Under Mr. Trump, expect me-me-me, mockery and misogyny. Under Ms. Harris, climate craziness, wokey woo-woo and pronoun patrols. I don’t like either scenario.
Mr. Trump says if he wins, there’ll be mass deportations. Believe him. Detention centers will be constructed, which the press will immediately compare to Nazi camps. It won’t be pretty. Add tariffs and a lower dollar in a misguided effort to help U.S. manufacturing. Prices will go up.
Ms. Harris says she’ll give money away in the form of tax credits, home subsidies and higher minimum wages. Believe her. Prices will go up. In 2026 maybe we’ll see a rebranding of the Dollar Store to the Five Dollar Store. The stock market may swoon on larger federal deficits.
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Economic illiteracy is bipartisan. Ms. Harris says she will “advance the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries.” Price controls lead to empty shelves—ask the Soviets. Mr. Trump suggests of the U.S. debt, “Maybe we’ll pay off the $35 trillion dollars in crypto. I’ll write on a little piece of paper, ‘$35 trillion crypto, we have no debt.’ That’s what I like.” Dumb and dumber.
And George Will writes that “voters face the worst presidential choice in U.S. history.” Three slices:
Of this mercifully truncated presidential campaign we may say what Samuel Johnson said of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: No one ever wished it longer. Why prolong this incineration of the nation’s dignity?
Donald Trump, a volcano of stray thoughts and tantrums, is painfully well known. There is nothing to know about Kamala Harris, other than this: Her versatility of conviction means that she might shed her new catechism as blithely as she acquired its progressive predecessor.
The Democratic Party’s reckless disingenuousness regarding the president’s frailty persisted until, in 90 June minutes, the truth became public. Then, with the nimbleness of those without the ballast of seriousness about anything other than hoarding power, his party foisted on the electorate a Play-Doh candidate. Her manipulators made her malleability into her platform. Prudence is a virtue, so do not fault her handlers for mostly shielding her from public interactions more challenging than interviews with grammar school newspapers.
Her sole notable decision as a candidate has been the choice of a running mate whose self-description (“knucklehead”) is more astute than his flippancies about serious matters (the electoral college is icky, socialism is “neighborliness,” etc.) and his self-celebratory fictions about his past. Tim Walz’s achievement during his pirouette in the spotlight has been to make his counterpart, JD Vance, resemble Aristotle.
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Trump and Harris are, however, crystal clear and completely agreed about the national debt, which increased $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30: They promise to do nothing about the main problem, entitlement (Social Security, Medicare) spending.
When Trump said “no tax on tips,” Harris, perhaps admiring the artful pander, said: Me, too! They also agree on repealing one of his good presidential deeds — the cap on deductions of state and local taxes from federal income tax liabilities. This would be a tax cut disproportionately for high-earners in high-tax blue states.
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Amazingly, although both candidates have constantly caused normal people to wince, neither’s voice has been the most embarrassing this year. That award goes to the Idaho Republican who, in a public forum, told a Native American to “go back where you came from.” Let’s do go back to where we come from: the nation’s founding of a limited government.
John Tierney asks: “Who’s the fascist?” Two slices:
Fascism is now routinely used to describe conservatives, but that’s only because of what Tom Wolfe called “the greatest hoax of modern history.” The original fascists were leftists. Benito Mussolini started his political career in the Italian Socialist Party, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis took their name from “National Socialists.” Unlike their Communist rivals on the Left, those dictators didn’t directly seize the means of production, but they believed that a strong central government should direct the economy and the rest of society: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” in Mussolini’s words.
Mussolini’s principles and policies were widely admired and emulated by progressives in America during the 1920s, and the underlying philosophy—a society planned and regulated by “experts”—is still shared by today’s progressives, as Jonah Goldberg showed in his 2008 book, Liberal Fascism. But after the horrors of the Holocaust, progressives rewrote history by reclassifying fascism as a right-wing movement. Since then, they have deployed the term against every Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan—including, of course, Donald Trump.
It’s true that Trump often sounds like an authoritarian, particularly when he’s misquoted by the legacy media (like the recent false accusation that he vowed to unleash the military on his political enemies). Democrats were appalled by his statements during the 2016 campaign about locking up Hillary Clinton, but his Department of Justice (unlike Joe Biden’s) didn’t actually try to imprison his political opponent. How does his record on authoritarianism compare with his rhetoric—and how does it compare with Kamala Harris’s record?
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Trump’s greatest power grab occurred during the pandemic, which saw the imposition of the most authoritarian measures in American history. Unprecedented restrictions of individual liberty caused massive social and economic damage. Technically, the lockdowns and most other restrictions in 2020 were the doings of state governors, not Trump, but the governors were responding to pressure from his administration. Though Trump himself soon began calling for the lockdowns to end and for schools to reopen, the White House officials overseeing his Covid policies, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, continued successfully pressuring governors to extend the restrictions. Trump did have the good sense to consult with scientists critical of the restrictions—notably Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, the lone dissident on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, who advised him to overrule Birx and Fauci. But Trump and his political team feared taking such action in an election year.
Atlas and others (including the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025) have urged the next president to make sweeping reforms in the federal health bureaucracy to prevent it from repeating its disastrous mistakes during the next pandemic. Atlas says he is confident that Trump recognizes the mistakes and would be eager to make the reforms. But Harris seems an unlikely reformer. She and Biden have continued to insist that the pandemic restrictions were necessary.
Juliette Sellgren and Samuel Gregg discuss industrial policy and national security.
With GMU Econ alum Caleb Brown, Eric Mack discusses Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
