Replacing Biden with Harris Changes Nothing. Trump Still Needs to Lose

MAGA's panicked pressuring may have intensified, but our best chance at saving the conservative movement -- and by extension America -- remains clear.

With the presidential election drawing nearer, Donald Trump’s lead having disappeared since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden, and Trump doing almost everything he can to dare the Republican Party’s essential pro-life constituency to stay home, panic is setting in among MAGA grifters and zealots, reflexive GOP partisans, and the well-meaning but low-information righties they’ve duped. The outcome is by no means in the bag for Harris, but lately MAGA seems to have been stung by the realization that it isn’t in the bag for them, either.

So, since late July, there’s been a perceptible increase in the hostility directed at conservatives refusing to vote for Trump in November (myself included), or worse, casting an affirmative vote for Harris (myself not included). The favorite line is that if Trump loses America will soon after fall into full-blown Communism, with the idea apparently being that Harris is considerably more extreme than Biden was.

Back in January, I concluded that a Trump loss would be preferable for the country’s long-term prospects, even at the cost of another Democrat presidency. My reasons were straightforward:

• The conservative movement—and by extension the country, as the conservative movement is the only opposition to the Left’s unmaking of America—cannot survive Trump’s transformation of it into an entity in which the Republican Party is only marginally more conservative than the Democrat Party, Republican officeholders are no more competent or decent than Democrat ones, conservative media is no more honest or objective than liberal media, petty grift completely replaces all regard for principles and results in conservative organizations (and in the examples set for future generations of conservative professionals), congressional and state candidates are pushed through primaries on the basis of sycophancy rather than merit and electability, the GOP infrastructure becomes the financially-devastated personal plaything of one sleazy, self-absorbed family and its hangers-on, and the Right is no more interested in producing decent citizens than the Left is.

• Whatever happens in November, one party is going to suffer an embarrassing loss to such a blatantly-awful opponent that it will have almost no choice but to take a serious assessment of itself for 2028, while whichever party squeaks by will decide it can afford to keep stumbling about as-is. It is in conservatives’ interests for the GOP to be forced to regroup while Democrats develop a false complacency about their status quo, whereas the other way around would be catastrophically dangerous for us.

• So, if Trump’s hold on the Right is weakened by a defeat that humiliates those who’ve sold out to him and cannot be blamed on the Republican establishment because he now fully controls it, America will stand a better chance of recovering from a continuation of the current deeply, deeply unpopular administration checked by a Republican Senate than it does of recovering from the unified Democrat presidency and Congress that four years of a Trump whose narcissism, stupidity, and natural liberalism are fully unleashed are most likely to deliver in 2028.

Note that neither is contingent on any assumption that Biden himself—or rather, whichever staffers and appointees made his decisions while he stared vacantly at the White House walls—was somehow less bad than any other Democrat, or that Democrats would never replace him with a non-sundowning candidate (indeed, the possibility of replacing Biden was one of the arguments against nominating Trump that MAGA blithely ignored).

For the past four years, conservatives broadly agreed that Biden’s was the most fanatically leftist administration in US history—open borders, weaponized government, illegal mail distribution of abortion pills, going all-in for genital mutilation of confused children even as Europe backs away from it, and much, much more. And Harris has been part of his administration and its choices from day one.

A Harris presidency would be a continuation of the Biden presidency, with all that entails. Personnel would change, but it would not be fundamentally more radical for the simple fact that there’s not much further left for it to go (ADDENDUM: at least, not in the current Democrat Party). Just like a second term of Joe’s would have, Kamala’s White House would continue to listen to the worst of the woke, and take every opportunity that arose to try to satisfy them. That’s an enormous amount of bad, and why we can’t reasonably blame our less strategically-minded neighbors for concluding, “at least Trump wouldn’t do that, so I’m voting for him.”

But it’s not a different amount, kind, or degree of bad than what Biden represented, nor is it different from what was on the table when the “good people of the Iowa caucus” decided to gamble that Donald Trump would be good enough to throw at it. As the more observant among you might have noticed, Democrats are in power right now—and have been for almost four years—yet they haven’t flipped the “permanent literal Communism” switch.

Which brings us to the most important point: Harris is not different from Biden in what it would take for her to actually do what she wants. Her budgets, her executive actions, her appointees, and her foreign policy would all be horrible. But they would be survivable.

The things the country really couldn’t survive—Democrats’ wish list of nightmare legislation to codify abortion-on-demand and LGBT accommodation nationwide, make safe and reliable elections impossible in every state, pack the Supreme Court, and turn millions of illegal immigrants into permanent Democrat voters—would all require not just Harris in the Oval Office, and not just a Democrat House and Senate behind her, but a majority in which every Senate Democrat was willing to abolish the legislative filibuster so those nightmare bills could be passed by simple majority vote.

The one glimmer of hope in this hellish election year is that Democrats are currently on track to narrowly lose the Senate, according to 270toWin’s consensus forecast (comprised of Cook Political Report, Elections Daily, Fox News, Inside Elections, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, Split Ticket, US News & World Report, & others), RaceToTheWH’s forecast, and a flurry of recent handwringing in the liberal media. If that’s the case, if Republicans win at least that much, then with or without the House of Representatives Harris will be unable to be anything more than a continuation of the status quo—against which a devastating case almost makes itself so potently that even a candidate as comprehensively loathsome as Donald Trump still has a coin flip’s chance of winning this year. So just imagine how much more receptive voters would be to Republicans presenting that case in 2026 and 2028 without Trump weighing them down.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Democrats’ nominee isn’t the only thing that’s changed since January. Republicans’ nominee is the same person, but that same person has somehow gotten even worse. Since he clinched the nomination and conservatives like me concluded he was too far below basic acceptability to support, Trump has:

• Tapped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard—both of whom remain hard leftists on most issues with distinctive crackpot streaks, despite their handful of dissensions from Democrat orthodoxy—to not just campaign for him but help recommend and review administration policies and personnel as part of the transition team;

• Conclusively disavowed Project 2025, a comprehensive conservative policy agenda worked on for years by movement conservatives and Trump alumni alike (and previously touted by Trump himself) for the express purpose of helping Trump not repeat the mistakes and letdowns of his first term, as “ridiculous and abysmal,” the “demise” of which “would be greatly welcomed” according to the Trump campaign;

• Flipped from wanting to ban Chinese government data harvesting scam TikTok to wanting to protect it, just days after a meeting with a rich GOP donor and stakeholder in TikTok’s parent company;

• Come out in favor of ruining his home state of Florida with a constitutional amendment that would make it almost impossible to keep recreational marijuana use out of public spaces, also days after a meeting with a wealthy individual with a personal interest in the outcome—this time the CEO of a cannabis company and a financial backer of the amendment (almost like there’s a pattern emerging);

• Torpedoed the GOP primary candidacy of yet another reliably-conservative House vote, Bob Good from Virginia, purely out of spite (the seat is considered safe Republican, but Trump’s preferred nominee, John McGuire, just got penalized by local party leaders for snubbing a committee meeting to knock on doors for Trump and take pictures with firefighters, so that change is already working out swimmingly);

• Proposed handing out green cards to any foreign national who graduates any kind of college program, a precursor to citizenship that would, albeit much more slowly, transform the electorate in much the same way his (supposed) immigration hawkishness is theoretically supposed to prevent;

• Punted all year on releasing a new list of conservative Supreme Court nominees to commit to nominating, despite the matter supposedly being one of the chief reasons conservatives supporting him is non-optional;

• Started campaigning on keeping Obamacare—“we will never let anybody touch it”—unless and until he comes up with something “much better” in unspecified ways;

• Proposed federally subsidized or “mandate[d]” insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization treatment, which would skyrocket insurance premiums for everybody else while potentially killing twice as many preborn humans as legal abortion ever did;

• Gone all-in on becoming “a tariff nation,” which when combined with the new entitlements he wants and guaranteed disinterest in serious spending cuts (references to which have been removed from the national Republican Party platform at his direction), would continue the high prices Americans are currently dealing with under Biden;

• Removed all mention of and commitment to supporting specific pro-gun-rights policies and opposing specific gun-control measures from the party platform, as well;

• Declared he is now opposed to further federal action to protect preborn Americans from abortion, to the point that he would actually veto pro-life legislation he previously urged Congress to send to his desk, and imposed that dramatic leftward shift on the rest of the GOP via his rewritten platform, which along with his other rewrites was forced through the RNC Rule Committee and a final vote via a rushed, thuggish, no-debate-allowed process that can only be described as “rigged”; and

• Pledged to continue Biden’s illegal, unprecedented expansion of chemical abortion by declaring he will not enforce an unambiguous federal law that prohibits distributing abortion pills by the mail to be taken without medical supervision, endangering women’s health and undermining pro-life states by guaranteeing that early-term abortion will continue in a way that is virtually undetectable.

• ADDED OCTOBER 5: Revealed, via presidential transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick, that his liberal son-in-law Jared Kushner is currently helping choose staff for a second Trump administration, despite multiple past assurances that he would not return and his influence being one of the chief drivers of the first Trump administration’s swampiness.

This is the sales pitch of a “Republican” candidacy so liberal as to make John McCain look like Tom Tancredo. Yet his fans have the gall to lecture others about “RINOs”?

This is what you get from a Donald Trump who has become accustomed to receiving complete deference from everyone and everything that used to pressure him into delivering conservative results, who no longer displays any sense of allegiance to those who made him president, who knows he will no longer need another Republican vote for the rest of his life if he wins, and who has nothing left to guide him but his real whims, desires, and feelings, his pathological need for glorification, and whichever flattering parasite happens to have his ear at any given moment.

Conservatives would have to spend nearly as much time resisting Donald’s terrible ideas as they would Kamala’s. But there’s the rub: most wouldn’t resist them. Not nearly as much, at least. The past two years have shown the Right will now let Trump get away with damn near anything. And what do you suppose the policy and political fallout would be from letting Trump get away with even a quarter of the above?

The fallout would be catastrophic, both for Republican messaging to normal voters and for the morale of conservative voters still into this for principles rather than personality cults—all while Democrats prepare a comeback with a new crop of leaders much more electorally potent than Biden or Harris.

If the Right is to have any hope of saving America, then MAGA needs to be cast off. Doing so after January 2021, after November 2022, or during the Republican primary would naturally have been much easier. But those are no longer options, and every alternative after this year will be harder still, if not impossible. And as dangerous as they are right now, Democrats will only get more dangerous if we wait. As perverse as it may seem, we will never have a better chance at restoring sanity to the Right than a Trump defeat on Election Day 2024.