A French newspaper journalist asked me last week, “Are you voting for Donald Trump?” As an American, I get this question often from Europeans. The answer is always, “Yes, absolutely.” Which is usually followed by some version of, “Dear God, why on earth?”
The answer is not because I believe in Donald Trump’s abilities, or because I think he embodies any kind of conservative ideal, or even that I think he’s a good man. It is not because I believe Trump is any kind of conservative ideal. The answer is partially because I believe 100% in J.D. Vance. But the answer is mostly because of who Donald Trump is not.
He is not a presidential candidate who wants to continue this pointless and costly war in Ukraine. Like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he wants to see a peaceful resolution of the intractable and bloody conflict.
(For that matter, Trump is not the candidate who despises Viktor Orbán, the most sensible leader in all of Europe. Trump would recall the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, who, on the Biden administration’s orders, behaves as if a diplomat’s responsibility is to relentlessly antagonize his host country.)
Trump is not a candidate who expects European nations to behave as an American fiefdom. He expects Europeans to pay their fair share of their own defense. It is long past time for Europeans to stop being free riders on America in this respect.
Trump is not the candidate more likely to start wars. The Trump administration notably started no new wars during its tenure. Kamala Harris’s campaign has the enthusiastic endorsement of neoconservative warmongers, chief among them Dick Cheney, the former vice president, who was a key architect of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump is the candidate who is a more reliable supporter of Israel. He will not kowtow to Jew-hating campus activists and their Islamist allies, who have taken to the streets en masse in an unprecedented demonstration of antisemitism. The vicious, Hamas-loving mobs that have taken over some U.S. campuses and intimidate Jewish students are not Trump voters.
Along those lines, Trump is not a friend to American academia, whose faculties have been overrun by leftists busy destroying educational standards, and even basic free speech and expression rights. At Harvard, the most prestigious American university, a recent survey found that 45% of students say they would be “reluctant” to discuss controversial issues in class, and fewer than half of teachers say they would be willing to bring up these issues in a classroom discussion. This is a jaw-dropping collapse of integrity.
Trump’s running mate, Yale Law school graduate J.D. Vance, once declared audaciously, “universities are the enemy.” In a 2022 speech, Vance explained how so many of the worst and most harmful ideas now besetting America began in its corrupt universities, especially the most elite ones.
Trump may not be much of a Christian, but at least he does not appear to despise Christianity, as the Democratic Party does (except, of course, when Christians and their leaders endorse left-wing policies, despite Biblical teaching).
Trump is not a presidential candidate who believes in mass migration and open borders. Kamala Harris absurdly claims that she will get serious about the crisis on the U.S. southern border—this, even though her administration has presided over a vast flood of illegal migrants swarming into America. One hopes that a Trump administration would in some way pressure Europe to take strong measures to regain control of its own borders.
Trump is not the candidate who believes in maximal abortion rights. Many U.S. pro-lifers are offended that Trump has moderated his abortion stance. As a pro-life voter, I too wish Trump maintained his former tough line on abortion. But as state referenda in the time after the Roe v. Wade ruling came down in 2022 have shown, the American people are largely pro-abortion. This is something we conservatives have to live with. Withholding a vote for Trump would be a foolish move, making the perfect the enemy of the good enough within the realm of political possibility.
Above all, Trump is not an ally of wokeness. I say “above all,” because the progressive ideology behind wokeness is the way of thinking undergirding the soft totalitarianism that is destroying the West.
For example, the U.S. military has fully embraced wokeness. Promotions within the military now happen within a woke context, in which men and women advance their careers on the basis of racial, sexual, and gender identity, not their capacity to fight wars. The elite service academies now train the officer class in gender ideology, Black Lives Matter thought, and various aspects of identity politics. This is terrible for readiness and morale. The ongoing recruitment crisis has in part to do with potential soldiers from conservative regions not wanting to serve in a military in which they will be at a disadvantage because of their race, gender, and their stance on homosexuality.
Trump is not the candidate who favors using the U.S. government’s power to compel universities to allow biological males who identify as female to compete in women’s sports—a policy that, under the Biden administration, is wrecking female athletics.
Trump is not the candidate who believes that “diversity”—as defined by left-wing ideologues—should be the supreme value in advancing one’s career as a student or a professional. In the liberal state of Oregon, the government has removed educational standards requiring high school students to show proficiency in reading and mathematics—this, on the grounds that upholding basic standards disadvantages people of color.
Trump is not the candidate who thinks the concept of ‘law and order’ is a cover for white supremacy. In the 2020 campaign, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said the ongoing violent demonstrations against police brutality are “not going to let up, and they should not.” The result has been the ongoing criminalization of daily life in many U.S. cities.
Trump is not the candidate who will fill the federal judiciary with leftist ideologues who are in thrall to so-called critical legal theory—the concept, popular among progressive legal scholars, who define justice in terms of context of racial, gender, and sexual identities. A senior conservative legal scholar told me recently that Biden’s judicial appointments, who will serve on the federal bench for life, have been mediocre diversity picks, but Harris’s are likely to be true radicals. One doesn’t have to worry about that with Trump.
Similarly, Trump is the candidate who believes in the classical liberal concept of equality under the law. Harris, by contrast, emphasizes equity, which is to say she judges justice by how the outcome affects favored minority groups.
Trump is not the candidate whose supporters include the worst people in American public life—the kind of people who seem to hate ordinary Americans, and longstanding American values. Among this number are white liberal women, the berserkers of wokeness, who despise masculinity and anything resembling traditional values; and the national media, who in their passion to stop Trump, have abandoned any pretense of fairness and neutrality.
Wokeness in all its forms is a cancer that is destroying social cohesion and the faith Americans have in their institutions, almost all of which have succumbed to the woke mind virus. What has made America great was the conviction that being an American meant being a citizen of a country where you are judged by the content of your character, and a country where you could go as far as your ability to study and work hard could take you. The United States has never perfectly realized these ideals, but at least these ideals still matter to the Republican Party; the Democrats have abandoned them for what is accurately described as ‘cultural Marxism.’
Moreover, the United States, with Democrats in the White House and ruling-class liberals in charge of most institutions, export these corrupt ideals to the rest of the world. I am tired of traveling throughout the former Soviet bloc countries in Europe, and hearing older people tell me that under Communism, they looked to America for hope—but now, they are afraid of American wokeness spreading to their country thanks to the U.S. government, woke capitalist corporations, and the American entertainment media.
Can Trump turn back the tide? I doubt it. But at least he won’t make it worse. That is the best a conservative can hope for at the present moment. Real change is unlikely to happen until and unless the young, deep, and razor-sharp J.D. Vance wins the presidency. A vote for Trump 2024 is, in my mind, a vote for Vance 2028. That is enough.
Besides, as a Trump-backing Catholic military friend back in the U.S. told me, “I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, but at least he doesn’t hate people like me.” True. In this time of social disintegration and intense culture war, the enemy of my enemy has to be my friend. Once I withheld my vote because I couldn’t vote Democratic, but found Trump too distasteful. That was 2016. Under present conditions, neutrality is not a luxury any conservative can afford. Therefore, the enemy of my enemy is my presidential candidate: Donald J. Trump, without apology.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is Donald J. Trump
A French newspaper journalist asked me last week, “Are you voting for Donald Trump?” As an American, I get this question often from Europeans. The answer is always, “Yes, absolutely.” Which is usually followed by some version of, “Dear God, why on earth?”
The answer is not because I believe in Donald Trump’s abilities, or because I think he embodies any kind of conservative ideal, or even that I think he’s a good man. It is not because I believe Trump is any kind of conservative ideal. The answer is partially because I believe 100% in J.D. Vance. But the answer is mostly because of who Donald Trump is not.
He is not a presidential candidate who wants to continue this pointless and costly war in Ukraine. Like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he wants to see a peaceful resolution of the intractable and bloody conflict.
(For that matter, Trump is not the candidate who despises Viktor Orbán, the most sensible leader in all of Europe. Trump would recall the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, who, on the Biden administration’s orders, behaves as if a diplomat’s responsibility is to relentlessly antagonize his host country.)
Trump is not a candidate who expects European nations to behave as an American fiefdom. He expects Europeans to pay their fair share of their own defense. It is long past time for Europeans to stop being free riders on America in this respect.
Trump is not the candidate more likely to start wars. The Trump administration notably started no new wars during its tenure. Kamala Harris’s campaign has the enthusiastic endorsement of neoconservative warmongers, chief among them Dick Cheney, the former vice president, who was a key architect of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Trump is the candidate who is a more reliable supporter of Israel. He will not kowtow to Jew-hating campus activists and their Islamist allies, who have taken to the streets en masse in an unprecedented demonstration of antisemitism. The vicious, Hamas-loving mobs that have taken over some U.S. campuses and intimidate Jewish students are not Trump voters.
Along those lines, Trump is not a friend to American academia, whose faculties have been overrun by leftists busy destroying educational standards, and even basic free speech and expression rights. At Harvard, the most prestigious American university, a recent survey found that 45% of students say they would be “reluctant” to discuss controversial issues in class, and fewer than half of teachers say they would be willing to bring up these issues in a classroom discussion. This is a jaw-dropping collapse of integrity.
Trump’s running mate, Yale Law school graduate J.D. Vance, once declared audaciously, “universities are the enemy.” In a 2022 speech, Vance explained how so many of the worst and most harmful ideas now besetting America began in its corrupt universities, especially the most elite ones.
Trump may not be much of a Christian, but at least he does not appear to despise Christianity, as the Democratic Party does (except, of course, when Christians and their leaders endorse left-wing policies, despite Biblical teaching).
Trump is not a presidential candidate who believes in mass migration and open borders. Kamala Harris absurdly claims that she will get serious about the crisis on the U.S. southern border—this, even though her administration has presided over a vast flood of illegal migrants swarming into America. One hopes that a Trump administration would in some way pressure Europe to take strong measures to regain control of its own borders.
Trump is not the candidate who believes in maximal abortion rights. Many U.S. pro-lifers are offended that Trump has moderated his abortion stance. As a pro-life voter, I too wish Trump maintained his former tough line on abortion. But as state referenda in the time after the Roe v. Wade ruling came down in 2022 have shown, the American people are largely pro-abortion. This is something we conservatives have to live with. Withholding a vote for Trump would be a foolish move, making the perfect the enemy of the good enough within the realm of political possibility.
Above all, Trump is not an ally of wokeness. I say “above all,” because the progressive ideology behind wokeness is the way of thinking undergirding the soft totalitarianism that is destroying the West.
For example, the U.S. military has fully embraced wokeness. Promotions within the military now happen within a woke context, in which men and women advance their careers on the basis of racial, sexual, and gender identity, not their capacity to fight wars. The elite service academies now train the officer class in gender ideology, Black Lives Matter thought, and various aspects of identity politics. This is terrible for readiness and morale. The ongoing recruitment crisis has in part to do with potential soldiers from conservative regions not wanting to serve in a military in which they will be at a disadvantage because of their race, gender, and their stance on homosexuality.
Trump is not the candidate who favors using the U.S. government’s power to compel universities to allow biological males who identify as female to compete in women’s sports—a policy that, under the Biden administration, is wrecking female athletics.
Trump is not the candidate who believes that “diversity”—as defined by left-wing ideologues—should be the supreme value in advancing one’s career as a student or a professional. In the liberal state of Oregon, the government has removed educational standards requiring high school students to show proficiency in reading and mathematics—this, on the grounds that upholding basic standards disadvantages people of color.
Trump is not the candidate who thinks the concept of ‘law and order’ is a cover for white supremacy. In the 2020 campaign, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris said the ongoing violent demonstrations against police brutality are “not going to let up, and they should not.” The result has been the ongoing criminalization of daily life in many U.S. cities.
Trump is not the candidate who will fill the federal judiciary with leftist ideologues who are in thrall to so-called critical legal theory—the concept, popular among progressive legal scholars, who define justice in terms of context of racial, gender, and sexual identities. A senior conservative legal scholar told me recently that Biden’s judicial appointments, who will serve on the federal bench for life, have been mediocre diversity picks, but Harris’s are likely to be true radicals. One doesn’t have to worry about that with Trump.
Similarly, Trump is the candidate who believes in the classical liberal concept of equality under the law. Harris, by contrast, emphasizes equity, which is to say she judges justice by how the outcome affects favored minority groups.
Trump is not the candidate whose supporters include the worst people in American public life—the kind of people who seem to hate ordinary Americans, and longstanding American values. Among this number are white liberal women, the berserkers of wokeness, who despise masculinity and anything resembling traditional values; and the national media, who in their passion to stop Trump, have abandoned any pretense of fairness and neutrality.
Wokeness in all its forms is a cancer that is destroying social cohesion and the faith Americans have in their institutions, almost all of which have succumbed to the woke mind virus. What has made America great was the conviction that being an American meant being a citizen of a country where you are judged by the content of your character, and a country where you could go as far as your ability to study and work hard could take you. The United States has never perfectly realized these ideals, but at least these ideals still matter to the Republican Party; the Democrats have abandoned them for what is accurately described as ‘cultural Marxism.’
Moreover, the United States, with Democrats in the White House and ruling-class liberals in charge of most institutions, export these corrupt ideals to the rest of the world. I am tired of traveling throughout the former Soviet bloc countries in Europe, and hearing older people tell me that under Communism, they looked to America for hope—but now, they are afraid of American wokeness spreading to their country thanks to the U.S. government, woke capitalist corporations, and the American entertainment media.
Can Trump turn back the tide? I doubt it. But at least he won’t make it worse. That is the best a conservative can hope for at the present moment. Real change is unlikely to happen until and unless the young, deep, and razor-sharp J.D. Vance wins the presidency. A vote for Trump 2024 is, in my mind, a vote for Vance 2028. That is enough.
Besides, as a Trump-backing Catholic military friend back in the U.S. told me, “I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, but at least he doesn’t hate people like me.” True. In this time of social disintegration and intense culture war, the enemy of my enemy has to be my friend. Once I withheld my vote because I couldn’t vote Democratic, but found Trump too distasteful. That was 2016. Under present conditions, neutrality is not a luxury any conservative can afford. Therefore, the enemy of my enemy is my presidential candidate: Donald J. Trump, without apology.
READ NEXT
Starmer’s War on Farmers: a New Low for Client Politics
Unprincipled Liberals & the Principle of Cause and Effect
End Scene