Voting Time

 For a good while this year I thought that Trump, bad as he was, should be reelected as the lesser evil. I have changed my mind for several reasons and now think the country will be better off with Trump gone.  (I still think he was less bad four years ago than Hillary Clinton.) The main reason is Trump himself.  He has been an arrogant, ignorant,  bullying, deeply un-presidential, bombastic,  jackass all along.  People hoped he would learn to behave decently  over  time. That has not happened, and he has continued to show he lacks the level of character, temperament, dignity, and knowledge minimally required for his office.  Now at a  time when political advisors surely are telling  to clean up his act and behave more nearly as an American president should if he wants to be reelected, he is getting worse.  He has refused to commit to an peaceful transition if he loses the election, tweeted that Osama is still alive, and President Obama had members of Seal Team Six murdered to cover that fact up, joked publicly about wanting a third or fourth term, told people who might want to dispute the results of the election in the streets to stand by, and at least sort of endorsed QAnon’s malicious nonsense.  It enough to make one wonder about the firmness of his grip on reality.

His proponents argue that one should overlook his character and personality because of his policies and actions. That can be reasonable  in judging among the usually sorry lot of politicians, but it goes only so far and for me not far enough to excuse Trump. Besides the policies and actions have not been consistently good.  Some  have been beneficial – lowering taxes, reducing or eliminating some harmful regulations, defeating ISIS, appointing better judges than Hillary would have, and favoring school choice, among others.  But he has been wrong on spending and deficits, wrong on international trade, wrong on NATO, wrong on freedom of the press, wrong on the value of immigrants, and troubling wrong in his disdain for limits on presidential power and his penchant for ruling by executive order and decree. To put it mildly, he is no principled friend of limited government. He has shown little evidence of principles of any sort, and there is no reason to believe his good actions in a second term would have to outweigh his bad.

Also the Democrats look less threatening than they did at the start of the year. The candidates of the  hard, authoritarian left did not win the party’s  nomination.  This does not mean that electing Biden will be a good thing apart from getting rid of Trump.  Biden is a dishonest, wrongheaded, big government Democrat who will do some bad and unpleasant things if he can, but he is not an America hating leftist.  He appears to have lost a step or two mentally but does not seem far enough gone that he will be the left’s puppet or that  Harris will  remove him using the 25^th Amendment.  The Dems are due for a turn in the White House soon anyway. It might make sense strategically for them to have it now when the Republican alternative is so poor,  the Democrat candidate is a likely one termer, and whoever wins in November probably will be bogged down for a year or two dealing with the epidemic and its consequences.  

I voted early, and I voted for Jo Jorgensen.