Please Do Not Vote for Donald Trump

Pretty insane that one has to keep saying this!

It is a longstanding tradition — one, that goodness, has now gone on for more than eight years — that, in an even-numbered election year, I write an electoral endorsement post. Here’s 2016, and here’s 2018, and here’s 2020, and here’s 2022. This year, during a time when there is nothing most people want to talk about less right now than politics, I have decided to write two.

The first, today’s, will attempt to grapple, hopefully one last time, with the Trump era. Next week’s will be an endorsement of his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. In a race this close, I find it inadequate to simply argue why one should vote against Trump; it’s important to make what I believe to be a compelling case specifically for her as well. So next week: Her. This week: Him.

When Donald Trump won the Presidential election (but of course not the popular vote) in 2016, the one thing everyone seemed to agree upon — including, it turned out, Trump himself — is that it felt like an accident. I remember attending a school event the Monday before Election Day back then, and even Republican friends (who, I suspect, ended up voting for him anyway) were openly mocking the notion that he could possibly win. His victory felt, when you took a bird’s eye view of it, like an absurd, unrepeatable set of circumstances: A historically unpopular opponent, a last-minute surprise in the release of the Comey memo, Hillary Clinton’s decision not to actively campaign in Wisconsin (and her particular struggles in the Upper Midwest and Pennsylvania), people voting for Trump out of protest but never thinking he would actually win, and (perhaps mostly) widespread complacency resulting in a lack of engagement and passion from the incumbent party that never seriously thought it could lose. Trump did win the Electoral College, but he still lost by nearly three million votes, in an election in which only 55 percent of Americans actually bothered to vote, the lowest turnout in 20 years. You could almost persuade yourself that this wasn’t supposed to be happen, that it was a black swan event that it would unfortunately take four years to correct, particularly as his chaotic and, do not forget, entirely terrifying Presidency unfolded under forever-plummeting approval ratings.