A few weeks ago, I explored the third-party candidates on Vermont’s presidential ballot in 2024. I talked about why all Americans need access to ranked-choice voting to overcome the “lesser of two evils” reason for voting. Finally, I wrote that if I had that access to ranked-choice voting, I would rank Dr. Cornel West as my first choice for president, Claudia De La Cruz as my second choice, and Kamala Harris as my third choice.
Former President Trump would not make my list. This post explains why.
Let’s ignore the obvious reasons.
We’ll ignore that former President Trump is a felon convicted of fraud. We’ll ignore that a civil court holds him liable for rape, that he has boasted of how his celebrity allows him to be a sexual predator, that circumstantial evidence suggests he (along with many other rich men) engaged in sexual intercourse with child victims of human trafficking, and that he cheated on his wife four months after she gave birth to their son (and later paid the woman $130,000 in an illegal campaign contribution to not tell anyone about the tryst).
We’ll overlook that he is currently under indictment for racketeering and conspiracy because he and 18 allies “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” nor will we point out his attempt to blackmail the president of Ukraine by threatening to withhold military aid unless the Ukrainian government went after his political opponent. We also won’t highlight his incitement of an insurrection against the United States on January 6, 2020.
We’ll ignore the 30,573 false or misleading statements he made during his years in office (not to mention the legion of lies he’s told since), his obvious narcissism, and his plain desire to enrich himself through his occupancy of the White House. Let’s forget that he is perhaps the worst possible role model for our children and citizenry, and that a clear case can be made that he seeks to become a strong-man dictator with carte blanche immunity for his actions rather than a democratically elected leader who understands that no citizen ought to be above the law. Finally, let’s ignore that, unless he wins the presidency, former President Trump may end his days in jail.
In short — I want to ignore former President Trump’s character entirely. Americans already believe that politicians are liars and cheats who are only in it for themselves and their cronies, so why should they care that former President Trump is more blatant about it?
I want to ignore former President Trump’s character entirely.
As Americans, we’ve been raised in a culture that values extrinsic success: wealth, attractive sexual partners, power, and fame — and former President Trump appears to have all four. He shits on a golden toilet (mythologically speaking), dates models (and sometimes marries them), has sex with porn stars, dominates Republican politics with an army of loyal underlings, fires people on “reality TV” in a conspicuous (if ultimately false) display of power, and has been famous for nearly fifty years.
To many Americans, former President Trump is the ultimate “winner” of life, and because, as Americans, we’ve been taught to value winners over losers, millions of Americans believe our best chance to have a successful future is to elect the ultimate winner to be our ultimate leader. For these Americans, former President Trump’s “winning” character is the reason to vote for him, regardless of how much he lies, how corrupt he is, or how devoid of empathy (which is a woman’s emotion, anyway).
So I want to ignore his character. Instead, I want to focus on what former President Trump wants to accomplish during his second term.
Let’s Also Ignore Project 2025
Should former President Trump win in November, he will most likely use Project 2025 as a guidepost for his “presidential transition project.” Developed by the Heritage Foundation, the project outlines policies to “abolish the Deep State and return government to the people.”
While I believe most (if not all) of Project 2025’s policy recommendations will be put into practice should former President Trump win the Electoral College in November, and while it’s a fact that Project 2025 was organized and contributed to by 31 members of the Trump Administration, former President Trump has disavowed Project 2025 and USA Today rates as false any claims that Project 2025 is a playbook for a future Trump Administration.
It is, instead, simply “a series of recommendations for the next conservative president,” no more influential than the policy recommendations put out by liberal special-interest groups and writers (if you’re interested in a liberal version of Project 2025, perhaps look at President Biden’s Build Back Better Framework from 2021?).
So, ignoring the fact that he is a liar, let’s take former President Trump at his word and assume my concerns with Project 2025’s policy suggestions are not valid reasons to withhold my vote.
Former President Trump’s Actual Plan for America
At its convention in July, the Republican Party adopted, almost by hostile force, its first party platform since 2016. “Delegates were handed what they were told was a draft [of the platform] on Monday [and after] roughly two hours and no amendments considered, the draft was ratified in full.”
The draft was written in Mar-A-Lago, with the former president “himself dictat[ing] edits over the phone, including on a late-night phone call in the final days that resulted in a doubling of the number of party principles from 10 to 20.”
You can read the platform online, but here are the main principles (in all caps, as former President Trump intended):
- DEFEAT INFLATION, AND QUICKLY BRING DOWN ALL PRICES
- SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION
- BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY
- BRING BACK THE AMERICAN DREAM AND MAKE IT AFFORDABLE AGAIN FOR FAMILIES, YOUNG PEOPLE, AND EVERYONE
- PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS AND FARMERS FROM UNFAIR TRADE
- PROTECT SENIORS
- CULTIVATE GREAT K-12 SCHOOLS LEADING TO GREAT JOBS AND GREAT LIVES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
- BRING COMMON SENSE TO OUR GOVERNMENT AND RENEW THE PILLARS OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
- GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE PEOPLE
- RETURN TO PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH
(Please note: The introduction to the platform offers twenty principles, but the platform itself is broken into 10 chapters; the chapter headings are above.)
My Issues with former President Trump’s Actual Agenda
If you dig into the platform, each of the ten principles has about five or six points beneath it. Each point gets a couple of sentences in explanation, but those explanations reveal, for the most part, the lies and misunderstandings that motivate the entire mess.
I should also note that this blog post rivals the length of the entire Republican platform, which is basically a PowerPoint.
His “Solutions” to Inflation
To “defeat inflation, and quickly bring down all prices,” the Republicans think stopping illegal immigration will help. According to the Republicans, illegal immigration has “driven up the cost of Housing, Education, and Healthcare for American families,” and by securing the border, deporting illegal immigrants, and reversing “Open Borders Policies,” a new Trump Administration will reduce inflation and bring down all prices.
But in reality, Vice-Presidential hopeful, J.D. Vance, had the opportunity to ask the Federal Reserve Chair if immigration had any impact on inflation, and the Fed Chair responded, “There’s no clear answer, but my sense is that in the long run, immigration is kind of neutral on inflation; in the short run [it] may actually have helped because the labor market got looser. [In housing specifically], there are places in the country where [immigration] may have contributed to an already tight housing market, but overall, in terms of aggregate inflation, I wouldn’t say it’s a driver one way or the other.”
Another solution a future Trump Administration proposes on inflation is to “Unleash American Energy.” The Republicans argue that inflation is related to energy restrictions, which ignores the reality that, under President Biden, the U.S. has continued to increase the oil production begun under former President Trump. While price shocks at the gas pump may seem to contribute to inflation, “contrary to popular belief, the surge in US inflation in 2021 and 2022 was not primarily caused by energy price shocks.“
A third solution to inflation—”Rein in Wasteful Federal Spending”—seems to speak to the actual cause of the inflation, but in reality, it does not. While MIT Sloan found that federal spending contributed the lion’s share to the burst of inflation in 2022, the spending was not “non-defense discretionary spending” (NDD) but rather the economic stimulus packages the Biden Administration passed during the COVID-19 pandemic, stimuli intended to prevent the outbreak of another Great Depression. And at this point, virtually all of the stimulus money has been spent, so there’s nothing left to cut that would contribute to a decrease in inflation.
Unfortunately, the Republican platform does not specify what wasteful spending they’d like to “slash,” so voters are left to imagine what they mean. We’ve been told not to look at the policy recommendations of Project 2025 as a guide, so our best bet is to revisit the last budget cuts the Trump Administration proposed to Congress, which, we should note, arrived prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In that proposal, the Trump Administration requested $1.6 billion in cuts to NDD, including Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, SNAP (formerly food stamps), and other low-income programs (SSI, TANF, SSBG, child care, etc.). The proposal would have cut programs that support low- and moderate-income families by nearly 40% over ten years.
It reduced the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 28%, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget by 17%, the Department of Transportation’s budget by 15%, and the Department of Health and Human Services by 11%.
If enacted, these cuts would have stolen healthcare from millions of Americans, made it harder for struggling families to feed their children, and slashed funding for public housing and housing assistance.
As a member of the generation who learned the art of politics from The West Wing, I believe government ought to be an instrument for good. I think our taxes should go to bread, not bombs, and it should harness the national wealth to ensure no child goes hungry, no head goes without a roof, and no sick person is denied quality care. The spending the Republicans hope to slash is the spending I believe our government should prioritize.
In this one goal and its proposed solutions, you can find many of the reasons I believe people should not vote for former President Trump in November. While his platitude-like goals may be palatable to a significant number of Americans (who doesn’t want to “quickly bring down all prices”?), his proposed solutions are disconnected from reality.
You can extrapolate this general critique to his whole agenda.
His “Solutions” to Illegal Immigration
If Americans know one thing about former President Trump’s policy priorities, they know he’s against immigration at the southern border (“Build the wall!, Build the wall!”). But the difference between what he says and what he does is too big to ignore.
His second policy goal, “SEAL THE BORDER, AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION,” includes a six point plan, the first of which is to “secure the border.”
The first thing to note is that former President Trump and the Republicans in Congress do not actually care about the border crisis. If they did, they would have supported and passed the bipartisan border security bill back in May. Instead, the Republicans decided they needed the controversy for a campaign issue and filibustered it. They took this action on behalf of former President Trump.
Second, the characterization of the border crisis as an invasion is not just conceptually false (armies invade; individuals immigrate), but factually false. According to the latest report from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “U.S. Border Patrol encounters in July were 32% lower than in June 2024 and were the lowest monthly total along the southwest border since September 2020. July’s total numbers between ports of entry are also lower than July 2019, and lower than the monthly average for all of 2019.”
The report continues: “CBP…caught more fentanyl nationwide between the start of fiscal year 2023 through July 31, 2024, than in the previous five fiscal years combined.”
Is the border perfectly secure? Of course not. But I think it’s important to compare the Trump and Biden Administration’s actual actions on the border, and not just their rhetoric. The differences are less about the enforcement of existing border laws and more about enforcing the laws with dignity and humanity.
I prefer politicians who respect the dignity of all human beings, regardless of their citizenship status.
The second “solution” former President Trump proposes is the mundane sounding “enforce immigration laws.”
According to the CATO Institute, former “President Trump reduced legal immigration. He did not reduce illegal immigration.” The report from CATO continues, “Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement.” By the end of his administration, “the removal of illegal immigrants from the interior of the United States was the lowest as an absolute number and as a share of the illegal immigration population since ICE was created in 2003… As a result, the population of illegal immigrants remained about the same as when he took office.”
In 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency by attacking immigration. He told American’s “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
It’s true that President Trump attempted to build the wall, and that, in fact, the courts forced President Biden to continue building some of it. But Mexico did not pay for it, nor did it prevent smugglers from overcoming it.
He said it would cost $8 billion for 1,000 miles worth of wall (and after all, “nobody builds walls better than me, believe me”). But after four years, we ended up with a wall that was less than half the distance for nearly twice the cost — 450 miles for $15 billion.
So, he might say he’ll enforce our laws, but the last time he had the opportunity, he completely failed, and what’s more, the reason he failed was because he was focused on building a wall, a project that also ultimately failed.
Another “solution” that former President Trump proposes is to “begin the largest deportation program in American history.”
The last time former President Trump discussed the plans for his deportation program, he pointed to the racist-named Operation Wetback as his model. Operation Wetback was a program launched under President Eisenhower in the 1950s to rid the country of Mexican immigrants (some of whom were American citizens) and many of whom were invited to the country in the 1940s as part of a deal with Mexico.
A former Commissioner of the U.S Immigration and Naturalization Service said about Operation Wetback, “[it] was lawless; it was arbitrary; it was based on a lot of xenophobia, and it resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens.”
Outside of the moral question of modeling your policy ideas on “sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights,” there’s also the question of whether a Trump Administration could pull it off.
Back in 2016, the largest number of deportations in a single year was under President Obama in 2013, when his administration deported more than 438,000 people. President Trump’s highest number was 337,287.
During his one term, President Trump promised to deport 11,000,000 unauthorized immigrants. In reality, “the Trump administration deported only slightly more than one-third as many unauthorized immigrants from the interior during its first four fiscal years than did the Obama administration during the same timeframe.”
The fourth solution to “the migrant invasion” will be “strict vetting.”
Allow me to quote the platform because it sounds like it came from Joe McCarthy’s mouth: a Trump Administration will “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America. Those who join our Country must love our Country.”
That’s right, his strict vetting program prioritizes Marxists ahead of “jihadists.”
Should someone tell the former President that Congress includes several socialists who love this country, including Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and that, as of 2019, four in ten Americans embraced some form of socialism?
Obviously, the United States of America is (in its ideal) a representative democracy whose founding documents do not support or reject capitalism or socialism (mostly because those concepts weren’t really around yet), and it makes no sense to vet legally documented immigrants based on their preferred economic model.
But the larger point is that, once again, a future Trump Administration envisions a “solution” that simply does not connect to reality.
I could go on and on and on…
But what it comes down to is that, even if we ignore former President Trump’s (lack of) character and the draconian policy recommendation of Project 2025, the problems and solutions that a future Trump Administration says it will prioritize would turn the United States of America into a version of itself that greatly offends me, my wife, my child, my immigrant and veteran ancestors, and the sacred principles that found our grand experiment as a nation.
I encourage you to read the official Republican platform for yourself, do your research, and decide if the candidate who crafted those solutions is the leader you prefer.
Of course, don’t forget to consider that the candidate is a convicted felon, but hey, you do you.