I’m Voting For Joy

I’m voting for Kamala Harris, and you should, too.

First, the giant orange elephant in the room: Yes, a big reason to vote Harris, maybe the biggest for many people, is that she’s not Trump. Which is fine! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with voting against a horrible candidate, and Trump was one of our worst presidents.¹

Orange Man IS Very Bad

Start with Trump’s long record of boorish behavior, from saying he liked to grab women “by the pussy” because, as a celebrity, they’d let him, to his contempt for military men like Senator John McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” McCain spent five years tortured in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Trump got out of the Vietnam draft by claiming to have bone spurs in his feet.

Trump’s attack on McCain is typical of his special scorn for America’s military. He’s referred to soldiers who died in World War Two as “losers” and “suckers.”

On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former President George H. W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.

Just this August, he was chastised for showing disrespect to Medal of Honor recipients. At an event where Miriam Adelson was receiving the Medal of Freedom, Trump opined that the Medal of Freedom was “much better” than the Medal of Honor because the recipients of the latter were “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”

Trump’s defenders claimed he was just joking around, but it’s not normal for an American president to joke about dead American heroes.

Veterans of Foreign Wars Commander-in-Chief Al Lipphardt, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, was not amused.

When a candidate to serve as our military’s commander-in-chief so brazenly dismisses the valor and reverence symbolized by the Medal of Honor and those who have earned it, I must question whether they would discharge their responsibilities to our men and women in uniform with the seriousness and discernment necessary for such a powerful position.

Alfred “Al” Lipphardt

Or take his behavior as president. Trump’s brain accumulates random bits of trivia—he can talk at length about whale psychology or whether it’s better to be eaten by a shark or electrocuted—but he was notoriously uninterested in the actual work of the job. His staff learned to keep his daily memos short because Trump was too impatient to read long, detailed briefs about the business of the country he was running.

And while Mr. Obama liked policy option papers that were three to six single-spaced pages, council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps.

But if his name was mentioned in a policy paper, he’d read more of it.

National Security Council officials have strategically included Trump's name in "as many paragraphs as we can because he keeps reading if he's mentioned," according to one source, who relayed conversations he had with NSC officials.

In terms of actual policy, Trump was bad. He appointed the three Supreme Court judges who made overturning Roe vs. Wade possible, thus taking away abortion rights from millions of women. In addition, he appointed hundreds of lower court judges, which will make American legal rulings skew more conservatively for decades. He cut taxes on the rich, which helped to increase the deficit.

Worse, he abused the power of the presidency for his personal gain. Trump repeatedly threatened to use the FBI against his political opponents. He asked the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden in order to help his reelection campaign and then illegally withheld military aid to try and pressure them to do his bidding.

Seeing alliances as zero-sum quid pro quo relationships, Trump has repeatedly undercut America’s ties with its allies, including NATO.

“We were supporting NATO. They screw us on trade so bad, the European nations. And then on top of that, they were screwing us on the military. So they’re taking a tremendous advantage of us. It’s not sustainable. You can’t keep doing this.” 

Attempting to Break Democracy

This is the biggie.

The January 6 riot was not an isolated event. For the two months leading up to it, Trump engaged in relentless election denial. In fact, even before the election occurred, he was actively laying the groundwork to challenge any outcome in which he didn’t emerge victorious.

On Sept 23, 2020, he was asked whether he would “commit here today for a peaceful transfer of power after the November election.” He refused:

“We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”

During the Sept 29, 2020 debate, he said:

they’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They found ’em in creeks. They found some, with the name Trump, just happened to have the name Trump, just the other day in a wastepaper basket. They’re being sent all over the place. They sent two in a Democrat area. They sent out a thousand ballots. Everybody got two ballots. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen

…It’s a rigged election…

There was no good evidence to support these allegations. This Reuters article outlines the safety measures used to make sure voter fraud does not occur. The United States already has a long history of voting by mail without problems.

Five states - Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington - hold their elections primarily by mail and have documented almost no cases of cheating. Oregon, for instance, has sent out more than 100 million mail ballots since 2000 and reported around a dozen cases of proven fraud.

Calling into question the results of an election before it’s even taken place is not normal, and Trump did it repeatedly.

Denying Reality

Once all the votes were counted and it was determined that Biden had won (Saturday, November 7), Trump, with the help of unscrupulous lawyers, sought to overturn the results. They filed dozens of lawsuits. None succeeded. Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, told him he had lost. On Dec 1, Barr officially announced that…

the Justice Department had not found any evidence of fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Despite this, between November 7 and January 6, 2021, Trump made repeated references to fraud and a stolen election, feeding rampant paranoia among his supporters. He also tried to pressure swing state officials to try to flip the results and give him the presidency.

Pressured by Trump, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a Republican) ordered a full hand recount. The recount was finished on November 19, with Biden still winning Georgia. Trump requested a machine recount, which again left Biden the winner. On December 14, the official Democratic electors met and cast their 16 votes for Biden. That same day, 16 Republicans falsely declared themselves Georgia’s official electors, committing election fraud.

On January 2, Trump called Raffensperger and asked him to “find” the votes needed to give Trump a win.

“I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,”

“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” the president said during the call. “You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

That “big risk” implied threat was made while Trump was still president and in charge of the Justice Department.

In Arizona, similar pressure was put on Rusty Bowers, Arizona’s Speaker of the House (a Republican). On November 22, Trump and Rudolph Giuliani called Bowers and urged him to find evidence of fraud and then replace Arizona’s current slate of electors with a pro-Trump slate.

“I swore an oath to the Constitution,” Bowers said.

“Well, you know,” Giuliani said, “we’re all Republicans, and we need to be working together.”

“Mr. President,” Bowers said, “I campaigned for you. I voted for you. The policies you put in did a lot of good. But I will do nothing illegal for you.”

“We’re asking you to consider this,” Trump again told Bowers.

For his refusal, Bowers faced weeks of harassment by Trump loyalists.

Caravans of trucks climbed the road to Bowers’s house with pro-Trump flags and video panels and loudspeakers blasting to his neighbors that he was corrupt, a traitor, a pervert, a pedophile. His daughter Kacey, who had struggled with alcoholism, was now dying, and the mob outside the house upset her. [She died a few weeks later.] At one point, Bowers went out to face them and encountered a man in a Three Percenter T-shirt, with a semiautomatic pistol on his hip, screaming abuse. Bowers walked up close enough to grab the gun if the Three Percenter drew. “I see you brought your little pop gun,” he said. “You gonna shoot me? Yell all you want—don’t touch that gun.” He knew that it would take only one would-be patriot under the influence of hateful rhetoric to kill him. He would later tell the January 6 congressional committee: “The country is at a very delicate part where this veneer of civilization is thinner than my fingers pressed together.”

And it wasn’t just Republican bigwigs who faced pressure. On Dec 3, 2020, Rudy Giuliani posted a video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers, falsely saying they were cheating Trump as they counted votes. Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss received numerous threatening voicemail messages saying, among other things, that they should be hanged for treason.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss

Giuliani later lost a defamation lawsuit and now owes the women almost $150 million dollars (which he may not have).

In addition to pressuring state leaders and election workers, Trump’s allies, guided by Giuliani, John Eastman, and others, organized more slates of fake electors. Their goal was to replace the actual electors with their fakes. Key to this plan was pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the real electors and insist that the fake electors be counted instead. Constitutionally, it is the current Vice President who is supposed to certify the results of an election. Finally, the schemers believed there was the possibility that Pence could be convinced to declare the election completely corrupted, at which point it would be thrown to the House of Representatives to decide (which would have almost certainly led to a Trump victory).

While these maneuvers went on, Trump had spent two months rousing up his fans, using speeches and tweets, repeatedly telling them that they had been robbed. This all laid the groundwork for the January 6 Capitol riot.

January 6

A December 19 tweet from Trump set the fuse.

Trump supporters retweeted his viral message. Grassroots organizers rented buses. Individual Americans decided this was important enough to drive or fly to Washington. Extremist groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters also planned to be in Washington and hoped to do something to stop the steal.

On the afternoon of January 6, a few hundred thousand loyal fans gathered near the White House to listen to Trump. Within a few hours, the election was supposed to be certified at the Capitol building.

The intent of Trump’s speech remains controversial. Defenders say that he called for a peaceful protest, which he did a little bit:

I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

But his speech was filled with far more incendiary phrases, asking his supporters to “fight like hell.”

this year they rigged an election. They rigged it like they’ve never rigged an election before.

we’re going to have somebody in there that should not be in there and our country will be destroyed and we’re not going to stand for that.

Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

You will have an illegitimate president. That’s what you’ll have. And we can’t let that happen.

We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This was the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.

We must stop the steal and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.

And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.

There was also pressure on Mike Pence to “do the right thing” (meaning not certify the election results). Earlier that morning, Trump had spoken to Pence by phone: “You don’t have the courage to make a hard decision.” In his speech to the crowd, he kept up the arm-twisting on Pence.

I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so.

Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. All he has to do, all this is, this is from the number one, or certainly one of the top, Constitutional lawyers in our country. He has the absolute right to do it.

And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn’t, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution.

Even before Trump stopped speaking, the crowd had started heading toward the Capitol Building. Most of the crowd just had cell phones and MAGA hats, but the extremists had put together their own riot gear, including bear spray and plastic handcuffs. Someone hung a noose in front of the Capitol, and some in the crowd called for Mike Pence’s death. Many of them expected the election to be overturned that day.

Jensen [a Trump supporter] thought Pence would be the first to be arrested. When a friend texted to tell him that Pence had just “banged the gavel” to open the joint session, Jensen replied with photographs of Trump supporters streaming past the Washington Monument en route to the Capitol and a short message. — “That’s all about to change ;)”
— Washington Post

In the confused situation, the undermanned Capitol Police were unable to stop the crowd from reaching one side of the building and breaking inside. A much larger part of the crowd remained on the other side and—not realizing the building had been breached—repeatedly pushed against another group of police, screaming and pounding on them in attempts to break through. Inside, a minority of the rioters pushed through the halls in a surreal romp while the nation’s representatives scurried for safety. Some rioters yelled for the vice president to be arrested.

At 2:24 pm, while this was happening, Trump tweeted:

Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!

Shortly afterward, he tweeted a more soothing message, but the crowd didn’t seem to be reading their Twitter feeds.

Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

At 2:44, one rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was killed while trying to break through a door to access the House chamber. By 3 pm, rioters were in both the House and Senate chambers.

Various officials tried to reach Trump and get him to call the crowd off. At first, Trump, who was watching the riot unfold on television, ignored them. Finally, at 3:13 pm, facing pressure from his closest advisors, he issued a more forceful call for the rioters to stand down.

I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!

At 4:17, he issued a video call for the rioters to go home, adding, “We love you. You’re very special.”

Reinforcements gradually arrived (the Washington DC Police, FBI teams), and the crowd dispersed. Later that night, the 2020 election was finally certified. Trump had failed, but not for lack of trying.

Watch The New York Times’ video story of what happened.

For a good moment-by-moment overview, try this Washington Post multimedia piece.

No, the Democrats Were Not As Bad

At this point in any election discussion, someone usually chimes in that Democrats are just as bad. They’ll bring up Hilary Clinton and the 2016 election. Except Clinton conceded her 2016 loss the very next day. True, she said stupid things much later and even called Trump an “illegitimate” president, but she took no legal action, and her words had zero effect as Trump was already president by that time.

Obama, the sitting president, hosted Trump at the White House and carried out the usual procedure of helping a new president transition into the job. And yes, some whining Democrats called for “faithless” electors, but while this is bad, no actual action was taken. The scale of election denial in 2016, while bad, was a faint shadow of what went down from November 2020 to January 2021.

His Own People Say “No”

But don’t believe me about Trump; listen to the people who know him well. President Trump has been rejected by many of his own former staffers, starting with former Vice President Mike Pence.

“I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Can anything be more clear than that?

General John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff and also Secretary of Homeland Security, called Trump “an authoritarian” and said that he had praised “Hitler’s generals” for their “loyalty” (meaning loyalty to Hitler personally).

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”

On October 25, 2024, thirteen former Trump senior staffers issued an open letter backing up General Kelly’s accusations and condemning Trump.

Yesterday, General John Kelly –-a retired four-star general and Donald Trump's former White House Chiefof Staff- told the American people what those of us who served in the Trump Administration have seen up close: Donald Trump is increasingly unstable, unfit to serve, and his second term would be more dangerous.

In a second term, those who once tried to prevent Donald Trump from his worst impulses will no longer be there to rein him in. For the good of our country, our democracy, and our Constitution, we are asking you to listen closely and carefully to General Kelly's warning. We unfortunately know all too well how serious and dire it is

Many other officials have condemned Trump, including Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense.

“any elected leader needs to meet some basic criteria: they need to be able to put country over self, they need to have a certain amount of integrity and principle, they need to be able to reach across the aisle and bring people together and unite the country. Look, Donald Trump doesn’t meet those marks for me.”

These men and women were solid Republicans, people who had been in government for many years. They had acted as breaks on some of Trump’s worse impulses. Next time, if there is a next time, he’s made it clear he’ll pick more obedient guys. Like Hitler’s generals.

Here’s Trump on Joe Rogan:

TRUMP: The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people, I picked some great people, you know, but you don’t think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked, I picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked.

ROGAN: Neocons?

TRUMP: Yeah, neocons, or bad people, or disloyal people

So Why Kamala?

Ok, Trump is bad, but why vote for Harris?

Because she’s a typical mainstream Democrat. I’m not thrilled, but I’m also not appalled. Not being appalled is good! And she may surprise us. Harry Truman wasn’t seen as a great leader when he was chosen as vice president, but he rose to the challenge after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

I believe Harris will be a status-quo Democrat, just as she’s been her entire life in politics. In every job she’s held, she did what was expected. As district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California, she prosecuted crooks. Hardly a soft-on-crime progressive. As a senator, she had a liberal voting record, but she wasn’t a wild-eyed socialist. In 2019 and 2020, she echoed social justice ideas about “equity,” but this—despite what her critics have ridiculously claimed—does not make her a Marxist. She’s always been an establishment Democrat, and she’ll continue to advance establishment policies.

Immigration? She’s supported Biden’s increased crackdown on border crossings, which should satisfy some immigration concerns.

Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since 2020, according to new federal data obtained by CNN, as Republicans and Democrats spar over border security.
— CNN (Sept 30, 2024)

She’ll be far better than Trump on abortion. Roe vs. Wade was overturned (because of Trump-appointed judges), and a key policy goal of Harris is to protect women’s reproductive freedom as much as possible. From the Democratic Platform:

President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Democrats are committed to restoring the reproductive rights Trump ripped away. With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again. We will strengthen access to contraception so every woman who needs it is able to get and afford it. We will protect a woman’s right to access IVF.

She will continue to support Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression, as opposed to Trump’s stated goal of quickly making peace, which can only mean quickly surrendering to Putin’s demands.

Alongside our allies, the United States has rallied a coalition of approximately 50 nations to provide much needed security assistance to Ukraine and coordinated unprecedented international actions to impose tough sanctions on Russia and hold Putin accountable on the world stage.

She made clear in her convention speech that, unlike Trump, she will not denigrate America’s troops or leaders:

As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families, and I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

I worry a bit about her economic policies, but I worry more about Trump’s. Both of them are more willing to spend than save, and while I’m no economist, our national debt seems way too high.

Take a look at the CRFB (Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget) analysis of the Harris vs. Trump campaign plans. The analysts admit there is some guesswork here, but their mid-range approach has Harris adding 3.5 trillion to our debt while Trump adds 7.5 trillion. Again, I don’t like Harris’s approach, but I hate Trump’s!

And inflation? As of September, it’s back down to 2.4% per year, which is normal.

The Elevator Pitch: Vote Harris

Trump is a horrible choice. He was a lazy, inconsistent leader who pandered to whoever flattered him the most.

After his electoral defeat, he spent two months trying to overturn the results, even though election officials, many of them Republicans, assured him that he’d lost, as did his own attorney general. He ignored all of them, instead listening to enablers like Giuliani and Steve Bannon. He repeatedly claimed he’d been robbed, and his team pushed frivolous court cases and concocted a fake elector scheme.

Finally, he tried to intimidate Mike Pence into refusing to certify the vote and encouraged a violent mob to target the Capitol as a strong-arm tool—a mob whose anger had been stoked by Trump’s lies. And even after January 6, he still refused to admit that he lost, as he does to this day.

For all these reasons, even top Trump officials, starting with Pence, have said that he is unfit to be president of the United States.

The easy alternative is Kamala Harris, who, if she doesn’t inspire excitement, seems likely to be a normal leader. After a chaos-agent like Trump, conventional will be a relief. Harris will support America's allies and show respect to our military. She’ll try and advance a liberal policy agenda that won’t make Republicans happy, but it won’t involve toppling America’s democracy.

Do I think Trump, if elected, would try and become a dictator? Honestly, no. Ideologically, he’s not a fascist (I don’t think he has an ideology), and I have great faith in our democracy’s guardrails.² But I also know he has no loyalty except to his own massive ego. He wants to be king of the hill and will happily make corrupt choices if they seem likely to benefit him. Democratic norms are a vital, precious commodity, and they don’t disappear overnight; if they go, it’s after being worn down over time like water dripping on stone. Trump’s choices are likely to degrade those norms. He’s already said he would pardon the January 6 rioters who swarmed into the Capitol. The Constitution should never again be under the protection of this narcissistic blowhard.

The choice is between restoring stability or embracing chaos. Voting for Harris means choosing conventional politics and the preservation of democratic norms.

1. I put him at third worst, following James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, the racist bookends of the American Civil War.

2. And I could be wrong. Many smart people think Trump is more dangerous than I do, and there are times I worry that I’m being too complacent.