by a focus on string theory. But we don't want to listen to astrologers, flat-earthers or other people with "creative" ideas as to how to fix the field!
On foreign policy, your assertion that the relative lack of foreign state conflict during the trump administration is directly attributable to him seems to me to be very unlikely. In general, we should be skeptical of monocausal explanations in complicated domains like geopolitics. It would be better to say that a presidential administration might have influenced the onset of a particular war instead of the general statement of all foreign conflicts. For example, the present war in Gaza and Lebanon seems to have been likely caused by a desire among Hamas militants to jeopardize the progress of the Abrahamic accords, and of course both the Trump and Biden administrations shared a desire to advance Arab-Israeli relations.
Sorry for writing so much! This was a lot, and yet I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I suppose that just shows how complicated politics is. Thanks for reading this comment.
Thanks for your note! I do agree with you about the limitations of my post. It is the strongest possible case for Trump, and not a quantitative calculation of the pros and cons. Could I do a good job at such an analysis, in this complex case? I’m not sure I could.
I still think there is value in what the post does do, especially for people who may not get Trump at all.
Is creativity good? I personally tend to think “outside the box” so I’m partial (biased?) to others who do, too. Maybe we’ll find out over the next 4 years…
I think you can do both a persuasive essay and a comparative pro and con though. In fact, I would say the best essays do both.
Take a hypothetical case where I want to argue that Trump is stronger than Harris in the domain of personal integrity. Here I can take two possible approaches. On the one hand, I can bring up his disadvantages, but counter that Harris’s personal flaws are worse off generally. On the other hand, I can simply point out that Harris has been known to flip-flop on policy issues, and that therefore she is untrustworthy, and hence Trump is clearly the candidate with better integrity (without mentioning anything else). I think it’s pretty obvious the first approach would be more persuasive.
I do agree that this type of essay might be helpful if your readership was already familiar with arguments on the other side, but was lacking info from the pro-Trump side, say. But once you take on the burden of showing that one candidate is superior in a particular domain, then I think it’s pretty clear that comparative analysis is the way to go. And, like I said, I think you can do that without having to give an exhaustive quantitative pro and con summary list, which I agree is impractical.
The filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution. But the right to a jury trial is, but Trump says he plans to place Adam Schiff and other political opponents before military tribunals.
I realize there is a companion piece pro Harris, but isn’t the only real reason to vote Trump restoring white male privilege? All the rest is window dressing.
Thanks Maxim. I do credit this as a largely rational argument, and I agree that it’s the strongest case that I’ve seen for what is still to me obviously the wrong position. It does not strike me as “the” rational argument, in that “the” rational argument ought to engage with the strongest counterarguments and your piece only does so perfunctorily at the beginning.
Even on its own terms, the argument skips very important evidence. First, it ought to take probabilities into account. The consensus is it is extremely likely that the next Senate will have at least 50 Republicans. Therefore, we are choosing between a likely divided government under Harris or a likely unified one under Trump. This sharply reduces the salience of concerns about institutional change and most other policy issues mentioned under Harris, and increases the salience of worries about the corresponding bad ideas of Trump, particularly his extremely consistent advocacy for broad and high tariffs, which he likely has authority to implement without Congress (see here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/making-tariffs-great-again-does-president-trump-have-legal-authority-implement-new-tariffs).
Second, there is extensive evidence we have regarding Trump’s past job performance from his past appointees which shows that he is far more than a “bad manager of personnel.” There is an immense volume of people who worked for Trump in his first term who have publicly said they are unable to support him on grounds of character. Trump himself has said that “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy.”
Dear Max - would it be interesting to re-visit this and see how it's turned out so far? I obviously disagreed strongly about this at the time. So as not to be too snide, my own evaluation is:
"Risk to courts" - Proving to be quite the opposite.
"Fewer regulations" - Coming true, albeit not in the most thoughtful way.
"Preserving free speech" - Proving to be almost diametrically the opposite.
"Relative focus on merit" - At best, unclear.
"Better on wokeness" - Perhaps half-true; I don't think it is likely you would write now that they are "welcoming [trans people] into the coalition."
"Intellectual tolerance" - At best, equal with the Democrats.
"Creativity" - True, in some ways at least.
"Crime" - Not sure how to judge here, because while they are certainly more aggressive on enforcement of immigration-related crime, there are some significant rule-of-law-related issues.
"Immigration" - Mostly true, but with some serious caveats about rule-of-law-related issues.
"Foreign policy" - Perhaps you could say too early to tell, but extremely unpromising by my reading.
"Abortion" - True, I think (haven't really heard anything one way or another, which is what this seems to predict).
"Transparency and consistency" - I thought this was, let's say, a stretch at the time, and I don't really know how to score it now.
That "is a sore loser" point is really important! It's not just that he complained a lot about the election. He encouraged his protestors to march on the Capitol on January 6 and then when they started a riot he sat in the White House and did nothing about it for several hours. Since then he's started describing these rioters as heros and talking about pardoning them. In my opinion this is a much bigger threat to the rule of law and democracy than court packing.
Also I think you're overstating the dangers of the filibuster and court packing. The filibuster isn't in the Constitution and I don't know of any other liberal democracy with a de facto 60 percent threshold for passing legislation. If we abolished the filibuster you'd still need agreement by the House, Senate, and president to pass legislation. That seems like plenty of checks and balances.
I'm not in favor of the filibuster but there are plenty of liberal democracies, including the UK and Canada, where the legislature has the power to overrule judicial interpretations of the Constitution. I like the US system better, but I don't think it would be a catastrophe if we ended up with a UK-style system with legislative supremacy.
Those are valid points.
While it's true that places like the UK and Canada are doing kind of okay with legislative supremacy, there are important protections (full free speech, as noted in my piece) that they're missing out on.
It's certainly true that what Trump did on January 6 was bad. Exactly how much weight to put on it, everyone will have to judge for themselves. The Harris guest post, naturally, ends with a whole section on it.
Wow! Brilliant article. I've always just hated Trump because this according to everyone in my circle Harris is "obiviously better". This article really did a great job making a rational honest case for Trump.
Thank you!
Two excellent articles! Posting the strongest possible case for each candidate on the same forum is laudable, and more of this should be normal political discourse. Well done.
The point about free speech is probably paramount for me. That was disheartening to say the least, Walz's statement in the Vance debate.
I'm not exactly low information, but hadn't come across many of these points. Thanks for putting this together in such a clear way
A brilliant (and canonical) summary. I particularly liked your point about creativity, which had not occurred to previously.
The filibuster has no Constitutional sanction. McConnell packed the current court by preventing Merrick Garland’s nomination any consideration in 2016, and rushing thru Amy C Barrett’s confirmation.
You can change the meaning of words all you want but any honest person knows that preventing nominations is not the same thing as changing the rules of how many people are nominated
I've been eager to read more sober election analyses, looking at policies, and I appreciate this effort to write one.
That said, I couldn't stop laughing when your first point in favor of Trump was, "preserving US institutions". Trump is the guy who, because he didn't like an election outcome, called Georgia officials and tried to pressure them to just find more votes. He hatched a plan to send alternate slates of electors for each swing state, and for Pence to choose his electors over the ones that voters had actually selected. Those are blatant attempts to subvert our institutions. And many of those actions are likely illegal, as well. But Trump hasn't been tried, in part because his packed supreme court has helped delay action and reduce the ability for him to face any consequences for his actions.
Suppose that his plan had worked, somehow. Would the new precedent be that both sides always just send their own slates of electors in every election and we fight over which ones are chosen? Would the vice president always just choose who wins? Wouldn't that just lead to permanent single party rule? Do you think Kamala could just certify her own victory this year, regardless of the vote?
You said that Kamala is a threat because she at one point agreed with some proposal to enlarge the supreme court. She can't unilaterally do that. If you're going to hold candidates to everything they've proposed, you're going to have to answer for tons of crazy things Trump has proposed. For instance you have to say that Trump's immigration policy is "mass deportation of every illegal immigrant in the country", rather than the more moderate changes you described. You'd have to say that his trade policy is huge tariffs on everything.
In contrast to this hypothetical court packing that you fear, Republicans already did abuse the rules to boost their supreme court margins, by refusing to appoint a justice in the last year of Obama's presidency and then appointing a justice in the last year of Trump's.
I am sympathetic to a number of your other points. I'm generally not in support of DEI programs. I don't think of myself as woke, though it does seem like wokeness spiked more in 2017-2020 than in the last 4 years. It's quite possible that the left will go crazier under a 2nd Trump term than under a Harris presidency. It's possible that Trump's foreign policy would be better, and that would be worthy of a lot more debate. Deregulation might be a good thing, that's probably case by case basis. Crime is bad, and it spiked in 2020. I voted Republican for many local offices because of that, but I don't think that Trump has much effect on local policing (and, of course, he presided over the increase in crime while Biden presided over the subsequent decline). Censorship is bad, but neutrality is hard to achieve (I initially supported Elon buying Twitter in the hopes it would bring more free speech, but in the end he just boosted his own content, started censoring the other side, and is now trying to influence an election).
If Republicans could field a candidate that supported reasonable right wing policies, without Trump's personality, his ceaseless lying, grifting, and sometimes outright criminality, I'd be open to voting for that candidate. But it's hard for me to vote for him, as is, and it's hard to take his supporters seriously, when they are willing to casually overlook those problems.
Sorry if you’re going to purity spiral over one guy for some reason when all major politicians are dishonest liars including Harris, Obama, Walz, Clintons then you clearly won’t vote for anyone who is opposed to the establishment because in your mind the establishment defines who is an “unreasonable” liar vs reasonable one.
Sounds like you have Harris derangement syndrome.
Harris isn’t anything special. Just another establishment Democrat. Pretty typical
I love the two essays. There is one big error in this one - you say "Trump successfully pressured Alabama to almost immediately reverse a law that courts had interpreted as preventing IVF fertility treatments." This is factually wrong. The AL SCT held (correctly in my view) as a matter of statutory interpretation that the state's wrongful death act provided a remedy to the parents of embryos in cold storage. In the case in question, the clinic involved (according to the clinic) had allowed a random person to wander in, access the cold storage units, remove embryos, and drop them, destroying them. The Wrongful Death Act had previously been amended to say that it allowed claims regardless of viability for fetal death (after a prior version had been held to not cover a pre-viability fetus a pregnant woman lost in a car accident). You can argue the statutory interpretation issue either way (it does not mention stored embryos) but the decision is a perfectly reasonable one. What AL then did, in 2 weeks!, is pass a broad tort immunity statute for fertility clinics. There's a word for this: "special interest legislation" and "rent seeking". (OK, 5 words). The clinics stage managed a panic to get the law passed (Trump had nothing to do with it) without debate or scrutiny. But exempting a business (which is what fertility clinics are) from tort liability for what is essentially negligence isn't good policy.
In general I am very grateful for what you're trying to do here and I am not an expert on many things you talk about in this post.
However, for the sake of rationality, in the section on trans issues: "women getting beat up by people with XY chromosomes" is such hot take it shouldn't be allowed in a rationalist analysis of any candidate. Imane Khelif is indeed a cis woman (not trans) with a potential DSD and the sport we're talking about here is Boxing - where beating each other up is the whole point. There is a complex discussion to be had about athletes with DSD and I really don't wanna get into it here, but that statement alone makes the other points you raised in this presentation very questionable.
I really hope you take more time to research in the future.
Thanks for the note.
Khelif does have XY chromosomes: https://www.sportingnews.com/us/olympics/news/imane-khelif-condition-explained-gender-fact-check/51994b8a2e23e7b423782f7a
Now I realize there are extra-complex cases, and this is probably one of them. Perhaps a more straightforward example of my point would have been the U Penn swimmer Lia Thomas.
I didn't question if she has XY chromosomes, it's that she is not trans, and on that even your link says: "It is not true that athletes with variations in their sex traits, or DSDs, are the same as transgender athletes. Conflating the two is considered to be inaccurate."
That might seem nit picking, but another example would do you good here anyway, because that example isn't part of the whole 'trans people in sports' discussion, it's about genetic advantages based on DSD.
Whatever, it is a hugely complicated conversation.
I still think the way you phrased it is coming in piping hot and unfortunately does not lend confidence in your rational presentation of actual benefits of a trump presidency.
Yeah. Although to be fair, I didn't say she was trans, I specifically called her "a person with XY chromosomes." I agree that the context of the section was trans people.
I wasn't writing it "piping hot", but I can see how it might come off that way.
To be accurate, the IBA claimed she has XY chromosomes, but this claim has not been confirmed as far as I can tell.
Here is the claim. It needs to be translated from Russian because the IBA is a Russian organization (banned by the IOC).
https://tass.ru/sport/17370249
I'm sympathetic with many of your arguments here. But none of it addresses what to me is the overwhelming problem with Trump: that he has shown consistently, through his words and deeds, that he has contempt for the institutions of democracy, and has every intention of making himself an autocrat. If Harris is elected and enacts bad policies, in 2028 Americans will have the chance to elect some other Republican (who doesn't plan to overthrow democracy) to repeal those policies. If Trump is elected, and succeeds in what he says he wants to do and has tried to do before, American's won't get that chance in four years, or maybe ever again. To me, that outweighs all of your legitimate points in his favour. It would outweigh almost anything.
But then again, I'm not an American, so what I think hardly matters.
I just can't see that happening. Even if he tried, which he won't, institutions like the court will prevent him.
Under 1% chance IMO. Is there a specific proposition we could bet on?
He already tried to overturn an election result once, on January 6th 2020. What makes you so confident that he won't again?
And what do you make of his statement to supporters in July that "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote"?
On Jan 6, he didn't come even slightly close to succeeding. He never used the military, and the protesters didn't bring firearms.
His "in four years, you don't have to vote" I see him saying the country is in crisis right now, but in 4 years it'll be on a good track and you can relax and not worry too much about election results. Because the country will then be in a good place regardless. Not that he'll end democracy.
Anyway, I'm happy to bet on it.
I'll decline your offer of a bet. I'm not in the habit of betting, and this question strikes me as difficult to operationalize precisely, since I can envision a wide variety of ways this outcome could manifest. I'm more interested here in understanding your view of my first question. What makes you think he won't attempt something like Jan 6th again? Or is it that you think he may attempt it, but is highly unlikely to succeed?
It's not easy to describe to someone else -- it's my entire psychological read on Trump, from having following his actions and speech for a decade. How do I describe that to another person?
But basically I think there's just about nothing in him that wants to dismantle democracy or whatever the concern is. He's been a businessman for almost his whole life, and his mindset comes from there. As President, he was actually pretty good about following the law -- he didn't ignore courts. When he lost, he was like a toddler who refused to give the ball back, but that doesn't mean he wants to be President for life. I don't buy that he "knew he lost".
Anyway, you're welcome to disagree, but I think the odds are less than 1/1000 that he's, say, president in 2030. As noted in my article, I think the odds of institutional damage are higher under Democrats.
I'm not sure that concerns here are hard to operationalize precisely for a bet.
I see. Thanks for taking the time to converse with me.
I don't mean to be rude but I find this piece painfully dishonest—certainly not the "rational case" it presents itself as. The most egregious quality is the way that it consistently cites Harris's 2019 and 2020 positions as being current, but when it comes to abortion it only considers Trump's 2024 positions—in fact, his *late 2024* positions, since he was discussing a national 15-week bans earlier this year! There's no discussion of, for instance, his statement that he'd punish women for having abortions. Trump's current stance on abortion is clearly born purely out of political contingency…which is fine! But then the same should apply to Harris. After all, Trump actually has a record here: he appointed strongly anti-abortion judges, such as the one who issued a ban on Mifepristone.
The inconsistency reaches comical proportions in the next section, Transparency and Consistency, which criticizes Harris for not explaining any of her changes in position and contrasts her in this regard with…J.D. Vance! If we're going to compare like with like, wouldn't it make more sense to compare how Harris has handled changes in position with how *Trump* has handled them? But then again, Trump hasn't ever been known to change his stance on an issue.
Hey Maxim,
My main criticism of the article is that it fails to provide a comparative analysis of why Trump is the superior candidate. When you're trying to show that Candidate A is better than Candidate B at achieving a particular goal, or that they score better in a category, it's not enough to just list a bunch of reasons as to why Candidate A is good in that category. Otherwise it is very easy to run afoul of selection bias.
Imagine for example, that there are 3 reasons to think that Candidate A has good policy on a topic, and 17 reasons to think that candidate B has good policy on the same topic. Let's also assume, for simplicity, that each reason should be weighed as being equally good. If I didn't make a fully comparative analysis between candidates A & B, but instead wrote an article listing the 3 reasons to think that Candidate A is a good bet, and maybe 1 or even 2 of the reasons to favor candidate B, a reader might come away convinced that Candidate A is obviously the superior option, when that's not true at all!
Now of course it's impossible to provide an exhaustive full-on comparison of how the candidates ultimately stack up across every conceivable domain, but if you've taken on the burden of showing that one candidate is superior in a particular domain, I think we are owed at least a general comparative analysis. I understand one doesn't have the space to list every argument for and against a candidate, but one can at least gesture at them. E.g. for candidate A vs B, one can say, "there are a lot of reasons to favor B including X,Y,Z and much more, but I think they are all outweighed by this argument in favor of candidate A".
Just to give a few examples of where I think this is applicable:
On the topic of preserving institutions, merit & intellectual tolerance: Here I would have liked some engagement with the obvious counter that Trump's fascistic and nepotistic tendencies would diminish the meritocratic standing and intellectual climate of the federal government. Some of these concerns even seem to overshadow the anti-meritocratic elements of the Democratic administration in scale. For example, there is the worry that he will drastically modify the nature of the civil service away from a meritocracy towards an ideological bent based on things like project 2025, Trump's statements, and the actions of his associates. Then there is the well-founded worry that he will restrict and suppress the merit-based findings of administrative forces when they inconvenience him and act to diminish the independence of institutions like the federal reserve in order to impose his ideological or personally-motivated aims.
There are additional reasons to worry about the impact of Trump on our institutions, like his conduct with the last election. Anyways, these are just a few examples, but I think they serve to illustrate my point, which is that I think your analysis is only superficially comparative (no offense), and my key takeaway is that as a result it doesn't provide a compelling argument to favor Trump. I would have liked an explanation of why such worries are ill-founded or at least outweighed by Trump's other advantages in those domains.
Beyond my point about comparatives, I feel that some of your arguments are rather dubiously supported. For example, on the section on creativity, missing is a reason to think that more creativity is generally better. I don't subscribe to that premise at all, in fact I think it's reasonable to think that levels and types of creativity should be contextual. For example, we want more creative Feynman's in a world where the field of theoretical physics is dominated by a focus on string theory. But we don't want to listen to astrologers, flat-earthers or other people with "creative" ideas as to how to fix the field!
On foreign policy, your assertion that the relative lack of foreign state conflict during the trump administration is directly attributable to him seems to me to be very unlikely. In general, we should be skeptical of monocausal explanations in complicated domains like geopolitics. It would be better to say that a presidential administration might have influenced the onset of a particular war instead of the general statement of all foreign conflicts. For example, the present war in Gaza and Lebanon seems to have been likely caused by a desire among Hamas militants to jeopardize the progress of the Abrahamic accords, and of course both the Trump and Biden administrations shared a desire to advance Arab-Israeli relations.
Sorry for writing so much! This was a lot, and yet I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I suppose that just shows how complicated politics is. Thanks for reading this comment.
Thanks for your note! I do agree with you about the limitations of my post. It is the strongest possible case for Trump, and not a quantitative calculation of the pros and cons. Could I do a good job at such an analysis, in this complex case? I’m not sure I could.
I still think there is value in what the post does do, especially for people who may not get Trump at all.
Is creativity good? I personally tend to think “outside the box” so I’m partial (biased?) to others who do, too. Maybe we’ll find out over the next 4 years…
I think you can do both a persuasive essay and a comparative pro and con though. In fact, I would say the best essays do both.
Take a hypothetical case where I want to argue that Trump is stronger than Harris in the domain of personal integrity. Here I can take two possible approaches. On the one hand, I can bring up his disadvantages, but counter that Harris’s personal flaws are worse off generally. On the other hand, I can simply point out that Harris has been known to flip-flop on policy issues, and that therefore she is untrustworthy, and hence Trump is clearly the candidate with better integrity (without mentioning anything else). I think it’s pretty obvious the first approach would be more persuasive.
I do agree that this type of essay might be helpful if your readership was already familiar with arguments on the other side, but was lacking info from the pro-Trump side, say. But once you take on the burden of showing that one candidate is superior in a particular domain, then I think it’s pretty clear that comparative analysis is the way to go. And, like I said, I think you can do that without having to give an exhaustive quantitative pro and con summary list, which I agree is impractical.
The filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution. But the right to a jury trial is, but Trump says he plans to place Adam Schiff and other political opponents before military tribunals.
I realize there is a companion piece pro Harris, but isn’t the only real reason to vote Trump restoring white male privilege? All the rest is window dressing.
Thanks Maxim. I do credit this as a largely rational argument, and I agree that it’s the strongest case that I’ve seen for what is still to me obviously the wrong position. It does not strike me as “the” rational argument, in that “the” rational argument ought to engage with the strongest counterarguments and your piece only does so perfunctorily at the beginning.
Even on its own terms, the argument skips very important evidence. First, it ought to take probabilities into account. The consensus is it is extremely likely that the next Senate will have at least 50 Republicans. Therefore, we are choosing between a likely divided government under Harris or a likely unified one under Trump. This sharply reduces the salience of concerns about institutional change and most other policy issues mentioned under Harris, and increases the salience of worries about the corresponding bad ideas of Trump, particularly his extremely consistent advocacy for broad and high tariffs, which he likely has authority to implement without Congress (see here: https://www.csis.org/analysis/making-tariffs-great-again-does-president-trump-have-legal-authority-implement-new-tariffs).
Second, there is extensive evidence we have regarding Trump’s past job performance from his past appointees which shows that he is far more than a “bad manager of personnel.” There is an immense volume of people who worked for Trump in his first term who have publicly said they are unable to support him on grounds of character. Trump himself has said that “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive and more than energy.”
I agree, it is merely "a" rational argument.
Divided government is a fair point; that wasn't the case 2 months ago, but now it's true that the odds suggest that: https://manifold.markets/ManifoldPolitics/who-will-control-the-government-aft
Also true that many of his old staff have very bad reviews of him.
Dear Max - would it be interesting to re-visit this and see how it's turned out so far? I obviously disagreed strongly about this at the time. So as not to be too snide, my own evaluation is:
"Risk to courts" - Proving to be quite the opposite.
"Fewer regulations" - Coming true, albeit not in the most thoughtful way.
"Preserving free speech" - Proving to be almost diametrically the opposite.
"Relative focus on merit" - At best, unclear.
"Better on wokeness" - Perhaps half-true; I don't think it is likely you would write now that they are "welcoming [trans people] into the coalition."
"Intellectual tolerance" - At best, equal with the Democrats.
"Creativity" - True, in some ways at least.
"Crime" - Not sure how to judge here, because while they are certainly more aggressive on enforcement of immigration-related crime, there are some significant rule-of-law-related issues.
"Immigration" - Mostly true, but with some serious caveats about rule-of-law-related issues.
"Foreign policy" - Perhaps you could say too early to tell, but extremely unpromising by my reading.
"Abortion" - True, I think (haven't really heard anything one way or another, which is what this seems to predict).
"Transparency and consistency" - I thought this was, let's say, a stretch at the time, and I don't really know how to score it now.
Thank you for the note. I agree with you, and it will be worth revisiting.
The companion essay by my friend is perhaps holding up better, with long sections of tariffs and foreign policy: https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/the-rational-case-for-harris
At the time I was very skeptical of the economy claim, but now…
I think biggest fundamental cause of error on my part was an implicit assumption that a 2nd term would be mostly like the 1st.
Sane washing.