Should we vote for Donald Trump?

The populist iconoclast is back. But what is the case for voting for him?

Written by Bo Winegard

PHILO: After a long, depressing, but never boring few months, the choices for the American presidential election are set. Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris.

Perhaps this will not surprise you, but I will argue that we should vote for Donald Trump. To be clear, I will make this argument without the certainty of an ideologue or the ardor of a romantic. Trump is boorish and selfish. He is crude and lazy. He is immature and incompetent too. I have no particular fondness for his character or his rhetoric. In fact, I find him loathsome. He is, at best, a profoundly imperfect presidential candidate, and in a better world, he would not be the leader of the populist movement in the United States. But we must take the world as it exists, not as we want it to be.

And in the world as it exists, the choice is between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. It is binary. There is no alternative. And, as I see it, Trump is like an ugly wall defaced with graffiti that just might save us from a deadly flood. It is hard to celebrate, for it is indeed a rebarbative wall. But I’ll take it over certain ruin. Therefore, I will vote for Trump, and I will urge others to do the same. The most important thing is to stop the progressive coalition and that means stopping the Democratic Party.

MEANDER: And in this simile, the certain ruin is the Democratic Party?

PHILO: Yes.

MEANDER: You are right. I am not surprised that you advocate voting for Trump.

But before debating this further, I should note that we agree on many things. Like you, I do not have the certainty of an ideologue or the ardor of a romantic. Like you, I think Trump is reprehensible. And like you, I am not excited about the vote I will cast in 2024, for Kamala Harris. As you said, in a better world, this would not be our choice. Perhaps, instead, we would be debating about Marco Rubio versus Josh Shapiro or J. D. Vance versus Pete Buttigieg. Ideas would be more important than insults. We would have two intelligent and morally decent candidates. And we would awake from this political nightmare.

Still, you are right. This election is a binary choice—Robert Kennedy being irrelevant. And in this binary choice, this forced question, I answer that so long as the alternative to Donald Trump is sentient and lives within the range of normal political morality, I will vote for him or her. Kamala Harris checks off both boxes. Therefore, I will vote for her.

PHILO: Are you what some call a “Never Trump” voter?

MEANDER: I don’t like the term since I’d probably vote for Trump over, say, a Ted Bundy. But, yes, as understood in popular discourse, I am a Never Trump voter.

PHILO: Fair enough. I will make the case for Trump in four domains: Culture, immigration, economy, and foreign policy. In my view, although he is not without risk, the likely outcome in each domain is superior with a Trump presidency than with a Harris presidency.

MEANDER: Excellent. I look forward to your arguments.

PHILO: To understand my support for Trump, you must understand how much I detest progressivism. In my view, the progressive cultural revolution of the past sixty or seventy years is an abhorrent deviation from the American tradition. And today, progressivism is the regnant ideology on the left and in the Democratic Party more broadly. White men are demonized. Diversity is praised. Homosexuality is not just tolerated, it is celebrated. Men can become women; women can become men. The decadent and degenerate are embraced and the traditional is dismissed.

The greatness of our forebears is assailed, their statues are torn down, their achievements are mocked, their ideals are rejected. The past is seen only as a crushing burden, a legacy of hate and oppression that must be annihilated. In schools, children are taught to despise the country. They believe their ancestors were not heroic men and women who sacrificed to create a better world. Instead, they believe their ancestors were benighted bigots, slavers, oppressors, and militant xenophobes.

When people become unmoored from their history, they either become weak and ungrateful, drifting into the listlessness of hedonism and malaise. Or they become angry and resentful, exploding into a conflagration of violence and revolution. What can be unburdened by what has been is a path built on broken bodies and the rubble of ruined institutions.

Now, you may think that I am being histrionic. Surely this florid rhetoric is hyperbolic. Perhaps it is. But caution is not a crime. And we should be worried about the decline of America. We should be worried about the rise of decadence. We should be worried about the celebration of degeneracy. And most of all, we should be worried about the gleeful degradation of our traditions.

We need actively and tirelessly to fight this pernicious progressive ideology. And only the populist conservative movement is willing to do this. Ban CRT in K-12. Stop funding state universities that teach divisive racial flapdoodle. Publicly and proudly espouse reverence for the Founders and for Christianity. We are not condemned to be submerged by a sea of rising progressivism because progressivism is not a natural phenomenon. It is not implacable. It is a resistible human phenomenon. We have a choice. Fight back or succumb. I want to fight back.

And Trump, despite his many flaws, will do just this.  

MEANDER: Maybe you should have been Trump’s vice-presidential pick. Splendid and effective rhetoric. A regular Cicero of populist conservatism. But, although I share many of your concerns, I do not think your declamation holds up to scrutiny.

Let us take your complaints, as best as I can remember them, one by one. You said that white men are demonized. Perhaps in some far-left commentary and by extremists or trolls on Twitter. But right now, Kamala Harris is poised to pick a white man for her vice president. And across the country, white men are respected members of communities. Nobody is harassing them or denigrating them. Mark Kelly is not despised nor is Josh Shapiro nor is Pete Buttigieg.

Is a kind of casual anti-white discourse popular on the left, especially on college campuses? Yes. Is it nettlesome? Yes. But Trump is not the solution to obnoxious adolescents or boisterous college students. And surely, he will not quiet the voices of hysterical progressives. In fact, he will convince them that their fears are justified and will cause them more loudly to protest and more enthusiastically to denounce the supposedly racist white status quo.

You said diversity is praised. Yes. And it will be for the remainder of the American experiment. We’re a multiracial country. The proverbial bell of diversification will not be unrung. And so long as we have diversity, we’ll praise it, even lie or at least dissemble about it. I understand that this can be annoying. But civilization requires, let us say, some exaggerations and propaganda. We should not be too precious about this. The mature mind understands this and sees no more need to gainsay the myths of this country than it does to gainsay the myths of religion. That which we must accept we often elevate with grandiloquent phrases and applause.

You said homosexuality is celebrated. I’m not so sure about this. Of course, people on the progressive left fly rainbow flags and often laud alternative sexual lifestyles. But is that a feature of our culture more broadly? Homosexuality strikes me as a minority lifestyle—obviously, of course, since most humans are heterosexual—which is overrepresented in leftist entertainment and outlets but is still outside the mainstream of our culture. Further, I, like most Americans, support gay marriage and think a restrained homosexuality, a bourgeois homosexuality, should be celebrated as a part of our mainstream society. I want monogamy. I don’t care if it’s heterosexual or homosexual monogamy. Gay marriage will not be repealed if Trump wins. And our attitude about homosexuality will not change either.

You said men can become women and women can become men. We agree that this is a problem. And I think conservatives have been right on trans issues more often than leftists. A Trump administration would be better than a Harris administration about this. So, I concede the point.

You said that decadence is embraced and tradition dismissed. Maybe. But did you watch the Republican National Convention? That was unbridled and embarrassing kitsch decadence. Hulk Hogan. Amber Rose. Donald Trump. All shamelessly louche and decadent. Social conservatism is but a faint whisper in the roaring angry crowd that is the populist right. In fact, one could argue that the professionalism of Harris and those around her is more conservative, more traditional, than the uncouth iconoclasm of Trump and his rabid fans.

You said our forebears are despised and children are taught to hate the country. Can you think of a single politician the Founders would have abhorred more than Donald Trump? He is precisely the kind of demagogic authoritarian about which they warned and worried. Does he know a single thing about Washington, Jefferson, Madison, or Hamilton? I doubt it.

I’m not an expert about K-12 education, but I suspect that some of the materials and lessons would irk me. And perhaps Republicans would also be better on this issue than Democrats. Hard to say. Education is local, and I don’t want to give the federal government much power over the states.

You ended by saying that caution is not a crime and that you were not being histrionic. I disagree. You were being histrionic, and caution can be a crime because it can cause you to exaggerate one risk to justify taking another risk. If you think the harmless snake is poisonous, you might escape it by running into an open field full of dangerous predators. So, if you think Harris and the Democrats will end the country, you might flee to Trump to stop them.

PHILO: I agree that Trump himself is a libertine who would have been despised by Hamilton or Washington, and I was not impressed with the RNC. Nevertheless, elections are not about the aesthetics or even the character of a single person. They are about coalitions and policies. Trump’s coalition is committed to American traditionalism.

MEANDER: But elections are about the character of the president since the entire power of the executive is vested in him. Character matters. Character is why January 6^th happened. Character might be the difference between peace and nuclear war.

PHILO: I’m not dismissing the importance of character, and I agree that Trump is deficient here. However, character is not everything. Good men can do wicked things. G. W. Bush, I think, is an example. Character did not prevent him from leading a disastrous invasion of Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and wasted billions of dollars. Decency is no protection against bad ideas and is as easily corrupted as the wings of a butterfly.

MEANDER: I would argue that Bush’s character, his shallowness of thought and dogmatism, is exactly why he became fixated on Iraq and a salvific vision of the power of democracy in the Middle East. Character is destiny. It cannot be escaped. A stronger and more nimble-minded intellect could have resisted the calls for invasion from Perle, Wolfiwitz, Kristol, Boot, Kagan, et cetera.

PHILO: Fair point. Let me clarify. Character in a president is like character in an artist. It is not irrelevant. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dissolute lifestyle and alcoholism destroyed his career and prevented him from writing at least several more novels. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald also wrote The Great Gatsby, which is a timeless masterpiece, whatever the shortcomings of its author. Trump’s selfishness and boorishness irritate me, of course. But they can’t be helped. And he has the right instincts. He’s a primitive politician. He can’t articulate his views. He probably does not even reflect upon them. But he feels them in his nervous system and his guts.

MEANDER: I don’t think he has any real views. He is a megalomaniac who tells people and crowds whatever they want to hear. His only political view is that that which brings him attention and adulation is good.

PHILO: I agree, of course, that he’s a megalomaniac, but I disagree about his politics. He’s had consistent instincts on trade and globalization more broadly. He understands intuitively the damage globalization has wrought.

MEANDER: Fair enough. No need to tarry on the exact source or nature of his political views since it is irrelevant. He has a chaotic, impulsive, and dangerously flawed character—and I think that is crucially important. George Washington had character. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Roosevelt. And that is why they were all great presidents. None of them were smarter than Thomas Jefferson or probably even Bill Clinton. But they were men of deep and abiding principle.

PHILO: Allow me to iterate, before moving to immigration, that I despise progressive culture. I despise the degradation of sex roles. The casual anti-white racism. The belittling of our Founders. The obsession with diversity and equity and inclusion. I want to resist and retaliate. And I think Trump will do that.

MEANDER: As a champion of liberalism, I despise many of those things as well. But I don’t think Trump will effectively fight back. He certainly didn’t during his first term. Remember the BLM riots? The spike in homicide rates? And even if I grant that the Republican Party’s cultural views are, in the aggregate, better than the Democratic Party’s, Trump is so loathsome, so volatile, so selfish, and so dangerous that we should not vote for him.

PHILO: What is dangerous, in my view, is allowing millions of illegal immigrants to pour into the country as if through a porous sieve. The Trump administration’s record on immigration was not perfect, but it was vastly better than the disaster that followed. Joe Biden not only allowed more immigrants in, but he also relaxed interior enforcement. Not defending the border is a dereliction of duty every bit as disgraceful as the riots of January 6^th.

What is even more abhorrent is that the disaster at the border was not solely the result of incompetence, it was the result of ideology. The left became so infatuated with a gauzy vision of cosmopolitanism and open borders that it regarded any enforcement as illegitimate—which, of course, is why candidate Kamala Harris spoke very guardedly when discussing punishment of illegals in 2020. Or should I say “undocumented” as the Orwellian euphemism puts it.

Trump has correctly identified the border as a winning issue. He has fulminated against Biden’s failures at the border. He has assembled an intelligent team who will immediately work to curb illegal immigration and will think creatively about legal immigration. He will, in short, slow the demographic change that the left has promoted and accelerated.

MEANDER: This may surprise you, but I largely agree with you about this. Clearly, the Biden administration’s failure at the border deserves obloquy. It was foreseeable and preventable. Harris also deserves some blame for it, though I am quite certain she will distance herself from it. And however much I detest Trump, his immigration policies and overall ideology about demographic change are better than Harris’s. If I were a one-issue voter, and immigration were my issue, I would vote for Trump.

PHILO: Demographic change is probably the most important issue facing the country since everything is downstream of demographics. Tax policy? Downstream. Gun policy? Downstream. Welfare? Downstream. Policing? Downstream. Cultural achievements? Downstream. And so on. America is ultimately a European experiment in culture and governance. If the demographics change radically, then the culture and the government will change irrevocably. America will no longer be a European experiment or a part of Western culture. Demographic change is the Rubicon. Once we cross, we can’t go back. Nothing will be the same.

Perhaps that is precisely the country the left earnestly desires, one radically changed in governance and culture, one more boisterous, diverse, and cosmopolitan. Fine. But I will not capitulate to that vision of the United States without a fight. If I lose at the polls, so be it. But in the meantime, I’m voting for Trump.

MEANDER: I understand your position, but demographic change takes place more than four years at a time. If you want slower immigration, you must persuade Americans. And Donald Trump’s rhetoric, his insults and denunciations of immigrants, is almost perfectly designed to alienate moderates. It is the opposite of persuasive. This is likely the reason the left in 2019-2021 endorsed such liberal policies on immigration—it was a thermostatic reaction to Trump’s hyperbolic condemnations of criminal immigrants.

PHILO: An excess of two to four million illegal immigrants with lax interior enforcement is not a trifle, though, and that can easily happen in four years. I take your point about the reaction to Trump’s rhetoric, though, and were I an advisor, I would urge him to be much more judicious. And, of course, he would ignore me. And thus I return to this: Elections are binary. I’m stuck with an unpleasant choice. We all are.

MEANDER: Yes we are. In today’s politics, only the second clause of Dickens’ widely celebrated opening sentence to A Tale of Two Cities is true: It was the worst of times.

PHILO: I suspect those in 1933 Germany would disagree.  

MEANDER: Ha! There’s always Hitler. But point taken. I’ll adjust my claim. Times are bad but could be worse. Though sometimes that is hard to fathom.

PHILO: Adjustment accepted—and, at any rate, as a wistful conservative, I have no right to complain about your pessimism.

Let’s move to the economy because I am genuinely excited about the direction populism has pushed the conservative movement. For a long time, I disliked the Republican Party because of its single-minded obsession with entrepreneurs. The GOP seemed to worship the job creator as a religious man worships the divine creator. And to this almost divine being, this entrepreneur, everything was given. Tax cuts. Deregulation. Cheap labor. Panegyrics. And on and on. It was not only nauseating but alienating to many socially conservative middle-class voters who otherwise would have voted for Republicans because they were alarmed by the Democratic Party’s rapid move to the cultural left.

J. D. Vance, despite being slightly awkward and despite lacking charisma, is the perfect choice to advance a working-class friendly economic agenda, one that repudiates the antiquated pieties of Bush and Romney and rejects the neoliberal policies that have generously rewarded the super-rich but severely hurt the working men and women of the country.

We agree that Trump’s character is repellent, but I do think his egotism, shamelessness, and intuitive distrust of globalization have been helpful in destroying the neoliberal incarnation of the GOP. He’s an egotistical iconoclast. A destroyer. And in the wake of such destruction is the opportunity to create a fascinating and effective populist Republican Party that finally embraces the working class.

MEANDER: Yes, the Trump/Vance’s rhetoric about the economy is quite different from Romney/Ryan’s. But much of it strikes me as grievance mongering and poseur populism. They rail against liberal elites, and they hearken to a Rockwellian America when working men could support a family on one salary—but they haven’t forwarded any realistic policies to return the country to those halcyon days. Upbraiding the educated will not transform the country. And it will not bring back high-paying factory jobs.

What is more, the actual policies Trump pursued in his first term are not so different from those pursued by Bush or Reagan. He tried to eliminate Obamacare. He deregulated. And he passed massive tax cuts for the rich. His only real nod to populism was that he did not even pretend to be interested in spending cuts. In other words, he was as reckless and improvident in government as he was in his private life. Profligate to the end.

He will almost certainly renew his tax cuts, which will disproportionately benefit the top one percent. He will hike tariffs, which will raise the price of goods. He might engage in trade wars, which will further raise the price of goods. In fact, so far as I can tell, his only actual working-class policy is a reduction of immigration, which may very well increase the price of labor by reducing the supply.

Now, I am not a neoliberal shill. I understand that globalization, although enrichening the world, is fraught with problems and challenges. Many leaders in the West were too glib about it, too sunny and too cocooned from the concerns of ordinary people. Economists such as David Autor have written effectively about the China shock and other once enthusiastic thinkers have become more cautious and less sanguine about neoliberal policies.

But I still think globalization, a moderate and judicious globalization that recognizes painful tradeoffs and better appreciates and attends to the plight of the displaced, is a good thing. We will never again be the America of 1946 standing atop a world shattered by war. Technology has changed. Other countries have developed. The past is the past. And no amount of nostalgia will bring it back. We must accept global integration. And humble our relative expectations.

PHILO: First-term Trump was compromised by neoliberal bureaucrats and crafty holdovers from the old Republican Party such as Paul Ryan. Trump had the right instincts, but he did not yet have the right people around him. Movements are built piecemeal, and the populist movement was still nascent. Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance is a signal that he is committed to the populist project and that this term will be more effective, more focused, and less distorted by the resistance and encroachments Reaganite Republicans.

MEANDER: Beyond a reduction in immigration flows and higher tariffs, what is Donald Trump actually advocating that leads you to believe that he will pursue a working-class agenda? Did not Joe Biden pass the more working-class friendly legislation? Is not Kamala Harris endorsed by the AFL-CIO, steel workers, and other unions?

PHILO: Biden’s record is mixed on the economy; and it takes time to alter a political party and realign. Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance, and other Republicans have been promoting smart working-class policies for years now. The time is ripe. The fruit will be picked.

And, by the way, immigration is very important. Democrats claim to support workers but compel them to compete with millions of immigrants storming through the border and into our cities, depressing wages and decreasing worker solidarity. Low-skilled immigration is baleful to the working class. It is antithetical to unions. And it should be opposed by anybody who wants higher wages.  

MEANDER: Fair enough, but I still think this is poseur populism. It is a posture. The only thing that holds together the Trump coalition is an exceedingly strong antipathy to educated liberal elites. For what it’s worth, I am glad that it is poseur populism since I think populism, although an understandable response to elite failure, is largely pernicious.

PHILO: Allow me to conclude my advocacy of voting for Trump by appealing to foreign policy, where his record was impressive. In fact, he was the first president since Jimmy Carter who did not inaugurate a war or increase the scope of an existing one. And during his administration, Israel and two neighbors, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, signed the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations. Israel was safe. The Middle East was less of a powder keg than during Obama or Biden’s administration.

Trump’s realism is often misunderstood as isolationism. He is ridiculed by war hawks and neoconservatives for retreating from the globe. But this is a slander. His foreign policy preserved American hegemony and kept the world safe, while shifting focus to the real enemy: China. After the misguided adventurism of Bush and the apologetic retrenchment of Obama, Trump’s foreign policy was fresh, exciting, and vigorous.

MEANDER: I confess that my foreign policy chops are not terribly impressive. And I am the most unfashionable of men, a Wilsonian internationalist. I want a strong NATO. I want a strong international vision. I want to defend Ukraine without qualification. And, of course, I want to deter China. I believe, and I am not alone in believing this, that we are entering a new cold war with China. Retreat from NATO and from Ukraine would signal weakness and only embolden China in the South China Sea and elsewhere.

Some of Trump’s and Vance’s rhetoric disturbs me. Wavering on Ukraine is a bad idea. Flirting with Taftian isolationism is a bad idea. Giving solace to authoritarians who hate liberalism is a bad idea.

PHILO: Wilsonian internationalism in a post-Bush era! I applaud your commitment to a failed vision of the world.

MEANDER: My view is that every man or woman should commit to at least one very unpopular idea. It trains the mind and thickens the skin.

PHILO: I am going to vote for Trump—so I know exactly what you mean.

MEANDER: I think it’s safe to say that very few people will vote for Trump because of his foreign policy. American voters simply don’t care much. So let’s move on.

PHILO: Agreed.

MEANDER: Before concluding, I want to make another point about Trump’s malignant character and why it disturbs me. Defenders of Trump often ridicule those who castigate his character, claiming that they are prudes or pearl-clutchers who are so distracted by aesthetics and manners that they ignore more important things. They would denounce a hero who is vulgar but embrace an executioner who is urbane.

But this is nonsense. As I argued earlier, character matters. And it matters in unambiguous ways. Trump lies incessantly. He promotes conspiracy theories. He claims that the election was stolen. He invents puerile epithets for his opponents. He behaves like a spoiled and selfish child. And this has real consequences. Riots. Hostility. Fractiousness. Coarseness. And a belief that the other side is demonic, rife with cheaters and power-hungry and depraved elites.

Democracy is held together by norms, not physical laws. And when those norms erode, democracy erodes. It is not unimaginable that a few more elections full of crudeness and hostility and refusals to concede will fully destroy our republic.

PHILO: Well put and I largely agree. But you underestimate the greater danger of the normalized illiberalism that flows like poison through the arteries of our society, from the beating heart of the universities to the vital organs of major newspapers and television media. Somebody needs to oppose this, attack it, eradicate it before it kills us. And Kamala Harris will not. In fact, she will encourage it, advocating for equity while denouncing the imaginary racism and white supremacy that supposedly plagues our country. That is the genteel killer, the polite murderer who lulls you with his charm before slitting your throat. That is what worries me.

Trump is risky, of course. But Harris is riskier.

MEANDER: Very well. Let’s summarize our arguments shall we.

PHILO: Absolutely. Trump is what many of his critics have contended: Uncouth, incompetent, selfish, and juvenile. However, elections are binary choices. We must choose between Trump and a populist conservative movement or Harris and a progressive movement. I despise the progressive movement. It has spread like a sinister toxin from our campuses and into mainstream society. Trump will fight against it. He will ban CRT in K-12, shutdown the border, nominate originalist judges. He will fight against trans ideology and other assorted pseudoscience. He will promote Judeo-Christian institutions. He will preserve our demographics. And he will rein in the excesses of cosmopolitan globalism without relinquishing our enviable position of power in the world.

MEANDER: We agree on Trump’s deficiencies, but we disagree on how important they are. I think they are disqualifying. As I said, I would vote for almost any sentient politician before I voted for Trump. Moreover, although I have some sympathy with conservative complaints about the direction of our culture and the dangers of progressive illiberalism, I do not think populism is a healthy alternative. It vilipends the educated and discourages debate and pluralism while pretending that if we only pursued the right policies, we could recreate Eisenhower’s America. But we can’t recreate Eisenhower’s America. Too many things have changed. The past is irretrievably lost.

Therefore, we must embrace the future and propose ideas that will help us to compete today and tomorrow, not yesterday.

PHILO: I embrace the future, but I am guided by the past.

MEANDER: Nice slogan.

PHILO: Thank you. Until next time.

MEANDER: Indeed.

Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor at Aporia.

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