Election Conversation: fears and hopes for a Trump or Biden presidency
The U.S. presidential election is about six weeks away (the first of the debates will air tonight) and neither of us is optimistic that we will see the best of America during — or after — that time. The country is deeply divided and the political tension is as high as I can remember in my lifetime: more than any policy result, I hope for the peaceful transfer (or peaceful continuation, as the case may be) of presidential power.
But the election will have policy consequences too, and, continuing our conversational conceit, we plan to discuss them. What do we each fear and hope for from an upcoming Biden or Trump administration?
Jay: I’ll start by observing that Trump and Biden are very personally similar in terms of intellect, temperament, and personal and political integrity. And both represent broad popular movements, more than they personally embody any specific “presidential” qualities — no one would confuse either man with the actual best, or most capable, people in our country.
They also share a somewhat antagonistic relationship to their respective parties — Trump has not always gotten along well with the establishment GOP, and Biden seems to have won the nomination in part on the strength of his establishment credentials. So whereas a president Biden is expected to moderate the radicalism of the Democratic Party, President Trump has been in the reverse position, seeing his own radical ideas moderated (and occasionally resisted) by establishment Republicans (and the long list of terminated Cabinet officials is evidence of that tension). In any case, this election features candidates who act more like mascots than personal champions.
Samarth: I agree that they have a lot in common personally, and perhaps this contributes to their overall lack of popularity. But maybe we just live in an America where politicians are doomed to be unpopular no matter what. One big difference, at least on the personal side, is what I’ve seen from Biden in the last few months in reaction to the pandemic. He seems to be weighed down by the massive loss of life, the responsibility he feels for winning this election to do something about COVID. Trump, despite some reports of his private behavior with some of his close staff, has never been able to display that sort of empathy in public.
Who knows how much of a difference their personalities will make in what kinds of presidents they’ll be between 2020 and 2024.
Jay: So the personalities aren’t likely to make a huge difference in the conduct of their presidential terms — for me, the most important differences are in the policies their administrations are likely to pursue. And I feel better about a Trump administration kept in check by a relatively more responsible Republican party than I do about a Biden administration that is trying to rein in an ambitious Democratic Party.
But I’m not actually very excited about any potential Trump accomplishments. Despite some notable achievements (including tax reform, some decent Supreme Court appointments, a general trend toward deregulation, and some worthy foreign policy achievements out of a very mixed foreign policy bag), I don’t expect anything more than a continuation of the first Trump term. With mostly all the same good things and bad things. My motivation for supporting a second Trump administration (assuming I am so motivated, which I’m not sure about), would be almost entirely to avoid Democratic control of the federal government.
Samarth: it’s probably not a surprise that I’m not as afraid of a Democratic administration (full disclosure: I’m currently doing some consulting work for the Biden campaign), in the White House, Senate or House, or all three. The major policy priorities of Democrats: things like the Green New Deal, increasing taxes on the wealthy, ushering in the next phase of American economic growth and prioritizing wider distribution of wealth are all exciting for me.
To me, the biggest concern is COVID and our national reaction to it. That may seem a little short sighted but I think it is a once-in-a-lifetime threat that I have seen no evidence the Republicans or Trump administration are willing to face as such. Democrats, on the other hand, seem at least willing to try to take it head on. There’s no reason why we should have the rate of deaths that we do, the economic turmoil that we do. An abdication of responsibility at the federal level on this issue has been devastating for our country.
Jay: Interesting. I think that the policies you listed — Green New Deal, high taxes to pay for it, and redistribution — are important parts of the Democratic agenda, and I think they represent bad ideas that will lead to less economic growth, more corruption, and, on an environmental level, faddish and unserious responses to environmental degradation. But at the same time, while these would represent unfortunate policy moves, they aren’t world-shattering. They probably aren’t even a good enough reason to vote for Trump over Biden.
I’m much more concerned about the ambitions of a riled-up Democratic party. A hyper-confident left no longer believes in democracy, and sees the protection of political minorities (most significantly, through the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court) as wholly illegitimate. And while Biden has done a responsible job of projecting himself as a responsible person, many of his surrogates (including, and especially, his running mate) have advocated policies or endorsed movements that would likely tear the country apart. These include packing the Supreme Court, avoiding or dismantling the Electoral College, gun confiscation, reparations, racial quotas, and continued street protests.
And I’m really concerned: with the death of Ruth Badger Ginsburg, a Republican Senate is pretty likely to put a Trump nominee on the Supreme Court. While I think that a new Justice should be appointed whenever the President and the Senate can agree to do so, I understand that Democrats have taken a different view of the Supreme Court since the Merrick Garland fiasco, and it seems probable that popular anger over “losing” the Supreme Court (which will presumably have six conservative justices to three liberals) will push the Democrats toward a court-packing scheme that could start a civil war. And I don’t say that lightly or casually — unlike a legislative disappointment, like the Green New Deal, packing the Supreme Court would re-write the rules of the game in the middle of the game, to the clear advantage of one side. Court packing is so plainly short-sighted — when the GOP regains legislative power, obviously it would just re-pack the court in its favor — that it can only be justified by someone who counts on never losing power again. It seems like many on the left are failing to appreciate that the one hundred fifty year inter-party truce over legislative tinkering with the Supreme Court is likely a red line for conservatives.
The possibility of social strife worries me much more than Covid does — like the candidate’s personalities and temperament, the two sides’ Covid responses are much more alike than they are different. I don’t think either candidate, or either party, has seriously grappled with the social and economic consequences of the pandemic.
Trump downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak at first, but so did a lot of Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and Biden himself, who criticized Trump’s China travel-ban as xenophobic. In New York, Andrew Cuomo’s management of the outbreak has led to a death toll that would be among the worst in the world, if New York were a country (only about five countries in the entire world have seen more than NY’s thirty-two thousand Covid deaths). And I don’t remember Biden criticizing Cuomo too much or ever discussing, for example, how his approach would have differed from Cuomo’s. So even though Trump can’t be praised for his pandemic leadership, I’m not buying Biden as any kind of Covid savior either.
Samarth: In terms of Democratic moves to diminish the power of the Senate, Supreme Court and Electoral College, I agree with you, these are alarming tendencies that I’ve seen crop up on the left more and more in the last couple of years. To me, they seem like a reaction to a hyper-partisan, hyper-competitive environment, as Democrats see institutions like the Senate, maybe not in one-fell swoop like court packing would do, but as the result of decades of demographic shifts, give hugely lopsided power to rural areas. I feel some comfort in the fact that these approaches are not widely popular on the left, as a whole (although who knows what will happen now in the wake of RBG’s passing and attendant political movements), and that, as you said, the Biden administration seems committed to keeping the more educated, urban, younger members of the base at bay when they agitate for policy moves like this. It is notable, for example, that Biden became the nominee of the party and not Bernie, Harris or Warren.
In terms of democractic backsliding, a topic that came up at the end of our last conversation, in addition to these agitations on the left, there is much to be concerned about on the right, too. Multiple comparative reviews of democracies around the world have shown an abatement of demoratic freedoms and norms under the Trump administration, from attacks on the free press, to undermining electoral integrity, judicial independence, etc. Whether these kinds of violations of democratic norms or whatever new violations happen in the second term of a Trump administration or a new Biden presidency result in social unrest remains to be seen. But, again, I agree with you, the potential for social strife is very scary.
With regard to COVID: no one can claim to be a savior when it comes to this disease. The hand NYC (and subsequently basically every part of the country) was dealt, coupled with legitimate dithering, which we now know cost tens of thousands of lives in some cases, magical thinking, antagonistic public conversations, false dichotomies between saving people and saving the economy, and developing understanding over the 6 months that we’ve been dealing with the pandemic (moving from the primacy of washing your hands to wearing a mask, congregate outside in small groups safely, provide a safety net for “essential” workers who are most at risk, etc); I’m not sure anyone could say the US as a whole, or any particular city or state, has done a good job of handling the pandemic. I’ve been very frustrated to see this crisis, like everything in our country, fall prey to the same hyper-partisan, competitive, Red State, Blue State framework.
However, there is a big difference between the Biden campaign which is positioning itself as focused on dealing with the pandemic, helping states as needed (instead of letting them compete against one another), prioritizing systemic solutions, providing more relief to businesses and families who have been adversely affected and the Trump administration and Senate Republicans who have dragged their feet on mask wearing, aid packages, testing regimes, or even mourning the loss of 200,000 Americans. The pandemic was framed and treated as a sad thing that happened to some people during most of the Republican convention. A recurring line from the White House is that we’ve done a “phenomenal job” handling the pandemic. The Trump administration has been pushing back on scientific leaders who want to move our response strategy from individual, intuition-based action, or waiting for a miracle cure to come in and save the day, to a more layered, coordinated response that has a chance of helping abate a resurgence this winter.
There’s a stark divide on this issue, more than most. And this issue happens to be one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced as a country in living memory.
Jay: It is, as usual, pretty interesting that we have come to different perspectives here. To my mind, the Democrats totally abdicated any claim to seriousness when they created a lockdown-exemption for anti-racist protests, to the point that I haven’t even looked at or inquired into what Joe Biden might be planning for his administration — I am convinced he will listen to the politics no matter what happens. But you’re right that perceptions about a continuing Covid response are going to be an important factor for a lot of voters.
What about fear of more Trump? It’s easy to imagine that a lot of voters are exhausted by that man and the chaos he brings with him everywhere, and they would vote for anyone else just to get a break from Trump. I’m certainly sympathetic to that line of reasoning, if not enough to give my support to Biden. What about a second Trump administration worries you most?
Samarth: Honestly, it’s hard to differentiate what I personally think might happen in a second Trump administration, what has been painted in my head by political and mass media depictions, how much to use the last 4 years as a mold and how much COVID or mass movements like the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter represent true discontinuities in how things work. One thing I’ve learned in the last 10 years as a data scientist, predicting the future is incredibly difficult and almost no one should try to do it. Allow me to contradict myself immediately.
I’ve already outlined a bit about the differences in responses to COVID. In the immediate and middle term, I think those are among my top concerns. And, god forbid, another crisis like COVID arriving on the heels of this one would be devastating. I’ll also leave aside some of the more contentious areas like race, religion and gender discrimination, for now, since they can turn inflammatory very quickly. And more discussion about violations of democratic norms. And the big, looming problems around Climate change. I feel like those could take on their own, separate, long discussions.
Beyond that, my worries about a second Trump administration are that he and his team around him have shown little interest in actually leading the government not just attacking it. Which is a bizarre position when interviewing for the job of head of government. His time in office has been marked by turmoil, sowing divisions between his base and everyone else, and relatively little interest in the work of leading American democracy. Civil servants are demoralized in agencies around Washington, his staff write books that describe a dysfunctional White House, and for billing himself a great deal maker, he has been pretty unsuccessful at securing good deals (from North Korea, to nuclear disarmament, to government shutdowns).
The Trump campaign, for example, has shared a threadbare agenda for their second term and the Republican party, in a rare move, published no agenda, just support for the Trump administration. Even in the small details available there, things like increasing police budgets don’t really make sense in an era marked by low crime rates and cities asking for other resources, not more police.
On the international stage, Trump’s go-it-alone strategy has been destabilizing, in a time when authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. If much of our foreign policy attention should be focused on China, I don’t see how alienating our European allies (by, credibly, threatening to do things like withdraw from NATO and WTO) helps us achieve that goal.
Domestically, on healthcare, further abatement of Obamacare will cost millions of people access to their healthcare. To eat crow here, on behalf of the drafters of that legislation, it does seem that removing the individual mandate has not had a dramatic effect on the efficacy of Obamacare. I’m all for improving and finding better solutions to this problem, even if most of the evidence points to the idea that state run healthcare does nothing more than make healthcare cheaper for everyone. As a young, healthy person, who will some day consume more health care, and someone who cares about people in my life who consume health care, I think cheaper health care sounds good. Trump’s focus seems, squarely, focused on removing Obamacare not really on addressing the underlying financial strain that health care creates on millions of Americans every year.
Jay: I think the idea that Trump is “attacking the government” is an interesting claim, and a key to the highly polarized responses to his presidency. First, it’s highly ironic, given the mostly Democratic protests against police, who are the representatives of the government’s monopoly of force. It’s hard to imagine how “the government” can achieve any coercive policy goal — from gun confiscation to a nationwide mask mandate — without police enforcement to back it up. And more generally it’s interesting that Trump is perceived as attacking the government even as Democrats endorse the 1619 Project’s conception of the U.S. as founded solely to protect slavery and white supremacy — apparently calling the entire government systematically racist and illegitimate is less of an attack than asking federal Department of Agriculture employees to live in Kansas.
So whether or not “the government” is being attacked is a matter of perspective. If one conceives of “the government” as the lawful authority of the government, it is Democrats who have been attacking the government. Trump’s attacks, at their best, are usually directed at special interest groups that have become closely associated with the government. While our democratic government is supposed to be of, for, and by the people, it can create constituencies of its own through allocation of state resources — jobs, loans, grants, subsidies, contracts, etc. A recent Biden quote illustrates the dynamic: “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax.’ When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs.’” While neither man is actually responding to climate change, Biden would at least use the impending climate doom as an opportunity for patronage, promising to spend the government’s money on jobs for his supporters. Presumably, if someone attacked the existence of these jobs, it would be considered an attack against “the government,” regardless of whether or not the jobs were necessary or desirable for addressing climate issues.
This creates a situation where the business of government — i.e. dealing with environmental degradation, educating children, policing responsibly — is subordinated to allocating money to Democrats. This is the model that pays some MTA employees more than $230,000 a year to conduct a train that could be electronically operated for the cost of a computer program; that pays teachers in New York who have been accused of sexual misconduct to sit in a room and do nothing, since they can’t be trusted around kids and they can’t be fired; that allows police all over the country to negotiate their own rules of conduct and discipline in their own favor, so that even cops who literally hide during emergencies can’t be fired; and that needlessly ties health insurance to employment in a way that makes healthcare both more precarious and more expensive. It’s why our approach to climate change involves spending money on infrastructure rather than reducing consumption; why our approach to making healthcare affordable opted to force Americans to buy sophisticated financial products from billion-dollar companies rather than increasing the supply of health care professionals; and why we tried to expand college access by making it easy for young people to take on lots of student debt rather than working to make higher education less expensive.
Responding to and, frankly, destroying the power of these constituencies is one of the most important challenges of our times — we will never have, for example, the competent and compassionate policing that we all want as long as police can negotiate their working conditions against the wishes of elected officeholders. So to me, Trump’s “attacks on government” — to the extent they challenge rent seekers in government — are one of the most appealing features of his administration. And it is what makes his norm-breaking behavior as president both explainable (a person sufficiently committed to “normal” behavior is unlikely to challenge a sophisticated patronage machine that has substantially helped to develop those norms for its own benefit) and, very occasionally, virtuous and necessary.
Trump is still disturbingly irrational, narcissistic, and willful. But his administration has made important gains in deregulation, tax reform, filling the federal bench with textualist judges, and achieving full employment — as Senator Tim Scott noted at the Republican convention, Trump’s pre-Covid economy was the best economy for minorities in American history. And internationally, despite his unfortunate rhetorical style, the U.S. has pulled away from China (and its Nazi-level-evil government), stood up to Russia, and achieved an historic rapproachment between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Trump has made the EU and NATO nervous with his rhetoric, but they can handle it — in any case, the point of NATO is to protect U.S. interests in Europe from an imperial Russia. If Europe can protect itself, and if Germany is going to become dependent on Russian gas via a new pipeline deal with Putin, it’s fair to ask why the U.S. should continue footing the bill for Europe’s defense. All in all, that’s not too bad, and it’s far more than I expect from a Biden-Harris administration (or, as Biden calls it, a “Harris administration”).
Ultimately, though, these are bad choices — I still look forward to the day when, for the first time in my life, there is a presidential candidate I’m excited to vote for.
Is there anything else you want to say about either of the prospective presidents?
Samarth: I admit that “attacking” is an inflammatory way to put it, and probably a result of, as you said, his hyper polarized presidency. That’s what I was trying to refer to when I said it’s hard to know how much of these things are things I personally feel versus what’s been portrayed in mainstream coverage versus the reality that we might live in a different world than when we were growing up.
One of the things I find most exhausting about political discussions is the back and forth on “this side did this,” and “well, that side did that.” So I’ll try to forego that route for now. But your broader point, about reshaping the rent seeking, insider, nature of federal government and Trump’s interest in doing this, despite his other manifest flaws, makes sense to me. I’ve known that to be a big part of the priorities of Libertarian and some conservative voters. And I don’t think anyone could argue that bloat, inefficiency, political patronage or corruption have any place in a functioning modern country.
I just don’t get any indication that Trump is an effective person to do this. Given his background, any claim to being above corruption and skirting the rules wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. He is an outsider, yes, but one without a vision or strategy except provocation. He seems to have little regard for how or whether his changing of Washington from the inside has collateral costs for people. I’d love to fix the numerous ways in which the government is broken. But I think it should be done in a thoughtful, strategic, way, with concern for people who depend on services. Or with attention to counterfactuals like, “if we roll back protections in this area, what do we think will fill that hole?” It would be great to hear those kinds of rationales from Trump or other GOP leadership. Or just to have more counterfactual thinking in our public conversations.
It also remains to be seen if the rollbacks in regulation have had an overall positive effect. From what I can tell, they’ve been pretty disruptive (government shutdowns, airport protests, migrant detention, modest improvements in middle class incomes while corporate profits and share prices soar). Again, who knows what would happen in a future Biden administration but it would have to be paired with a Senate majority to even make any headway on the kinds of hopes I mentioned above (or the fears you mentioned). My biggest expectation, to be honest, is that not much will happen if Biden wins the presidency. But we might turn the temperature down a bit. And, at least in the short term, restore some competence in the government to address the COVID crisis.
I guess what I wonder is: if the patronage that you’re afraid of happening under a Biden administration is already happening with Trump but just toward private instead of public institutions, or different constituencies (sometimes his own family, in fact) is that much better? Maybe your answer will still be yes because public and private institutions work differently.
In terms of unsavory choices: I think we might be doomed, at least within our lifetimes, to always have to vote for unpopular candidates. The shape and nature of our political system, the relative efficacy of a fear or negativity based political strategy vs something more positive in turning out voters (or, conversely, turning them off), the nature of our media ecosystem, the benefits that corporate and private leaders see in letting this play out as it does while they do the work of shaping society quietly, out of the public eye; it all seems insurmountably racked in favor of an exhausting political process.
I’m remembering this now, after having felt it to some degree earlier in my life: politics may not be the best path to public service. In fact, it may be one of the worst. It’s too bad it matters so much.
Jay: I can’t emphasize enough that Trump is an unfortunate vehicle for reform of any kind — but it is important to me, as you guessed, that his corruption is personal, and thus private and temporary, rather than structural, and thus semi-permanent and public. But more generally, Trump’s personal inadequacy speaks to how poorly represented are the interests of the core Trump constituency among the political class — even if that interest is often to blindly and randomly challenge the conventional wisdom of our ruling classes: if they had a better spokesman, they would probably have voted for him. Neither party has recently made much space for new or unpopular views on immigration, racial issues, or the consequences of globalization. On the right, shutting down these conversations for too long resulted in Trump. And if Biden and the Democratic establishment lose this election (like Romney and the old GOP did in 2012), I imagine we might see an angry and too-long-ignored populist left put forward their own unfortunate champion for 2024.
At least we agree on pessimism!
Before we wrap this up, I want to briefly ask if there are any major policy issues or perspectives that are notably absent from the presidential race. In 2016, Donald Trump seemed to gain a lot of support from his wildcard positions on immigration and trade — the two issues, incidentally, where we used to see the most bipartisan agreement. We won’t see anything like that in this election, but is there anything both parties are ignoring?
For me, the issue is ending the War on Drugs. If Biden were to propose a full legalization, with money for addiction counseling instead of prosecutions and prisons, he might get my vote in spite of everything I just said about him and his plans.
Samarth: That’s a good question about what is missing from the national discussion. Your point about the war on drugs is well taken. One of Trump’s major accomplishments, the First Step Act, was a positive move in addressing mass incarceration. And ending the war on drugs would go a long way to help a lot of people, similarly.
I guess the issue that I’d put front and center, if I could pick one, would be climate change. You and I have talked about it a bit here and there but the more I learn about it, the more I find it a completely enveloping, hard-to-think-about-anything-else-but-this type of issue. Dare I say that I, too, might cast a vote for Donald Trump if he released a big, ambitious Climate Plan tomorrow and got the GOP to rally around it. Shh, don’t tell anyone I said that.
Or, and this is a harder one to capture succinctly, but I think it’s at the core of a lot of concerns. We’ve been on a steady, downward decline as a country on a measure called “Social Trust” (basically people are asked “Generally speaking, would you say you trust other people or you can’t be too careful when dealing with other people?”). There are people in society for whom things have been working relatively well (highly educated, more income than their parents, etc) and they tend to have higher social trust. The less well your life has worked out, the less you trust other people. To me this erosion is a strong threat to national unity and to sustaining democracy. And it maps onto a number of concerns in society like political polarization, economic inequality, and so on. But, again, maybe the way to do anything about it is to keep it squarely away from politics.
Jay: Social trust is for statists and tyrants! Count me with the Antisocial Party.
Maybe our next conversation should be about climate change, though. After the election: I understand you’ll be busy between now and then helping to get Joe Biden elected. I, on the other hand, will be busy reading Plutarch and hoping that whatever happens, we can all at least agree on which of these old white dudes won the election.
