THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020 SR 11L
ASTSunday this section was turned
over to essays making the case
against the re-election of Donald
Trump. I read all of the pieces, and
found more than a few points with which I
disagreed. But my commitment to con-
trarianism only goes so far: Fundamen-
tally I agree with my colleagues that
Trump should not be...
Heyyyyyy — you aren’t even going to let
me make a case here?
Excuse me?
Oh, you know who I am. You let me slip
out during the Covington Catholic contro-
versy, remember, when the media that
puts on kid gloves around Hunter Biden
decided a random teenager with a smile
they didn’t like was the face of white su-
premacy. Well, I’m back.
Ah, sure — you’re my right-wing id. And
let me guess — you want to make the case
that I should vote for Trump? I figured the
coronavirus experience had shamed you
into silence.
Shame is what you should feel, sellout.
Look, I get that you’re a lost cause. But
someone needs to tell you that you’re go-
ing to miss Trump when he’s gone.
Am I indeed? All right, go ahead, make
the case.
I mean, it’s not particularly compli-
cated. I read your columns about the Re-
publicans, even your long-ago book (and I
saw its sales figures, so I know I’m in ex-
clusive company), and all these years
you’ve wanted — what? A populist G.O.P.
that helps working families, something
like that, with a more restrained foreign
policy than the Bush era and a pro-life, re-
ligious core? Do I have that right?
You do.
That’s what Donald Trump has given
you, you bloody ingrate, to the extent you
ever get what you want in politics.
Oh, you mean the economic populism of
a corporate tax cut and an “infrastructure
week” that’s just a running joke.
No, I mean that Trump did two big
things that no other president would have
done together. He actually cut immigra-
tion rates and he backed a looser mone-
tary policy.
You mean he ran an inhumane family
separation policy and he appointed a
bunch of hard-money cranks to the Fed-
eral Reserve.
The inhumane policy was abandoned
quickly, and the cranks weren’t actually
confirmed. I’m talking about results, not
problems with particular appointees or
policies. Why do you think the economy
ran hot for so long, and low-wage workers
did a lot better under Trump than under
Obama? Loose money, tight borders. A
Democrat might have given you one; Ted
Cruz might have given you the other. Only
Trump could deliver both.
The inhumane policy is still having aw-
ful consequences, and Jerome Powell de-
serves more credit for loose money than
Trump’s jawboning.
Obama signed off on plenty of inhu-
mane policies — those detention centers
went up on his watch, remember, and he
had record deportations, too. And, yeah,
Powell deserves credit, but who ap-
pointed him? The economy under Trump
was the best for the working class in two
decades. And kicking him out means we
go back to mass low-skilled immigration,
back to wage stagnation...
Most economists think immigration’s
effects on wages are pretty minimal.
Most economists these days have liber-
al biases that make them elevate weird
case studies over simple common sense.
Look, we just ran the policy experiment!
Tighter borders, higher wages. You won’t
talk me out of this.
I thought you were the one talking me
out of my...
... your anti-Trump pieties, yeah, I am.
Because then there’s foreign policy. No
new wars! The Islamic State routed! At
least the beginning of a withdrawal from
Afghanistan! A bunch of Arab-Israeli
peace agreements that would have won a
normal president the Nobel Peace Prize!
No new wars except the ones we almost
stumbled into with North Korea and Iran,
and the ones percolating in regions where
the United States has abdicated its super-
power role. A non-withdrawal from Af-
ghanistan because Trump can’t execute
on his own positions.
“Percolating” is a word people use to
describe things that aren’t actually that
bad. Trump almost went to war with Iran,
yeah, but in the end he left John Bolton at
the altar. Put the Democrats back in and
we’ll get the kind of “humanitarian” inter-
ventions and “fund-the-moderate-jihad-
ists” gambits that ravaged Libya and
made the Syrian situation worse.
Biden had a decent Obama-era record
of opposing unwise escalations.
Personnel is policy, man! All the liberal
hawks are coming back! You’ll see. And
speaking of personnel, there’s nowhere
you’re more ungrateful than the Supreme
Court, where Trump has given you exactly
what you wanted...
Neil Gorsuch, culture-war hall moni-
tor?
Come on, no Republican president
would have done better. Your big com-
plaint was choosing Brett Kavanaugh
over Amy Coney Barrett, and you’re get-
ting Barrett, too.
And I support her elevation...... but not the president who put her
there. Oh, your hands are so clean!
Better than wading in corruption and
demagogy and mass death, yeah. Can I of-
fer some comebacks?
That wasn’t one?
I mean, it was a distillation. There are
some ways that Trump has been better
than I feared, and things he’s done that I
wholeheartedly support. But he’s also the
most corrupt American president of mod-
ern times: The liberals are wrong to see
him as a dictator, but that doesn’t make his
web of self-enrichment and pardons for
cronies and Ukrainian abuses a good
thing. He’s a bigot and an aggressive liar,
he winks at violence, and he’s exacerbated
one of his party’s worst tendencies, its ob-
session with the minor threat of voter
fraud and its eagerness to throw up im-
pediments to voting. What he’s given to
cultural conservatives with the courts,
he’s taken by making us seem like hypo-
crites and making embarrassments like
Jerry Falwell Jr. the face of conservative
Christendom. He’s radicalized young peo-
ple and empowered some truly terrible
tendencies on the left that will reshape
American institutions deep into Amy Co-
ney Barrett’s old age. And I haven’t even
gotten to the coronavirus.
We’ll get to it. But you know, because
you’ve written about it, that there was
self-enrichment in Washington long be-
fore Trump. It was just laundered
through respectable channels rather than
the Trump hotels. I’ll concede that Trump
is more naked about it, more impeach-
able. But sometimes you have to vote for
the corrupt candidate when the policy
stakes are more important.
And the birther candidate.
And the — look, Trump says racially of-
fensive stuff, but he’s going to win more
minority votes than he did last time, more
than Mitt Romney did. You write skepti-
cally about white liberals who have be-
come more “anti-racist” than African-
Americans, but you’re doing the same
weird thing: If Trump is expanding theG.O.P.’s appeal to minorities, who are you
to say he’s too racist?
He’s benefiting from larger trends to-
ward class and gender polarization, and
he’s emphatically not expanding the
G.O.P.’s appeal overall —
Right, because wimps like you won’t
support him! All this stuff about how he’s
“radicalized” people and hurt religious
witness — that’s just self-serving intu-
ition, with no hard data behind it. It’s a
convenient excuse.
No more convenient than you ignoring
all the Americans who have died from a
pandemic on Trump’s utterly incompetent
watch.
You yourself have written that Trump
can’t be held responsible for all those
deaths. You said our response had a lot in
common with Europe’s — and look at
their case numbers lately. You were right!
I also said that we were modestly worse
in ways that can be attributed to Trump’s
terrible crisis management, which is not
improving as we head deeper into the fall.
So that “modestly” could add up to 60,000,
70,000, 80,000 dead. That’s the worst ex-
cess-death fiasco for an American presi-
dent since the Vietnam War.
And Joe Biden could repeal the Hyde
Amendment, fund abortion with public
money, and preside over an extra 60,000abortions every single year.
Which is why I want Republicans to
hold their position in the Senate and pre-
vent that from happening — and I’m not
the one dragging them downward, Trump
is!
You know, liberals always say that pro-
lifers don’t really think that fetuses are
human beings, and you’re proving them
right. You think pandemic deaths are
worse than the possibility of hundreds of
thousands more abortions. Your concern
for the unborn is fake news.
No, I think the pro-life movement isn’t
going to win a long-term victory if it be-
comes a political suicide pact, where any
anti-abortion politician, however incom-
petent or malevolent, merits our support.
What if the pandemic had been a little
worse? What if it had killed children in
large numbers? What if some even great-
er peril comes along in Trump’s second
term? What if there’s a great-power war?
2020 has been a lesson in what it means to
have a totally incompetent president in a
crisis. We should heed it.
I’m sorry to see you revert to fearmon-
gering.
And I’m sorry that you can’t look at this
situation the way a lot of Trump support-
ers did in 2016, when they conceded they
were gambling, putting an unfit figure in
the White House, because the stakes with
the Supreme Court were so high. Well,
guess what — you won the judicial part of
the gamble, and in the pandemic you also
got a taste of what can go wrong when you
play dice with the presidency. So why not
just take your high court winnings and
walk away from the table, instead of going
double or nothing hoping that the next dis-
aster isn’t worse?
And let you be a free-rider on our wa-
ger?
Is it all about me?
I’m in your head, how could it be other-
wise?
Then you know that it wouldn’t entirely
surprise me if, by some miracle, Trump
won one more time — if his presidency is
part of a bipartisan chastisement, and
God isn’t finished with us yet. But if God
wants that, He doesn’t need my vote to do
it. And the last year, in all its misery and
chaos, has vindicated almost all of the rea-
sons I withheld that vote last time.
You’re giving yourself —
The last word, yes. Talk to you on the
other side.ROSS DOUTHATThe Last Temptation of NeverTrump
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMESA voice in my head makes
the case for the president.
WASHINGTOND
URING the Barack Obama comet
streak in 2008, a lot of Ameri-
cans were electrified by the idea
of leaping into modernity with a
brainy, young, Black cool cat.
Now a lot of Americans seem resigned
yet relieved to step back in time with a
sentimental old-school Irish pol who was
born the year Bing Crosby topped the
charts with “White Christmas.”
Back to a time when the president did
not rubbish people like an insult comic.
Back to a time when the president did not
peddle his own lethal reality. Back to a
time when the president cared about the
whole country, not just the part that voted
for him. Back to a time when the president
didn’t dismiss science, treat the Justice
Department like his personal legal de-
fense firm, besmirch the intelligence com-
munity and denigrate the F.B.I. for not do-
ing his bidding. Back to a time when the
president behaved like an adult, not a de-
linquent.
You can only let King Kong, as Don Mc-
Gahn, Trump’s first White House counsel,
dubbed his former boss, smash up the me-
tropolis for so long.
Donald Trump does have a gift for sym-
metry, you must admit. He began his pres-
idency with an epic tantrum about pic-
tures showing that his Inaugural crowd
could not compare with Obama’s.
And now he could be ending his presi-
dency with another epic tantrum about
crowd size. After Lesley Stahl trolled him
during a “60 Minutes” taping, saying,
“You used to have bigger rallies,” you
could almost see steam pouring out of the
president’s ears. He stormed out of the in-
terview a short while later.
He may be finishing right where he
started, focused on himself.
Whatever Joe Biden’s shortcomings, he
is genuine when he says he will make his
presidency about helping others.
As the former vice president vowed in a
speech in Wilmington, Del., on Friday, “I’ll
listen to the American people, no matter
what their politics.”
Biden’s appeal comes from his own
struggles. He was a working-class kid who
stuttered. He was an adult who suffered
terrible losses. He was not coddled by a
rich father who was always there to bail
him out of a jam. Biden is an empath,
Trump a sociopath.
Somehow Trump grew aggrieved
buoyed by family money in a Fifth Avenue
penthouse, while Biden remained opti-
mistic despite the fates throwing down
one lightning bolt after another.
“Biden feels others’ pain,’’ said the
Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio.
“Trump doesn’t even feel his own.”
D’Antonio pointed out that Trump’s
more modulated debate performance was
disturbing, in that it proved “that being
horrible has been a choice all along.”
“He had the capacity to be normal,”
D’Antonio said. “He just prefers being the
bad boy, the out-of-control deviant mem-
ber of society who says the things that no
one else will say. He’s just performing. Heneeds the adoration of the mob more than
he needs the acceptance of normal peo-
ple.’’
Trump would rather be bitchy than bor-
ing. He loves being a gaper’s delight.
That’s why that long-yearned-for pivot
never came.
Biden’s debate performance wasn’t
scintillating. He let some balls get past
him. He did not word his comment about
transitioning from oil dependence artfully.But he checked the boxes he needed to
check and he successfully presented him-
self as the anti-venom to Trump’s ven-
omous attempts to divide the country for
personal gain.
Trump calls Biden gloomy but he’s the
one threatening the apocalypse if he loses
— low-income hordes overrunning pris-
tine suburbs, scary immigrants streaming
north, a stock market crash and a cadav-
erous New York City.
“Wave bye-bye to your 401(k), cause it’s
going down the tubes,’’ he said at a rally
Friday in The Villages in Florida, warning
that Biden’s climate aims might somehow
deprive Floridians of air-conditioning.
Isolated in his shrink-wrap, Fox-speak
bubble in the debate, he ignored the fact
that he has already turned America into a
sort of dystopia by bungling and dissimu-
lating on the virus.He didn’t even seem to know how he
sounded when he bragged that undocu-
mented immigrant children separated
from their parents and held in cages are
being “so well taken care of.”
When asked about families living under
the polluted skies of oil refineries and
chemical plants — made worse by his ad-
ministration’s incessant rollback of regu-
lations — the president intoned that actu-
ally all that smog is a small price to pay
because the families “are employed heav-
ily and they are making a lot of money.”
Trump began the pandemic blowing off
masks and, even as we enter a new fall
surge and even after the president and his
family contracted the virus, he was still
mocking a White House reporter’s mask
on Friday. It’s unfathomable that the pres-
ident of the United States would turn him-
self into a public health menace. But he
has.
Trump’s problem is that he keeps wow-
ing the same people. And that base just
isn’t large enough.
“Republicans were relieved that he was
eating with a knife and fork,’’ David Axel-
rod cracked about the debate. “But it was
still the same meal.’’
Trump is clearly stunted. His father en-
couraged his opportunism and cynicism:
Do what you need to do to grab whatever
you want. And never do anything that is
not in your own self-interest. That’s only
for suckers and losers.
“Normal life, that’s all we want,” Trump
said at the Florida rally.
But his only normal is chaos.MAUREEN DOWDKing Kong Trump, Losing His Grip
Biden, the empath;
Trump, the sociopath.
.