Should You Vote for Donald Trump in November 2024?

This choice could have been avoided. Yet here we are.

When a perfect storm of Republican betrayal, conservative division, and establishment obstinance enabled Donald Trump to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, it saddled conservatives with a dilemma—could we really cast a general-election vote for an obviously-unqualified, crooked, sleazy, sexually-degenerate Clinton family friend with a history of Democrat campaign contributions and liberal-to-moderate political positions (including on his signature campaign issue)? A shameless opportunist who had leveled insane lies and grotesque personal attacks at the family of his conservative opponent, as well as falsely accused him of stealing his first primary win and wanted him disqualified from the ballot (sounds familiar) on bogus eligibility grounds?

After clamping down my anger and disgust at the situation, I took a cold, hard look at all the arguments and considerations, and concluded the correct answer was “yes,” because the chance of doing good was preferable to the certainty of getting bad. Through print and social media I went on to do battle with what became known as the NeverTrump movement, even criticizing my primary candidate, Ted Cruz, for giving conservatives his blessing to let Hillary Clinton become president at the Republican National Convention (Cruz eventually endorsed Trump less than two months before the election). I argued that pro-lifers had a moral obligation to hold their nose and vote for him, and that the NeverTrump impulse of the time was putting narcissism and feelings above the moral responsibilities of voting.

Then Trump became president, and for his first three years he simultaneously performed considerably better than his critics’ worst fears and far short of his fanboys’ hype. I continued battling NeverTrumpers (which endeared me to some big names in conservative media while alienating others), defended the honor of his post-primary supporters, and when the 2020 election season rolled around concluded that voting for him was once again the right thing to do. He went on to lose, and I naively hoped we could move on to a decent candidate for 2024.

No such luck.

Unless God sees fit to surprise us with a miracle, we now know we’re going to be stuck with The Failure for a third general election in a row, meaning it’s time for conservatives to once again ask ourselves how we should vote.

Ever since the last election, despite my contempt for the man, I took it as a given that my answer to the title’s question would again be “yes.” As recently as August 2023, in my column on the mess he made of the election integrity cause on his way out of the White House and what it meant for 2024, I wrote that Democrats’ desire for actual election-rigging meant that “we don’t have the luxury of refusing to support whoever the Republican nominee ultimately is (yes, even one as weak and ineffectual as Trump, if it comes to that).”

In the months following that assessment, witnessing how exponentially worse Trump and those surrounding him have gotten and just how thoroughly he has corrupted both the Republican Party and conservative media, I’ve changed my mind. I am now convinced that conservatives should not vote for Donald Trump in the general election, because Joe Biden’s reelection would be less harmful for the country in the long run than validating what the American Right is becoming under MAGA.

I did not reach this conclusion lightly, nor have I forgotten or changed my rules for deciding these things. During the NeverTrump wars, I tried to articulate principles of responsible voting that recognized the one consideration that must outweigh all others is the net impact of an election’s outcome on the more than 335 million people with whom we share our country. Voting isn’t about you, how your vote makes you feel, what you think a candidate deserves, or any narcissistic conceptions of self-image.

Accordingly, I do not believe Trump’s manifest unfitness for the presidency is sufficient grounds on its own to withhold support when the alternative is equally unfit. That Trump has not “earned” conservatives’ votes is irrelevant. And even in light of the ways Trump has shifted to the left over the past year, if this was strictly a choice between two men in a vacuum, I would still prefer Trump’s likely policy output to Biden’s. General elections were binary choices then, and I’m not going to start pretending they aren’t now.

But this is no longer just about who signs and vetoes what during the next four years. It’s about whether we have any semblance of a conservative movement left by the time the next presidential term is done—which will in turn decide whether a few years of incremental good (that we might not even get) are destined to be wiped away, or whether a few more years of what we’ve got now are followed by the long-term reform we really need.

As we discussed last month, during Trump’s 2016 campaign and the first few years of his presidency, traditional Republicans and the professional Right still had some degree of independence from him, forcing him to at least try to appease us and preserving some capacity to call him out when he strayed. That influence has long since been replaced by a completely submissive relationship in which conservative media will let him lie with impunity, give him lapdog interviews of the kind we used to roast the mainstream media for, cover for his scandals and weaknesses, and tacitly condone his abandonment of bedrock conservative principles—meaning we would get a President Trump who would never again need any conservative votes, would no longer feel any need to appease us, and as he’s been signaling would feel emboldened to feed his ego by instead cutting deals with Democrats that played well in the mainstream press.

He has co-opted the national Republican Party infrastructure into his own personal piggybank, and infested the top ranks of the party with people so sycophantic as to propose rigging elections on his behalf. He has fully integrated himself with a Republican establishment that is not one iota more conservative or responsive to the concerns of the base than it was in the days of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, only now it gets to wear Trump’s approval like a mask that signals well-fed conservative media types to look the other way.

The experience of working with him has been so thoroughly toxic, alienating, financially ruinous, and legally jeopardizing to so many people that nobody with any self-respect, independent spirit, or redeeming qualities would want to come anywhere near him, leaving him only incompetents, opportunistic fools, and vile thugs to entrust with vital jobs, all safe in the knowledge that anything goes as long as they do his bidding.

Through all of the above, he has brainwashed a decisive share of the Republican electorate away from being responsible, inquisitive citizens, and into complacent, easily-manipulated zombies who neither think nor care about qualifications, integrity, job performance, accountability, electability, or conservatism.

In short, Trump has thoroughly corrupted the American Right, including the GOP and most of conservative media, into the personal plaything of a combination personality cult/marketing racket that exists not to advance conservative principles, but to validate a malignant narcissist and line the pockets of his hangers-on—who will never willingly give up control as long as the gravy keeps flowing, and are already seeding fantasies of a Trump presidential dynasty through Don Junior.

Whether it works will depend on how long the parasites can keep pretending to be winners.

Over the long term, I believe America stands a much better chance of survival if MAGA is rebuked in November, breaking its hostage grip on the Right, sending the worst of the parasites scurrying, changing the incentives of the cowards who went along, and giving us a chance to regain a modicum of sanity, decency, and accountability with which to take back the White House in 2028. It is equally important that Republicans keep and/or retake at least one chamber of Congress with which to keep Democrats from enacting their most dangerous agenda items, meaning we still need to hold our nose for bad Republicans in down-ballot races. If we accomplish that, then the next four years (or just two, if we shape up in time for the next midterms) will simply be a continuation of our current status quo, which is plenty bad, but survivable.

If, however, Trump wins in November, it will validate, reward, and solidify all of the aforementioned lies, betrayals, left turns, sellouts, intimidation tactics, and outright evils as the ways to get ahead on the Right. It will complete the conservative movement’s transformation into a corrupt, feckless blob of nothingness that is wholly uninterested in principles, policies, or results, and will be ultimately incapable of denying Democrats the opportunity to enact the things America really can’t survive. And that opportunity would come sooner rather than later, thanks to the emotionally-unstable buffoon at the top using his perch to inflict on us more abysmal candidates that cede power to Democrats in the next round of elections and creating God-only-knows what new messes that will generate more backlashes and further poison the GOP brand going into 2028.

Getting a few years of marginal gains on our issues will not be worth it if those responsible not only ensure they will be immediately undone by the next administration, but put their party on a path to never being able to accomplish our goals again.

That is the risk we’re dealing with here. And the only thing I can see that could possibly outweigh it is if, God forbid, we lose Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito before the election. If that happens, then and only then will I cast a vote for Trump in November. Otherwise, I am leaving the presidential circle blank on my ballot for the first (and hopefully only) time in my adult life, and voting straight Republican down-ballot. (Admittedly, based on the logic I have laid out here, I should actually be casting an affirmative vote for Biden to maximize the odds of Trump losing. But I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it. We’ll see in November.)

This stance will no doubt provoke knee-jerk reactions of “then you’re supporting Biden!” with the implication that we’re de facto Democrats now. Again, conservatives should not try to have it both ways by denying the binary nature of general elections as NeverTrump did in the past; serious adults will be able to understand and have a mature discussion about what we think a Trump victory would do versus a Biden one, even if they ultimately decide to vote differently. Moreover, no conservative opposition to Trump this fall can possibly do nearly as much to strengthen Biden’s odds of keeping the White House as the decision to nominate Trump in the first place already has.

None of this had to be this way. A long train of abuse and neglect by nearly every faction of the conservative coalition brought us to this point. But one way or the other, the cancer that is MAGA needs to be excised from the body before it kills us. Things would have been much easier had voters been convinced to do so by July, but now November will have to do.