The Rational Case for Trump

Note: The counterpart to this essay, The Rational Case for Harris (written by a Harris supporter) is also available here.

The US election is coming up! We’re flooded with talking points, but I haven’t seen a single article going through the issues and earnestly making a case for a candidate.

Everyone thinks it’s “obvious” why their candidate is better. It’s not obvious!

So today, I’m simultaneously posting the strongest possible case for Harris, and also for Trump.

Here is the rational case for voting for Trump:

Trump does have flaws

Let’s get it out of the way: I am aware of Trump's drawbacks. He can be rude, thinks transactionally, has a colorful personal life, sometimes puts politics above factual accuracy, can be a sore loser, and makes things about himself.

Despite those things, there's a very strong case to vote for Trump this year:

Preserving US Institutions and Courts

While Trump is often portrayed as the threat to US democracy, it’s Kamala Harris who has endorsed eliminating the filibuster and packing the Supreme Court. That’s no idle threat, as every Democrat in the senate already voted to end the filibuster (besides the two who are retiring: Manchin and Sinema.)

Packing the Supreme Court would effectively end the rule of the Constitution, as judges would then be determined by whichever party were in power. It’s not hyperbolic to note that Venezuela started its descent into dictatorship and starvation-level poverty with court packing.

Trump, in contrast, appointed judges to the Supreme Court who read the plain language of the Constitution, and who aren’t afraid to cast tie-breaking votes that deviate from conservative consensus — whether that’s Gorsuch ruling in favor of enforcing ancient treaties with Native Americans, or Amy Comey Barrett ruling that Arizona can’t revoke the voter registrations of people who didn’t provide proof of citizenship, or Brett Kavanaugh ruling against Republican redistricting plans.

Trump’s judicial appointments have been excellent in general, and contrary to stereotype, an academic study finds that, “across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence … Trump judges outperform other judges.”

As long as the Supreme Court is made up of such independent-thinking judges, the risk of any authoritarian takeover or successful “coup” is extremely low. The biggest risk to Constitutional Democracy is the destruction of the court itself, which Democrats increasingly advocate for.

Fewer Regulations

Trump, and Republicans, are instinctively anti-regulation. For example, Trump:

• Won’t ban prediction markets, as Biden’s CFTC commissioners are in the process of doing

• Won’t throttle cryptocurrencies

• Won’t limit fracking and energy development

• Won’t add costly, needless airline and car regulations

Harris’s bureaucrats would restrict our freedom to innovate in a hundred other regulatory ways as well, which Trump’s people would avoid.

Avoiding overregulation is a big deal. An academic study found that, “Had regulation been held constant at levels observed in 1980, our model predicts that the economy would have been nearly 25 percent larger by 2012 … regulatory growth since 1980 cost GDP $4 trillion in 2012, or about $13,000 per [person].”)

Elon Musk has also become a target of overregulation. California authorities recently shot down launch permits for Musk’s satellites, with one regulator (Gretchen Newsom) showing malice by blasting Musk’s politics at the regulatory meeting: “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA.”

Musk’s innovations are so important. He has already provided worldwide internet by launching more satellites than all governments combined, and it would be amazing if he could get us to Mars next. He’s already enabled people to play Civilization VI using only their brains, and it would be amazing if that can progress into helping people with mental health issues.

Protecting Musk’s projects from government interference is by itself a small reason to vote for Trump, and there are millions of other entrepreneurs who will also do cool things if not overly restrained.

Preserving free speech

Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke out about how the Biden administration pressured him and Facebook to censor Covid content, leading to absurd decisions like censoring the "lab leak" theory, and even censoring experts who argued against masks in schools.

Kamala Harris endorsed censorship wholeheartedly in 2019, saying about social media companies, “if you profit off of hate, if you act as a megaphone for misinformation … if you don't police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable.”

This year, Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, said, “there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.”

That is dead wrong when it comes to the US Constitution, which protects those things because laws against so-called “misinformation” and “hate” would allow government to censor any speech it dislikes.

The United Kingdom shows what unrestrained progressive leadership looks like. The UK arrests thousands of people every year for offensive social media posts, and recently jailed someone for TWO YEARS for posting things like “it’s OK to be white.”

We owe it to Trump's 2016 victory that free speech is not the top concern right now, because (barring court-packing) this court will uphold free speech. If the court were instead 6-to-3 left-leaning, then reinterpreting the First Amendment to exclude "hate speech" and “misinformation” would be a hot legal topic. A Harris Presidency would move us closer towards that possibility.

Relative Focus on Merit

When President Biden got the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice, he promised at the very start of his selection process: “that person will be the first Black woman.”

When President Biden picked his Vice President, he promised, well before picking anyone, “I commit that I will in fact pick a woman to be Vice President.”

Such explicit criteria for a particular role are not normally even legal in the private sector. It’s no way to run a government, either.

Trump will govern in a more colorblind and genderblind way. So if Vivek Ramaswamy ends up in Trump’s administration (as I hope he does) it won’t be because he’s Indian. It’ll be because he’s brilliant, and ideologically-aligned with Trump.

Beyond “DEI” concerns, compare the massive quality difference between Trump’s new top advisors and surrogates with Harris’s.

Elon Musk takes the cake, but the FT reports that Silicon Vally executives’ donations as a whole have turned Republican! For the first time since 2000:

The list of Silicon Valley executives now backing Trump include David Sachs, Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins, Andreessen Horowitz, Chamath Palihapitiya, and more. JD Vance also worked in Silicon Valley, investing in startups.

I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have pulling the strings of government than such innovators.

Contrast that with Harris’s circles, which are heavy on DC political hacks, over-credentialed ladder-climbers, bureaucrats, and activists. No thanks.

The same difference also shows up in the candidates’ own life experiences. Harris and Walz have approximately zero private sector experience, in stark contrast to Trump and Vance:

No wonder Trump and Vance are better when it comes to regulation and the economy.

Better on Wokeness / Trans Issues

Kamala Harris bragged to the ACLU in 2019, “I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.” She also said it should be given to incarcerated illegal aliens.

Should you and I, as taxpayers, really pay for that?

Joe Biden's pick for Supreme Court, when asked to define the word "woman", also famously responded that she couldn't, because "I’m not a biologist.”

I understand where people like her come from — I don't want trans people to feel bad either. There's no need to constantly remind trans individuals about biological sex.

At the same time, I expect serious people like the President of the United States, or a Supreme Court Justice, to be able to say obvious truths.

Otherwise we end up with absurdities like US prisons, and the military, paying for sex change operations, putting biologically male prisoners in women's prisons, and women getting beat up in sports by people with XY chromosomes.

It’s a case of "pathological empathy" that, at the highest levels of government and academia, people have decided to play along with gender dysphoria. Denying truth never works out well. Meanwhile in everyday life, people can still be encouraged to be nice and supportive of those who live in a very different way.

Trump walks the balance between truth and empathy on this better than Democrats, by not denying basic truths, while also not gratuitously making fun of trans people, and while welcoming them and other LGBT Americans into his coalition.

Intellectual Tolerance

Democrats, incredibly to me, often try to get people fired for stating facts like the above. Republicans have somehow become the party of relative intellectual tolerance.

When RFK Jr. decided that he had no path to victory this summer, he reached out to both the Trump and Harris camps. RFK Jr. says that Harris “declined even to speak with me.” He ultimately endorsed Trump.

I disagree with RFK Jr. about vaccines, energy policy, and more, but I despise the culture that says he's "beyond the pale" just for coming to different conclusions. All Americans should be able to talk with one another.

Creativity

During Trump's first term, he suggested that the US should buy Greenland. That’s creative. I’d never thought of it. It’s a cool idea, makes sense geopolitically and economically, and while Denmark likes to claim that Greenland is not for sale — maybe they’d change their mind for a trillion or two.¹ Buying Alaska also seemed weird in 1867, when people widely ridiculed the purchase.

JD Vance shows every bit as much intellectual creativity. For example, he floated the idea of giving votes to children under age 18, and assigning those votes to their parents. Again, it’s something I hadn’t thought of. The policy would culturally encourage people to have children, and it’d give more control to those who have a greater stake in the future of the country.

Such ideas are speculative. They need more debate.

But how refreshing is it to have leaders who are creative enough to come up with new ideas? As opposed to regurgitating the same consultant-created talking-point slop that we’ve been force-fed for decades?

Crime

The President doesn’t have much authority to intervene when it comes to local crime. But at least, when there were mass riots in 2020, Trump shouted that someone should do something rather than tweeting links for bail funds while rioters were burning cities down:

The bail fund that Harris promoted at the height of the riots ended up bailing out a man on his 8th count of indecent exposure, who went on to murder someone once he was out on bail. It also bailed out a man accused of domestic assault, who also went on to murder. In other words, the charity may not have been the most effective altruism.

At the same time, Tim Walz was governor of Minnesota. While hundreds of local businesses were burning in his city, his wife was enjoying the poetic nature of the scene: “I could smell the burning tires,” she said. “I kept the windows open as long as I could because I felt like that was such a touchstone of what was happening.”

Self-congratulatory masochism, instead of focusing on the people whose lives’ work were going up in smoke.

Meanwhile, Walz’s daughter was tweeting to protestors and rioters, “the National Guard WILL NOT be present tonight.”

Walz’s family aren’t running for President. But they give us a good sense of what’s within the “Overton window” in the Walz household.

One candidate, and one party, is dramatically more sane on the issue of crime.

Immigration

I support more high-skilled immigration. But the situation on the southern border has been a disaster. It was almost entirely caused by the Biden-Harris administration, on day one, revoking all of Trump’s executive orders and international deals that were keeping the border secure:

Harris, instead of saying “we made a mistake,” (or, more honestly, “my administration is staffed with ideologues who don’t believe in borders”,) disingenuously blames Congress for not passing immigration bills, which she knows contain “poison pills.” The bill proposed in 2021 would have provided amnesty to 11 million people, and the one this year would have codified keeping the border largely open.

Picking the future citizens of the United States is a serious and irreversible policy issue, and so it’s particularly important to decide the question openly and democratically, with broad buy-in from Americans. Instead, we get the Biden-Harris administration ignoring the rule of law by letting millions come and stay indefinitely.

It may be true that immigrants, on average, don’t commit more crime than Americans. But should that be the bar? Did America really need to let in the Venezuelan gang members who have forcibly taken over an entire apartment complex in Colorado? Or the migrants who are causing 75% of all arrests in Midtown Manhattan?

We can do better when it comes to picking our future fellow citizens. Trump kept illegal crossings low, and he keeps an open mind about legal immigration, earlier this year even saying, “you graduate from a [US] college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

Foreign policy

Trump can sometimes seem unorthodox on the world stage, maybe even a bit crazy. But there’s a method to his madness.

How do I know? Look at this off-camera exchange Trump had with Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot, just days ago:

Mr. Gigot: “Would you use military force against a blockade on Taiwan?”

Mr. Trump: “I wouldn’t have to, because he [Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy.”

Trump has practiced negotiation more than you or I, and his quote suggests that he well understands the benefits to being perceived internationally as dangerous and volatile.

In contrast, we’ve seen the fruits of the Biden-Harris strategy of cautious containment, where they give just enough aid to anyone fighting America’s adversaries to keep things in a bloody stalemate.

The results from Trump’s last term speak for themselves: Foreign bad actors were scared to act out, and there were far fewer wars in the world.

Abortion

Trump's position on abortion is the following:

• Roe v. Wade was wrong (it was)²

• Voters in states should decide; he would veto any national abortion ban

• Total bans go too far; at least have exceptions for rape, incest, and life of mother

• Allowing abortion until birth for any reason, as many blue states do, goes too far

Most people don’t know that Trump has taken many concrete steps to moderate his entire party on abortion:

1) Trump successfully pressured Alabama to almost immediately reverse a law that courts had interpreted as preventing IVF fertility treatments.

2) Trump successfully pressured the Republican Party to remove a national abortion ban from its platform, which had been in there for 40 years.

3) Trump has even proposed requiring insurers to cover IVF. Government mandates like that are non-libertarian, but might at least help with declining birth rates.

In contrast to Trump’s moderate and nuanced approach to abortion, from Harris we get absolutism. Seven blue states now allow abortion all the way up to birth, for any reason at all — a policy more extreme than that of any other country in the world.

Transparency and consistency

Harris now claims she doesn't want to ban fracking,³ a complete reversal of her 2019 quote that, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

Harris now claims she doesn’t want to force Americans to sell their guns to the government, a total reversal of her 2019 quote that, “we have to have a buyback program [for assault weapons]. I support a mandatory buyback program.”

I have never seen Harris, ever, explain why she changed her mind on so many of her positions. If you listen carefully, she doesn’t even admit she changed them. That’s not honest, and it gives me no confidence that she has moderated her views.⁴

By contrast, when JD Vance is asked about his changes in views, he just says he changed his mind, and then gives plausible reasons why. Is that too much to ask?

Outcomes are hard to predict

The impact of any President is hard to predict in advance, because there are so many factors in play. For example, will the “woke left” have a resurgence if Trump wins? I doubt it; I think they’re exhausted. But nobody can know for sure.

In general, we should avoid overthinking about second-order effects and just ask: Which Presidential candidate supports sane economic policy, sane judges, and sane immigration rules? Which candidate is unafraid to speak basic truths? Which candidate is more creative and open-minded? Which candidate has the better track record, both in terms of freeing entrepreneurs from taxes and regulations, and in terms of keeping the world at peace?

The answer to all of those questions is Donald J. Trump.

Disagreement is Reasonable

I think I've presented a compelling case here, but you may have different priorities and values, and may disagree. That’s fine. I hope my arguments here at least made you think. Perhaps you also now better understand why many non-crazy people will vote for Trump. Maybe you should, too!

For the counterpart essay, please see “The Rational Case for Harris” at MaximumTruth.org

1. There are only 6 million Danes, so $2 trillion would be $333,333 per Dane. How long would national pride hold up in the face of such an offer? Meanwhile, the US routinely passes $2 trillion dollar bills, and few even notice.

2. Roe v Wade was an awful legal decision: Judges made a right to abortion up out of thin air, finding it in an alleged “right to privacy”, which they found “in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights.”) [Definition of a penumbra: “1. the partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object. 2. a peripheral or indeterminate area or group.”]

3. As an aside, fracking has been amazing in three ways. First, it’s far cleaner than the energy it outcompeted, and is largely responsible for the big drop in US carbon emissions. Second, it allowed the US to become energy-independent, reducing our reliance on the middle east. Third, it reduced the cost of energy in the US, which has been great for American industry.

4. My real read on her is that, at her core, she’s a lawyer (trained to argue for something regardless of whether it’s right) and an ambitious ladder-climber, and she doesn’t actually hold many genuine policy views. Which gives me no confidence that she’d push back on progressive excesses when in power. If the atmosphere ever reverts to 2020, she’ll gladly go back to tweeting out bail funds for rioters.