Decision 2024: Final thoughts about not voting for Donald Trump

[a closing argument]

Back in August I wrote a pair of lengthy politically themed essays—a reflection on voting as a pro-life Catholic and a polemic against Donald Trump—that I am pleased to see have become my most popular pieces on Substack! These two pieces were written primarily for a specific group of readers: conservative Christians, particularly Catholics, who are at least conflicted about voting for Trump. My goal was to pursuade such readers of the merits of the case for opposing Trump in this election, even if they also don’t like Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris.

I’m not here to persuade anyone to support Harris or to vote for her—though I do reject the argument that no Catholic can legitimately vote for Harris. I have argued that it is always morally permissible (not always morally necessary, but always morally permissible) to vote for the viable candidate (that is, the candidate with a chance of winning) that you consider least objectionable. It follows that if you hope Trump loses, you may vote for Harris—and vice versa. Not that you have to! There are also credible arguments for voting for a quixotic third party, like the American Solidarity Party. None of the arguments against voting third party are universally compelling. But I’m not going to rehash these arguments here.

I hope that in these pieces at least some such readers who might have felt compelled to vote for Trump may have found reasoning persuasive enough to enable them to choose to vote otherwise, or not to vote at all, as well as helping some readers who already didn’t want to vote for Trump to feel more confident and secure in rejecting him!

What about readers who still aren’t quite persuaded? Again, I’m not addressing diehard Trump fans, particularly those who are somehow capable of believing him a moral, patriotic, godly man. I’m addressing conservatives who supported Trump in 2016 and/or 2020, but are conflicted about supporting him one more time—conflicted enough, perhaps, to want to be convinced not to do so, but who haven’t gotten there yet. If my last piece didn’t persuade them, is there anything that would?

“The best people”

There is certainly no shortage of people worth listening to who would like to try to help persuade them! This includes a long, long list of high-ranking Republicans and conservatives, among whom are numerous former Trump officials, cabinet officials, and senior staff—a remarkable indictment against a candidate who ran in part on his claimed ability to bring together “the best people.” 

Consider the unprecedented opposition to Trump from nearly half of his own cabinet officials:

It is rare for Cabinet members to not support the president they served. They are normally some of a president’s most loyal supporters. But in the case of Trump’s Cabinet, these uniquely qualified insiders — spanning from the vice president and chiefs of staff to more than a dozen agencies, such as Agriculture, Commerce, Homeland Security and Transportation — are deeply divided about whether he should return to power.

Among Trump cabinet-level officials who oppose him, Trump has been denounced as

• a “threat to democracy” (Trump defense secretary Mark Esper)

• “unfit to be president” (Trump national security adviser John Bolton)

• “certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators … falls into the general definition of fascist” (Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly)

Other Trump officials have described Trump in terms like these:

• “fascist to the core”; “the most dangerous person to this country” (Trump chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley)

• “detached from reality”; someone who “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office” (Trump US attorney general William Barr)

• “no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth” (White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham)

Not all former Trump officials who oppose him have gone so far as to endorse Harris, but at least a dozen have—and so have many other Republican officials from past administrations.

Oh. And then there’s Trump’s current vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, who not only called Trump “noxious,” “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” and “cultural heroin,” but who even stated that Trump had “thoroughly failed to deliver”—in 2020!

Being salt and light vs. normalizing a**holery

I’ve tried to emphasize that I understand why many religious conservatives, even if they are conflicted about Trump, are so adamantly against what the Democrats stand for that they might even hold their nose and vote for Trump.

In my anti-Trump piece I mentioned that I believe that this desperate strategy has backfired: that Trump has done far more harm than good to the very causes for which Christians supported him. In 2016, I called Trump’s candidacy a “suicide vest” that would do more harm to the wearer than to anyone else. I believed that at the time, but even I have been stunned at how accurate that assessment was.

By embracing Trump, however ambivalently, Christians have both a) changed their own culture for the worse in ways they didn’t anticipate and b) alienated potentially sympathetic or persuadable Americans both from Christianity and from the causes that conservative Christians have historically cared about, including the pro-life cause. When I was young, pro-lifers believed that popular opinion was trending away from abortion because we had the moral high ground. Without moral credibility, without suasion, we can only lose—and, worse, we deserve to lose.

I’m not going to say that the Trump administration did nothing right. What I’m concerned about here is not first of all what Trump has done (I’ll say more about that in a bit), but how he’s done it—how he does everything. Trump style is ugly and spiteful; his first and last impulse is to demean and belittle everyone who he perceives as against him, with particular venom toward women and minorities. That may seem like small beer in the grand scheme of things, but when the president talks like that, culturally and psychologically it gives other people permission to do the same.

I firmly believe that changing the world for the better involves what Jesus called being “salt” and “light.” And being salt and light starts, not to put too fine a point on it, with not being a**holes, nor embracing, excusing, enabling, or normalizing a**holery.

I am well aware of the hard-nosed rejoinders of veteran culture warriors to the effect that, to the enemy, we will always be a**holes anyway, and there’s no point trying to appease them. If those who say this don’t quite come out and say “We might as well actually be what they accuse us of being” — i.e., advocating “being a**holes to own the libs” — they come awfully close, both in theory and often in practice.

Anyway, this rejoinder is at least highly misleading. Yes, there are hard-nosed warriors on the other side who will always consider the least departure from their own orthodoxy to be the gravest of thought crimes. There are people to whom the gentlest adherent of Christian orthodoxy is effectively equivalent to the gatekeeper at Auschwitz.

In my long personal experience, though, the vast majority of secular, progressive Americans aren’t remotely like that. Most Americans, regardless of ideology, respond positively to anyone whom they perceive as trying to be kind and compassionate, genuinely committed to treating other people decently and upholding the dignity of all human beings, curious about points of view other than their own, humble in their own claims and beliefs, and self-critical of the failings of their own tribe.

Which is, you know. The polar opposite of everything the Trump Machine stands for. Which is part of the reason why my own prudential judgment even the most conflicted, nose-pinching vote for Trump is a serious mistake.

Unjustifiable harm to immigrants, including children

Turning to immigration, let’s acknowledge up front that the whole subject is desperately complicated, and no one has easy answers. Trump pretended that his “beautiful wall” would be the answer, but it was really a waste of time and money that did far more harm than good.

Catholic social teaching perspective provides some important guidelines:

• Nations have a right to control their borders, and illegal immigration should be prevented.

• The right to emigrate must be upheld and defended. Residents are not the property of the state, and nations cannot keep people from leaving if they want to.

• While the right to emigrate does not force other countries to accept all requests for admission, it does oblige nations to weigh the needs of those seeking entry as well as the nation’s own condition in evaluating requests.

• Equally important is the right not to emigrate. That is, the right to live in one’s community, among one’s family and friends, where one’s home and work and life are, is pre-political and inalienable. When and where this right is denied by citizenship laws and deportation regimes, those laws and regimes are per se unjust and inhumane—and an unjust law is no law at all.

• Finally, we must always uphold the dignity and human rights of people seeking to emigrate to the US as well as those who are already here, with or without permission.

It is certainly true that the Trump administration was not the first to mistreat human beings based on immigration status. It’s also true that, under the Bush and Obama administrations, immigrant families were sometimes separated, and Obama-era Border Patrol officials detained women and children in dire conditions.

Yet there was no precedent for the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy of systematic family separations. Trump’s claim to have “inherited” this policy from Obama was just another lie. Under Trump’s policy, over 5,500 children—young children, toddlers, even nursing infants—were separated from their parents, with no system in place to track them or plan to reunite them with their families. The harm caused by these separations was immediately obvious, yet they proceeded anyway, inflicting lasting trauma on both children and parents. Although some Trump officials claimed the separations were inevitable, others openly justified it as a deterrent—literally harming some children and families to prevent others from trying to come here. In some cases parents were reportedly tricked into signing removal documents or agreeing to deportation in exchange for being reunited with children who were never returned. At least one Trump official has denounced this policy, though of course Trump continues to defend it. Even now, despite years of efforts to reunite parents and children, over 1,000 children remain separated from their families.

Just as cruel and unconscionable in some cases was the Trump administration’s aggressive policy of deporting undocumented immigrants—no matter how long they had been here or even whether they were brought here as children. Consider the 2018 deportation of 39-year-old Jorge Garcia to Mexico—a country that hadn’t been his home since the age of 10—separating him from his wife and two teenaged children living in Detroit. Brought here as a child, Garcia committed no crime, living for here 30 years, even spending six figures in legal fees and costs seeking a path to citizenship. Many things about immigration law are complex and subtle shades of gray, but this is black and white: What we did to this man and his family was utterly unjust. Detroit was his home. His family, his work, his life was here. His right to live here is prepolitical, transcending citizenship law.¹

Or consider the case of Oscar and Humberta Campos of Bridgeton, New Jersey, deported from the US in December 2017 after living in the US for 30 years, separating them from their three children. Their case is slightly more complex because they came here as young adults (a mere misdemeanor). In three decades they have committed no crime (other than Oscar returning to the US after a 1995 deportation).² After three decades, New Jersey was unquestionably their home and the home of their family. For many years they checked in with ICE every three months, requesting a stay of removal that was always granted—until one day it wasn’t. The three children (two in college, one a high-school sophomore) were left alone to pay the mortgage and living expenses. Months later, facing facing foreclosure and other hardships, the oldest quit college to take a job at Walmart.³

The point is not that the Trump administration did cruel and inhumane things the first time around. The point is that Trump is running on a promised regime of deportation on steroids, with sweeping raids, giant camps, and mass deportation. If Trump is allowed to carry out his anti-immigrant plans, it is all too likely that children yet to be born will continue to suffer with lifelong trauma long after everyone reading these words on the eve of Election Day is dead.

Trump vs. justice

Perhaps some readers hope that the worst fears I have expressed here and in my earlier pieces will be prevented by the courts. I do harbor significant hope that the courts—even the Supreme Court with its six conservative justices—will act as a real check on much of the harm that Trump would otherwise do. That hope is tempered, though, by realism about how quickly Trump and his supporters are likely to move beginning in 2025, and how slow the courts move. We are only now beginning to see the hope of accountability for Trump’s crimes in office—accountability that, if he wins, will be at least put on hold for four more years, if not swept under the rug entirely. Indeed, one of the main reasons Trump wants to be president again is that it’s his best hope of staying out of prison without fleeing the country.

There’s a lot more I could say. Right now, though, I’m out of time. And so are you, pretty much. Election Day is upon us. If you’re still reading, and if you’re the kind of person for whom I wrote this piece, I hope it’s been helpful.⁴

Read more: Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’ (David French)

1. Fortunately for Garcia and his family, his story became national news. Almost two years after his deportation, he was granted waivers and allowed to return to his family as a lawful permanent resident with a path to citizenship. Regardless, the fact remains that a) we had no right to deport him and b) we stole two years from him and his family that can never be restored.

2. For most types of crimes, even most felonies, the statute of limitations would long since have expired!

3. Note how this deportation harms the entire community by undercutting investment in college education and potentially leading to avoidable foreclosure. Again, publicity to the rescue: In the sort of deceptively “heartwarming” story that gave rise to the “orphan-crushing machine” meme, the children’s home was saved by an anonymous donor.

4. If you’re a different kind of reader, you’re on your own!