Contra Hanania On Trump

Neither candidate is ideal, but Harris is the better choice

Richard Hanania

has a new article out arguing that one should vote for Trump. I don’t disagree with a lot of the points he makes in the article; there’s a lot about a Harris administration that I find rather frightening (like the fact that she loves to describe that her administration will kill lots of people through pharmaceutical price controls). Nevertheless, I think Harris is the better candidate, and thought it would be worth spelling out why.

Hanania has two main arguments for Trump: the economy and personal freedom. He thinks that though a Republican administration would be, in various ways, vile and ignoble, they wouldn’t pass unnecessary, bureaucratic regulations, nor would they impose the sorts of severe lockdowns that made COVID disastrous and explain why I don’t know calculus. The Democrats, now seriously floating wage and price controls, will chill economic growth, while Trump, despite being bumbling and incompetent, has a general policy of not interfering with stuff too much.

I share the concern about the Democrats anti-growth policies. A little part of my soul dies everytime Harris endorses wage controls, or price controls, or anti price-gouging laws, or any of the other laws that would appear in a basic economics textbook, followed by a line like “although these sorts of policies are politically popular, when we consider what this would do to the marginal revenue product, it’s clearly disastrous.” If the president just passed economic policies, I’d seriously consider voting for Trump (though as I’ll argue later, the economic case for Trump isn’t as strong as Hanania makes it out to be).

However, I think other issues are more important than the economy. Three specific ones come to mind.

First, general competence. While Trump might sometimes have good policies, he’s a loose cannon—a crazy person. He is, by my estimation, far more likely to crazily start a nuclear war than Harris because he’s erratic. By his own admission (and to be clear, I think he’s probably lying about this, but it’s still alarming), we were close during 2017 to a nuclear war with North Korea.

I’d rather have someone competent in power even if they have the wrong views than someone incompetent, erratic, and crazy. Just look at Trump’s Truth Social feed, and it’s quite clear: we’re dealing with someone bizarre and erratic (and very old—he’ll be, at the end of his term, older than Biden is now). Here’s his most recent message (Tweet? Truth?)

Having well-run institutions is unbelievably important and Harris will do that better than Trump. America is great because of our well-run and functional institutions—institutions that Trump undermines constantly and eggregiously. His quite flagrant attempt to overturn the election is only the most obvious example.

I think it’s unlikely, though not totally out of the question, that Trump would fraudulently attempt to go for a third term—I’d give it maybe 5% probability. But the fact that he’s the sort of person to make a coordinated effort to overturn a fair election is extremely alarming—it means he’s a frightening candidate and might do other similarly bad things. While I don’t expect him to try to become a dictator, the fact that he’s the sort of person who has perhaps a 1% chance of making a concerted effort to become dictator is completely disqualifying for being president. I could quite easily imagine Trump, at the end of his term, declaring a national emergency and trying to hold on to power, and while this is unlikely, it’s certainly possible. If you gamble on the guy with a 1% chance of overturning Democracy or being a dictator 100 times, you end up with a dictator!

Second, Trump is worse on existential risks. While Hanania describes the badness of locking down schools, I’d trust a Harris administration much more than a Trump administration in the event of a pandemic. Global pandemics and AI are the biggest threats to the world, seriously risking ending advanced civilization. If a disease came along that was as deadly as ebola but as infectious as COVID, civilization would effectively end (and, frighteningly, terrorists might engineer biotechnology to do just that). Harris is far more likely to work on the sorts of international cooperation needed to fight against such a scheme, given Trump’s disastrous opposition to any sort of cooperation. As Belfield notes:

As part of a general withdrawal from developing world health systems and developing world disease monitoring systems, Trump withdrew CDC officials from a Wuhan lab, which could have provided a crucial early warning. He ignored the pandemic plan prepared by the Obama Administration, and did not write one of his own. Trump did not prevent the early spread of COVID-19 within the US, holding off on lockdown thus allowing it to spread unchecked for those crucial weeks and months. Trump withdrew from the World Health Organisation, and has refused to join the international effort to develop and distribute vaccines.

The risk of man-made pandemics has not been made significantly worse by the Trump administration. While I was worried that Trump was “less hesitant to use or develop biological weapons”, the law and norms around the use or development of biological weapons in the US seem to remain strong. However, the situation remains completely inadequate: the Biological Weapons Convention has a staff of four and a smaller budget than an average McDonalds restaurant. The norms against chemical weapons have been weakened, with the Russian Novichok attacks in the UK in 2018 and on Russia’s leading opposition politician in 2020. 

Similar things are true regarding AI. AI is a major threat to security—one Harris supports regulating. Ask yourself: who is more likely to ratify a major treaty that reduces AI risk between Trump and Harris. The answer is obvious—particularly given Trump’s poor record on arms control treaties.

Third, Trump is worse on the main moral crisis of our time: factory farming. Harris is vegan before 6 pm and has a better record than Trump on enforcing animal welfare laws. Wayne Hsiung notes:

Enforcement and regulation. The primary direct impact of the President on animal protection is via enforcement and regulation of federal laws. While the PACT Act of 2019 made headlines, it is far less important than other laws, such as the Humane Slaughter Act (HSA) or the Animal Welfare Act (AWA), that impact the lives of billions of animals. And in this regard, Trump was a disaster. Enforcement of the AWA plummeted in his administration, and he gave corporate factory farms the ok to engage in unlawful high-speed slaughter. Trump also pushed bizarre interpretations of existing law, such as defining “outdoor access” under the federal organic program as including industrial sheds with tiny porches where the animals never actually step outside. While the Biden administration did nothing special in this area – and Harris has not indicated how she might differ from her former boss – doing “nothing special” is better than what Trump did. This is a clear win for Harris. 

Impacts on state policy and law. The President, through various discretionary programs and legal intervention, can have a significant impact on the animal rights movement in states across the nation. This was made most evident by the Biden administration’s efforts to strike down Proposition 12, the California ballot initiative that banned certain forms of intensive confinement. Biden argued that California had “no legitimate interest” in preventing mother pigs from being tortured in gestation crates, and his lone Supreme Court appointee, Kentanji Brown Jackson, agreed with this analysis. (It took three conservative justices to save the law.) Trump apparently has made no statements on the law, which was passed by California voters in 2018 when he was President. This is an area, however, where Vice President Harris is likely to be better than Biden. As attorney general of California, Harris defended two farm animal cruelty laws from similar challenges. Harris therefore gets the slight edge. While she was part of an administration that shamefully tried to keep pigs trapped in crates, she took a different course of action when she was the boss. 

More importantly, a Trump administration is far likelier to pass a ban on lab grown meat, given the major Republican push for it. Given that factory farming is, as

Michael Huemer

argues (I’ve also argued this), the worst thing ever (this may sound silly, but it becomes more plausible when you realize it causes more suffering every few years than has existed in all of human history) a president who might shut down the main way of getting rid of it should never be supported.

Now, I think Trump probably won’t ban lab grown meat, but he’s likely enough to do so that it’s utterly disqualifying, in large part because of the conservative culture warriors staffing his administration. Additionally, even if he doesn’t implement a full ban, he’ll be less likely to subsidize lab meat, and more likely to be burdensome to the lab-grown meat industry. If, like me, you regard factory farming as akin to an ongoing holocaust of unprecedented proportions, then the candidate who is marginally better on the subject is much better.

What’s wrong with Hanania’s argument? I think fundamentally Hanania isn’t conservative enough. Trump may have various little edges over Harris based on better economic policy, but all of that is minuscule in importance compared to preserving the quality of our institutions. America is utterly kicking ass (except for factory farming, where we’re doing evil of a kind the Vlad the Impaler could only dream of)—I’d take the candidate who will keep things roughly the same over the one who might be a bit better but exacerbates risks of everything melting down. When you’re up by a lot, you don’t take risks.

I also care more about stopping the thing that causes more suffering every few years than has ever existed in history than I do about economic growth, so I think Harris is clearly the better candidate. Factory farming is one of the few issues where billions can be affected by even a fairly small change.

Richard thinks that Democrats are worse on personal freedom, but I disagree. Richard and I agree that making sure Euthanasia is legal is of vital importance—I regard that as a more significant personal freedom issue than lockdowns (making sure those who are slowly wasting away in excrement and constant agony can end their lives is unbelievably important). Similarly, as Richard notes, the Republicans are worse on immigration, which is the most major way the government restricts personal freedom. The Republicans support making it illegal for millions of people to non-coercively go from living in a poor and destitute country like Colombia or Mexico to living in America—one of the best countries in world history. While it’s a sizeable restriction in personal freedom to have to mask in schools, I’ll take masking over being forced to live in Mexico—in poverty, constantly exposed to violent gangs.

The Republicans also, as Richard notes, support banning abortion—that’s a major restriction on the personal freedom of many people. While I expect the federal government to be relatively inconsequential on abortion these days, it’s still a point in favor of Democrats. Republicans are also more likely to restrict freedoms in support of weird culture war fights than Democrats—especially when Walz is running on the slogan “mind your own damn business.” Now, of course, Walz’s statement is an act, but what a politician says tells you something about what they’re likely to do.

As for economic growth, this won’t determine my vote for several reasons. First, I think economic growth, while important, has a much less significant effect on quality of life than the other sorts of issues I’ve dissed. While earning more makes people better off, it’s not by much:

Second, Trump is opposed to free trade. The Democrats are also sometimes sort of opposed to free trade, but less than Trump—and less likely to get into GDP-shredding trade wars that cost maybe half a percent of GDP and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Trump’s tariffs were the worst kind of protectionism seen in decades, and he’s proposed massively scaling them up so that they replace the income tax, which is something that Milton Friedman had nightmares about.

Third, Trump is worse on immigration, as Hanania readily admits. But immigration is good for the economy. Nearly half of fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants or their children. Restrictive immigration costs many hundreds of thousands of jobs, and is especially devastating to foreign countries, for about a quarter of their GDPs come from foreign remittances. Innovation is the primary driver of long-term economic growth, and immigration is a key component of innovation. This means Republicans are bad for growth—especially in the long term. And that’s not even taking into account the vitally important economic function immigrants serve in helping keep social security solvent.

Fourth, I think it’s overall very unclear what effect a Harris administration will have vs a Trump administration on the economy overall. A lot of economic growth depends on complicated decisions done by the fed that only policy wonks understand. But Harris’s greater general competence might make her better on that than Trump. As Ezra Klein notes:

And the Biden team, they said they were going to run the economy hot, that at long last, they were going to prioritize full employment, and they did. And then inflation shot up. Not just here but in Europe, in Canada, pretty much everywhere. The pandemic had twisted global supply chains and then the economy had reopened, and people desperate to live again took their pandemic savings and spent. And the Biden team, in partnership with Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, got the rate of inflation back down, and we are still beneath 4 percent unemployment.

And I don’t want to just skip over that accomplishment. Most economists said that could not be done. The overwhelming consensus was we were headed for a recession, that the so-called soft landing was a fantasy. It got mocked as “immaculate disinflation.” But that is what happened. We didn’t have a recession. We are still seeing strong wage gains for the poorest Americans. Inequality is down. Growth is quick. America is far stronger economically right now than Europe, than Canada, than China. You want to be us.

Now, it’s hard to know who is better on the economy overall. But I think it’s at least extremely non-obvious, given the potential success of the Biden-Harris administration on averting a recession. This stuff is all above my paygrade—I’m just a simple bulldog, not equipped to do complex econometric analysis—but it makes it at the very least non-obvious who is better for the economy.

Fifth, I think a sound repudiation of Trumpism is good for the economy—most of all if you have Richard’s libertarian worldview. While Trump may be better for growth than Harris, he’s worse than, say, Romney. The quicker the Republican party can move away from economically disastrous populists that currently run it, the better. If Trump loses again, that will be a major blow to his form of populism. Yet Trumpian populism is bad for the economy—as the Guardian notes:

…having a populist leader hits a country’s GDP per capita and living standards by about 10% over 15 years as the economy turns inward, institutions are undermined and risks are taken with macroeconomic policy.

Even when it comes to the economy, I’m probably more scared of Trump than Harris. While I don’t like Harris’s support for government regulations, I think populist conservatism is generally a bigger threat to economic growth than standard Democratic policies.

This is why I’m voting for Harris. While I find her policies on many things frightening, and find her to be economically too far left, I think she’s much less dangerous than Trump and much better on the most important issues. The issues that Trump might be better on are generally hard to figure out and pretty non-obvious, while the ones Harris is better on, she’s clearly better on.

The one exception to this is pharmaceutical price controls. Those are a disaster—one of the worst things a president has done in my lifetime, near as bad as the Iraq war. In another election, I’d like to be a single issue voter for not passing pharmaceutical price controls. But in this election, I can’t afford to be—too much is at stake.