If the coronavirus doesn’t mind, this fall the U.S. will choose its president for the next four years. This post contains my list of key issues favoring Donald Trump, the incumbent, and Joe Biden, the challenger.
I started this post in mid-May 2020 and will be revising it until the election in November. In effect, each of these items is an argument with myself, an attempt to express how each issue appeared to me, as of the last time I revisited it. So if I say Trump has the advantage on a certain matter, I mean that, to me, this item would be a reason to vote for Trump. The weighting is an attempt to state priorities among these items.
Note also my long-term bet (made in March 2018) that Trump will win and my post on how to vote.
Final Results: The Scorecard
Topic Details
Note: this discussion does not purport to provide an exhaustive analysis. These are largely just my notes, accumulated over the several months prior to election season.
Economy, Poverty, and the Environment (Weight: 50. Points: Trump 10, Biden 40)
The current state of the U.S. economy is awful. It got that way because of the coronavirus, and that is much worse in the U.S. than virtually any other developed nation because Trump handled it incompetently. It does not appear that he has improved as the months pass, nor that he would handle another virus or other catastrophe better.
Part of this is the federal budget. Bill Clinton was the last president who ran a budget surplus. The Republicans (and the Donald) have never seen a tax cut that wouldn’t solve everything. We’re running trillions in the hole, and they still can’t bring themselves to undo the 2017 tax cut that shoveled billions to foreign investors. Even in the middle of the coronavirus recession, they couldn’t help insisting on a bailout law that sent tons of cash to big corporations while mom & pop shops ran dry. Democrats will give everything to illegal immigrants while American citizens go without food and healthcare, but at least that actually helps someone who needs it, and has some potential to stimulate the economy rather than merely improving corporate balance sheets and then getting paid out in bonuses to CEOs. Bailouts aside, millions of people have ongoing needs, and the Republicans (notably including Trump) are the only ones who keep showing signs of gutting Social Security, putting millions on the street, and preventing the U.S. from getting workable healthcare.
The American Conservative (Doran, September 5) argues that the Democrats are no longer the party of the poor — especially, but not only, the rural poor. It is true that the Democrats are most certainly the party of ridiculing people for being hicks, and in that sense favoring the elite. There is a credible argument that billionaires and other members of the elite favor the Democrats, not merely because they are more enlightened in various areas, but because continuing to set the “woke” against poor whites, especially, prevents the poor of all colors from joining forces against those (not only the rich) who exploit and manipulate them.
Not that murky skies and rivers that catch fire were bad. Sometimes they made for more colorful (orange!) sunsets and more spectacular nighttimes. Besides, so far it looked like we were going to be OK without fireflies and honeybees and whatever other bugs the scientists keep going on about. But I would really rather not have to see photos of two-headed salamanders. (Pardon the sarcasm; I am attempting to emulate those who somehow manage to be indifferent to the environment.)
Administrative Competence, Constitutional Government, and Leadership (Weight: 40. Points: Trump 5, Biden 35)
Trump’s government has been a chaos. Every time I turn around, I hear about another administrative vacancy not filled for years after his inauguration, or another administration employee (including many cabinet members and senior White House figures) leaving. It seems to be a government run by caprice and scattershot attention span. Trump has demonstrated that a yahoo, flying by the seat of his pants, can occasionally serve a useful purpose in upsetting applecarts and breaking things. But overall he has demonstrated that good government requires competence. That said, the Democrats nowadays are so hyper-partisan these days that they, too, appear unlikely to give us really decent government.
Given that Biden appears to be tending toward senility, I wonder if the Democrats are hoping to replace him promptly with Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential candidate, and are using this route to get a female president. Aside from my suspicion that Biden is, if anything, less electable than ever, I would be surprised if this back door will impress voters generally. It won’t impress me, even if I believe the woman will make a good president, even if I believed that Americans will not willingly elect a suitable female candidate. The outcome would be desirable, but I can’t approve of Joe Biden — or, perhaps, Joe Biden’s handlers — choosing the next president of the United States.
Nonetheless, Trump is a walking anti-constitution. Firing inspectors general and other governmental watchdogs is very bad. In a time when many people rightly doubt that our flawed form of democracy can rule effectively, Trump is very much the wrong person to be so much as one step closer to dictatorship. And I shudder to think of subjecting young people, for whom this may be the only president they know much about, to four more years of this. As Election Day nears, I am seeing increasing indications that Trump will fight the constitutional transfer of power when his time is up, and that Republicans are trying to wreck the popular vote. Slate (Hannon, October 13) cites the example of efforts in Texas to make voting more difficult, so as to deter the poorer and less-educated people who are less determined about it. I could see an argument that people who aren’t determined to vote shouldn’t be given the opportunity, for fear that they won’t know what they’re voting for; but dirty tricks to disenfranchise them are beyond the pale.
One item in Trump’s favor has to do with having balls. It’s not a question of physiology. Many women have the functional equivalent; many men don’t. Regardless of whether Trump’s nerve is due to psychopathy, the point remains that he has faced down calumny and (in my view, far too often) proceeded with his chosen policies despite the slings and arrows, where someone like Joe Biden would have done fourteen flip-flops and would still be begging the media to love him. To a certain extent, people expect their candidates to know how to act like leaders. Biden has been particularly weak during these months of runup to the election: you rarely hear or see him take a position on anything, presumably because his handlers are trying to avoid broadcasting his dementia. But there is also a larger problem. Hillary’s campaign in 2016 was faulted for its lack of courage — and now we have the same thing all over again. If anything, it’s worse. Hilary was afraid of her own shadow; the handlers aren’t letting Biden out into the sunlight at all. You’ve got to wonder what odd kind of presidency we are about to enter.
International Affairs (Weight: 40. Points: Trump 10, Biden 30)
First, about China. My initial remarks said this:
Obama started the talk with his “pivot to Asia,” but Orange Man has been far and away more active in awakening America to the economic, military, and political espionage, theft, propaganda, exploitation, and otherwise unkind behavior of China toward its own neighbors as well as the U.S. Even now (i.e., May 2020), when the New York Times has belatedly realized that the American viewpoint has shifted, there are still Democratic remarks about how we really just need to go back to buying everything from China and being pleasant while they take over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Biden will be flip-flopping on this within five minutes after taking office. Not to deny that Trump is likewise capable of completely reversing himself on everything at any moment.
I think The Atlantic (Schuman, July 9) makes a persuasive case that, having helped to awaken America to the threat posed by China, Trump has become more harmful than helpful, for purposes of forming the coalition of nations that will be needed to place limits on Chinese imperialism. I think there is also something to the argument in Foreign Policy (Detsch & MacKinnon, July 24) that it’s a put-on — that Trump has actually been pretty easy on China, and is just posing as a tough guy for the election. On the other hand, I like Mike Pompeo’s remarks opposing China’s freedom to bully Southeast Asian nations in the South China Sea, and I am concerned that there will be no coalition of nations facing China — that media will compel Biden to adopt a pro-China stance. This concern is exemplified by The Atlantic (Beinart, July 26), which strongly endorses America’s continued financial support for China, to the tune of a $400+ billion trade deficit per year. Beinart says, “Surely what’s needed now isn’t for Democrats to “stand up” to China but to cooperate with it to rebuild the economic ties on which so many American exporters depend.” In other words, money for us today; servitude for future generations. Contra Beinart, surely what’s needed now is for America to begin the long, hard task of recalling some of the excessive trust it has placed in China — to insure, among other things, that China is one of the nations to which “American exporters” are able to export. Because in many areas, that has decidedly not been the case so far.
I like the idea that Biden will form a coalition of nations to hang tough against China, and I believe he — or, more accurately, his team — are more capable of doing so; but I am afraid it won’t work that way. One question, for me, is whether Trump has learned anything from his blunders in alienating various allies. It is possible. At the moment, I don’t think he has been doing as much of that as he did in his first few years in office. Bolton’s book (2020) reminds me, though, that Trump was, and may always be, a poor and impetuous negotiator with little grasp of nuance or complexity.
More generally, as America’s spokesman to the world, Trump does have one strength. The world has hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people who would like to come here. For all this country’s problems, it still looks a damn sight better than what they’ve achieved so far in Central America. Trump at least says so. I am afraid the Democrats will allow the progressives to control the microphone and only harp on our failures. Perhaps worse, though, Trump is all about making the U.S. a flaky partner abroad and an object of ridicule around the world; he has profoundly undermined our influence worldwide.
It almost goes without saying — Trump virtually broadcasts — that he doesn’t care about human rights. Yet there are counterexamples. Perhaps the most obtrusive examples in the world at present are, once again, in China. At least the Trump administration’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is still making noises about Tibet. Despite the brevity of its grudging coverage, the New York Times (Jakes, 2020) does acknowledge that Trump has not completely forgotten this place that the media were so passionate about, and then proceeded to implicitly give up on. If an American administration can find excuses to push back against China’s abuses of Tibetans, Uighurs, Africans, and other peoples around the world whose rights and needs do not accord with China’s global ambitions, then that is something. I don’t know whether it is more than the mere talk that Obama presented; I don’t know whether it is more than Biden will actually do. But it is something.
Extremism & Identity Politics (Weight: 40. Points: Trump 30, Biden 10)
I hear about the extreme right, but in daily reading most of the extremism I’m seeing is on the Left. I think it feeds on Trump’s variously erratic, bizarre, incompetent, and corrupt administration. All other things being equal, I would think the solution to that would be, not to perpetuate Trump as a catalyst for more Left nuttiness, but rather to replace him with a centrist who will tend to trigger less radical thought and action on either side. Having a Democrat as president may reduce support on the left for the more extreme behaviors that have flourished due to what conservatives call Trump Derangement Syndrome, which roughly translates as foaming at the mouth whenever someone mentions Trump.
That said, I am concerned at the extent to which extreme progressivism has taken root in American institutions and seems likely to remain, regardless of who is president. Using the New York Times as an example of an institution that I would expect to remain balanced, I am looking for instance at an article (Gladstone, July 22) whose objective is apparently to twist every aspect of a current issue into an argument against Trump. It would be no surprise to see this in many other websites; but it is stunning to see that the Times has descended to this level of irrationality. A few brief illustrations:
- Gladstone says it is “racist” to refer to SARS-CoV-2 as the “Wuhan virus” or the “China virus.” As argued in my separate post, Gladstone’s racist claim is that the Spanish were tough enough to absorb the incorrect 1918 labeling of the “Spanish flu”; somehow the Germans are not offended when we refer to a McDonald’s quasi-sandwich as a “Hamburger”; but China is too delicate to take responsibility for a virus that its dietary practices supposedly originated, and that its government’s handling did help to spread worldwide, in the eventual killing of millions of innocent people.
- Gladstone blames the Trump administration for “setting up potential military confrontations between Chinese and U.S. naval forces” in the South China Sea, without any mention of the fact that — as reported in the “old” New York Times (Perlez, 2016) — “An international tribunal in The Hague [has] delivered a sweeping rebuke … of China’s behavior in the South China Sea.” It is actually China that is setting up that potential military confrontation, by claiming other nations’ waters as its own. Gladstone claims to be sensitive to racism, yet he privileges China over other Asian nations.
- Gladstone says, “The Trump White House has escalated the accusations [of Chinese theft of American intellectual property] further by seeking an international blacklisting of Huawei.” Again, however, an article in the old, rational Times (Sanger & Perlroth, 2014), written during the Obama Administration, says this: “American officials have long considered Huawei … a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company … could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.”
My concern in this regard is that these media outlets are serving as mouthpieces for Chinese propaganda, as if deliberately favoring (and apparently selling advertising to, and in other ways conceivably being funded by) Chinese interests over American ones — and also over the interests of the people of the many nations, from India to Vietnam to Japan, against which China has wielded increasingly aggressive economic and military force in recent years. This pattern of inventing arguments hostile to the Trump administration, across many areas of American social and political life — even when that administration is doing the right thing — does seem to position the Times as an “enemy of the people,” insofar as the people need and deserve honest, factual reporting.
When Trump first made that accusation against the media (i.e., “enemy of the people”), I thought he was crazy. But I have been a Times reader for more than 30 years, and I am really appalled at its current drift. Possibly a second Trump administration would persuade the Times and other such sources that incompetent journalism is counterproductive — that, indeed, someday it may encourage hostility to our present concept of a free press, if and when a would-be American tyrant really does emerge. In other posts, I have discussed other examples of institutional failures at the Times (e.g., harmful distortion of issues pertaining to gender and anti-Semitism). Another example that I have not explored elsewhere: the hypocrisy in media coverage of the #MeToo complaint by Christine Blasey Ford (accusing a Republican male of inappropriate sexual behavior) vs. media coverage of Tara Reade’s comparable complaint (against a Democrat). This demonstrates what I had observed earlier: even liberal and progressive media outlets that formerly seemed to care about truthfulness now display persistent political bias, at the expense of the nation’s best interests. Suppressing a disfavored narrative while promoting a favored one may be journalism, but it is not truthseeking.
Here, again, I am increasingly concerned that Biden and the Democrats will kowtow to the extreme progressives who have attempted to censor everyone who does not say exactly what they want, as illustrated in Matt Taibbi’s (May 29) article on progressive attempts to censor — would you believe — Michael Moore. Trump is a lousy standard-bearer for a free and honest press; but in this presidential election, I fear, he may be the best we will get.
There’s less of the White Man Bad nuttiness than there was in 2016, but I still run into it frequently. White progressives do still have a pathological need to pretend they are the friends of nonwhites. Some are. But too many are just popularity hounds who would say anything, or sell anyone, if it made them look or feel better. There is a reason why supposedly progressive social workers were able to serve Hitler’s Nazi regime with hardly a trace of dissent. On the other hand, a black woman like Kamala Harris, as vice president and eventual president, could make a huge improvement just by standing up there and saying something to the effect of, “We don’t need white people attacking white people on behalf of black people. Alienating white people is not going to help black people.” The problem is that, so far, Harris doesn’t seem inclined in that direction.
One other issue: I have nothing against LGBTQ people, and I sympathize with them against discrimination. I realize that everyone wants to be on the winning side, so everyone is pretending to be something they aren’t — namely, to be just like an LGBTQ person, and thus able to see and understand and share and support. But in terms of what people will do when their money or their real priorities are at risk, I believe the reality is quite different. A person focused on reality may more honestly admit that, for most Americans, it does not make sense to prioritize this cause célèbre while neglecting the grievances of others who are more numerous and/or whose problems are more intense or historically egregious (e.g., rights of people with disabilities or American Indians or the homeless). This has been a very visible issue, and Biden appears better positioned to benefit from it. But when it is overdone, it risks recoiling to Trump’s advantage. There is, for example, widespread concern that kids are free to choose sex reassignment surgery when they are too young to have any idea of who they are or what they are doing, and that medical and counseling professionals are helping them override parental concerns to do so. America has lots of voting parents who may not appreciate this.
Academia, Science, and COVID-19 (Weight: 30. Points: Trump 20, Biden 10)
I sympathize with Trumpistas’ hostility to the wrong kind of expert. But ignorance is no way to run a world. Trump would have been far more effective on this front if he had, ironically, used experts to remove some of the halo from the intelligentsia. There are legitimate controversies out there. Academia’s current tendency toward woke (f/k/a Soviet) homogeneity of opinion and inquiry is not the solution. But Trump was not the man for that job. Biden isn’t either, but at least he’s not a know-nothing. We’ll have to wait until the next election, or at least until Biden’s retirement, for a candidate who can do something constructive on this point. I doubt a Democratic president will do anything not beloved of academia, though.
In the area of COVID-19 specifically, our present circumstances are a consequence of Trump’s cluelessness on both science and administration. I am reading, for example, that The Atlantic (Zhang, July 24) quotes Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, as saying, “We continue to ask CDC these many, many questions. And they don’t know.” Producing a useless CDC at the time of a pandemic seems like a pretty good example of the consequences of blindly politicizing science and wrecking government. I recognize the conservative argument that prominent Democrat leaders (e.g., New York’s Cuomo) were not necessarily favoring more enlightened responses at crucial points, but the buck stops here: the fact remains that the U.S. response has been a mess.
Trump has left the states to figure things out for themselves; and while that has been a circus, perhaps in some regards it has been for the best; perhaps a Trump-created catastrophe in handling COVID-19 has been and will be best addressed by states experimenting with and collaborating on their own solutions. It is not clear that there was a solution in which people in the heartland would get the message about masks and social distancing until enough of them died. And meanwhile, in important regards, the left is destroying what American science and academia are all about.
There is, for one thing, the question of where COVID-19 came from. Although it presently sounds like a matter of mere curiosity, it could be very important for, among other things, world opinion on China, and for protection against future biowarfare. The Democrats don’t merely believe that the evidence favors a purely natural origin, from an animal to a human at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. They — especially leading liberal media — have consistently evinced an unscientific political determination to avoid, indeed to ridicule, the question of whether the virus could have originated in the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory. These people will never seek an unbiased investigation of, for instance, the question of whether the Chinese government could have released the virus deliberately. They believe, in effect, that God has already given them the truth: Republicans like Tom Cotton are always wrong.
That’s not science, nor is it the way to learn anything you don’t already believe. Such nonsense is unfortunately too typical of the extremely partisan bent of academia these days. Political hacks masquerading as intellectuals destroyed my own academic career. In their view, the pursuit of knowledge is just one more political angle. I can’t favor that. I don’t see that Trump has any intelligible response to that sort of bias. But at least he offers a piecemeal opposition to it, whereas Biden will surely coddle it.
Courts and Rule of Law (Weight: 30. Points: Trump 0, Biden 30)
The rule of law in America has serious problems, regardless of who wins this election. The main problem with Trump, and with both political parties, is that they seek to corrupt the courts in order to promote their partisan priorities. I am not sure how I would vote on this item in normal times. I am sure that I was offended by how the Republican Senate broke the rules to prevent Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland from joining the Supreme Court, and then turned around and fast-tracked Amy Coney Barrett. This is not a vote on her. This is a vote against the Republican Senate.
Political Parties in the Long Term (Weight: 30. Points: Trump 5, Biden 25)
I don’t like having just two political parties. But that’s where we are. For purposes of making them effective, much needs to be done. I have heard partisan liberals say that Republicans are unified. Then I read, for example, an article in Business Insider (Haltiwanger, August 19) describing how Trump has fractured the party. There is no such illusion about the Democrats: traditional liberalism is increasingly divorced from extremists on the left.
Trump may have pushed the Republican party toward paying more attention to its small fry and less to its millionaires. I’m not sure about that. I feel they have had their four years. Meanwhile, I think it would be healthy to give the Democrats power, so that they can fight among themselves about what their party stands for, instead of being pseudo-united against Trump. Ideally, this would result in a party split, with the radicals leaving the Democratic Party and empowering a party farther to the left (e.g., the Greens). I don’t know whether this would produce a better Democratic party. I am pretty sure it couldn’t produce a worse one.
Regardless of whether that happens, I think an opportunity for the Democrats to fight among themselves may help to reduce the far left’s promotion of civil war against conservatives. I would rather expose and reduce the push toward armed hostility among young people who have not yet persuaded me that they have any idea of what they are doing. This is the principal reason for my allocation of points in this area.
Police and Race Relations (Weight: 20. Points: Trump 10, Biden 10)
The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 led to riots and looting — supposedly in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement — that a majority of voters disapproved of. For people who are concerned about social unrest, the situation was compounded by progressive cluelessness — by, for example, a pair of opinion pieces in which the New York Times conveyed the doubly bad impression that Democrats favor riots because that’s what most black people want.
Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris could be a plus for Democrats on both moral and electoral levels, but not if blacks keep getting associated with ongoing riots and looting. I felt that Trump shot himself in the foot with his poorly executed injection of federal officers into the protest scene in Portland. But after viewing videos of protesters’ violence there, and seeing that the violence has expanded into violence including murders in Portland and Kenosha while mayors and governors do nothing, I am less critical of Trump’s decision.
Even after months of riots and looting that seem to have nothing to do with black lives, and that have drawn criticism from a number of blacks, we do not seem to have responsible coverage in the mainstream media. Thus, I have increasingly been reading The Federalist. Despite purveying more than its share of right-wing nonsense that leaves me rolling my eyes, I find myself agreeing with black writers like Delano Squires, whose Federalist article (July 21, 2020) offers a number of seemingly fact-based arguments in support of his argument that “Too many black leaders continue to proclaim black problems only matter when caused by white people” and that they act as though “white thoughts are more important than black actions” — such as,
In the past five years, about 25 percent of those shot and killed by police were black, and only 2 percent were unarmed. …
[N]early half of the people killed by police in the last five years have been white ….
The truth is that 61 percent of black inmates in state prisons — by far the largest part of the prison system — are there for violent crimes. Drug possession accounts for just 3 percent of the black prison population ….
I would really rather have much less of well-to-do white progressives preaching at me about white privilege (which many of them enjoy to a far greater extent than I do), and much more real conversation with black people who will not beat me up if I express a willingness to learn but also a determination to stick with the facts. Given the surprising number and weight of black leaders choosing Trump (e.g., Vernon Jones), I would like to see people like Squires taken seriously in the New York Times and Slate. Judging from mainstream media’s somewhat improving ability to look askance at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, now that they are not in power, I think it could be beneficial to have a Republican (preferably not Trump, but there you are) in power for another four years.
One of the primary factors pushing me toward Biden on this issue is the thought that police reform is a real possibility at the presidential level under Biden, but apparently not under Trump. I would rather not see that opportunity pass. There is some pressure in that direction now, though much of it has already vanished in the wake of continuing riots and looting; it seems the public has already largely been driven back toward accepting the police as they are.
Vice-Presidential Candidates (Weight: 20. Points: Trump 15, Biden 5).
Since there is a strong likelihood that Biden will be replaced by Kamala Harris no later than 2024, and possibly much sooner, it seems that I would ideally have been considering Harris on most if not all of the other topics addressed in this post. Until I have time and information to support that effort, I will have to settle for this separate entry. At present, I have only two things to add. First, I did not like Harris as a candidate in the Democratic primaries. I felt she was a rank careerist, very much in the mold of Biden and Trump, who would do or say anything to get elected. I did not know a lot about Susan Rice, and was concerned about her limited experience, but based on what I knew, I would have been far more excited about Biden with her on the ticket. She seemed to be a genuine person, perhaps advantaged in that regard by her lack of years of cynical experience as a politician. Second, it seemed that Harris had been abusive, especially toward the poor, in her years as San Francisco District Attorney and California’s Attorney General. Here, again, I am not generally comfortable with The Federalist, but one of that website’s articles (Clark, 2020) draws on several liberal sources to support the impression that Harris is very likely to back the powerful and the privileged against the poor. I don’t have comparable material on Trump’s VP Mike Pence, nor interest in him, because it seems much less likely that he will ever be president.
Morality and Civility (Weight: 15. Points: Trump 5, Biden 10)
Politicians lie. That’s what we want. If we really cared about lying, we wouldn’t vote for people who do it, regardless of whether it comes in the form of Biden’s pandering to voters or Trump’s more bald-faced style. Politicians cheat as well; they care about winning more than they care about the country. This, too, is generally acceptable for American voters; when the only food left is a choice between rotten meat or rotten potatoes, we hold our noses and select one or the other. Within this narrow and distorted scope, voters are likely to conclude that Biden does a much better job of pretending to be what he’s not. It’s not that America is actually going to become a more moral place for political reasons. If its next generation does so, it will probably be, rather, for economic reasons: by becoming less available, money may become less corrupting. It’s just that Americans’ preferred view of themselves entails not being regularly and publicly besmirched by association with a president who open practices and endorses immorality in a variety of forms.
Trump has had his impact. He has sent his message. At this point, his presence — his coarseness, his ignorance, his corruption — seems likely to continue to influence the country negatively. It is time to return to the land of adult leadership. It is unfortunate that the Republican party missed the opportunity, presented by impeachment, to replace him with a serious candidate, capable of leading all Americans. Not that Pence would have been the ideal candidate for that, and presumably that was part of the impeachment calculation.
On the other hand, Trump’s mentality and behavior are ugly on many levels, but to some extent that has been priced into the current exchange: he’s not shocking anymore. “Shocking” has moved on to the increasing violence (see Law & Order) and aggression (see Extremism) displayed by radical progressives on all levels. If you can make Trump look stable and reassuring, you are definitely doing something wrong.
The Trump administration — explicitly, and by its very existence — has encouraged rethinking of Obama’s years in office. When Trump replaced Obama, you’d have thought Satan was replacing God. There were mass protests absurdly declaring that Trump was “Not My President!” More recently, however, it appears that even some on the Left are less inclined to believe that everything about Obama’s administration was wonderful. I, personally, don’t think Obama’s administration was nearly as corrupt as Trump’s — even though I did wait eight years, in vain, for his Department of Education to render an honest opinion on my appeal of its initial corrupt decision of my case. But, despite efforts, I’ve also gotten nothing from Trump’s DoE.
Immigration (Weight: 10. Points: Trump 10, Biden 0)
I am not fond of the idea of admitting millions of additional immigrants into the U.S. My primary concern is that the U.S. has far too many people, and should be working toward significant population reduction. One reason is that people consume resources and produce waste. The world cannot support its present population without continued catastrophic environmental consequences. Another reason is that it seems to me, pending research, that lower population entails lower stress and more friendliness. On that level, I don’t care where the immigrants come from; they just need to stay there, and add to the pressure to reduce population there. I don’t blame people for wanting to come here. This country is a lot better than a lot of other places. But if the U.S. wants to spend money on making life better for immigrants, it should focus on long-term constructive humanitarian programs (as distinct from short-term fixes that solve nothing) in their home countries. Another concern is that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries contribute to social fragmentation: too many of them persist, understandably, in their cultures of origin, rather than contribute to an America that all residents share. We cannot fix the world’s problems by bringing the world into the U.S.; we can only burden the U.S. with the world’s problems. I don’t know that Trump’s wall is the most brilliant concept — again, I haven’t studied it in any detail, though one brief sketch suggested that it might actually be cost-effective. I don’t think Biden necessarily opposes some form of immigration control; the problem here, as elsewhere, is that he will blow with the wind, whereas at least Trump draws a hard line. If the Democrats have an effective plan for immigration control, as distinct from open borders, it has not been publicized in the largely liberal press that provided most of my reading until this year.
The American System 