The devil we know

What do they really stand for?

So now we know…nothing more than we knew before. Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz sat for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, after 39 days of resisting any attempt to define herself. I didn’t watch it, for two reasons: I don’t have cable, having cut the cord years ago; and, I don’t care enough to try to watch live when there’s literally dozens of takes floating around the internet this morning.

What I do know is that Harris is the “Retcon Candidate.” Harris’s answer when Bash confronted her with flip-flops on fracking and immigration, is that “my values have not changed.” Right, only her positions, which she insists really didn’t change, because of reasons. If Kamala was a Disney story line in the Star Wars universe, she’d be canceled.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has proclaimed he would vote for a Florida amendment that overturns the 2023 law limiting abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy. He said he will “be voting that we need more than six weeks.” He also promised to have the federal government—or force insurance companies to—pay for IVF treatments, which freeze hundreds of human embryos, with many ultimately thrown away. This from the first president to address a March for Life in person.

“And above all, we know that every human soul is divine, and every human life –- born and unborn –- is made in the holy image of Almighty God,” Trump said to massive applause on January 24, 2020. In 2016, I wrote:

Trump is not a Christian, and we should not expect him to change who he is apart from Christ.  One pastor said that if we elect him to the White House, the first time Christians disagree with Trump, “we will get everything that’s coming to us.”

Well, here’s everything that’s coming to us, good and hard—except so far, other than from Lila Rose and other political pro-life activists, I’ve heard crickets from the evangelical church.

I’m not going to expand on two subjects that I think are non-issues: Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery, and Gov. Walz’s “grammar mistake” that he “carried weapons in war.” The Trump campaign, advised by many of the same sewer rats and snot-noses he had back in 2016, is pugnacious, rude, and stupid. The fact that they’d physically shove a federal employee at the most hallowed ground in the D.C. area is no surprise to me, even if they intended to comply with federal laws, but were too ignorant to do it. And Walz is a politician, which means lying is his tool of the trade. As lies go, this is a small one, but whatever.

Both candidates are liars. Both flip-flop. Neither is particularly trustworthy to keep their promises—but what candidate for office ever is? The question is, which candidate is the devil we know? Erick Erickson spent nearly 13 minutes defending why he is going to support Donald Trump, with a clothespin in his nose. He says he can’t stand Trump (I believe him) , but then offers all the reasons he is going to vote for Trump.

I know all these reasons, mostly because I covered them in one of the more popular pieces on this site. See, the reasons have little to do with Trump, and everything to do with Kamala Harris. Harris wasn’t lying to Dana Bash that her values have not changed. She’s a tax-and-spend, typical conflicted progressive. All the things conservatives fear she might do—she will do, to the degree that she can get Congress or the courts to go along.

My trouble with Erick’s argument isn’t about Harris. It’s about Trump. Erick claims Trump will do what a conventional Republican in office would do, as far as his administration (not himself). Erick goes back to the 2017-2021 years, and what Trump’s administration (and Congress) did to roll back thousands of pages of federal regulations, to ease stifling business requirements, and to reverse the idiotic policies that led to Gov. Walz having tampons placed in high school boys’ bathrooms.

Maybe Trump did some of those things in his first term, but I say not only didn’t he do them, but he did worse things than Democrats do. His tariffs, which distort and tax the market on all kinds of goods, persist to this day. Harris has no intention of relaxing them.

Would a second Trump administration look like the first, or like any conventional Republican? Let’s see. How many Trump appointees can say they enjoyed their time with him and left on good terms? Way under 50%. Who would work for Trump? Competent people? People from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025? The one that Trump disavowed?

Trump singlehandedly banned bump-stocks, and the Supreme Court reversed that violation of the Second Amendment. Trump says he’s a 2A believer, but there’s little evidence of it. Trump said he believes in the First Amendment, but wants to have people who burn the American flag locked up (clearly a 1A violation).

Would Trump really be a conventional Republican in his second—and lame duck—term? I doubt it. He’s too unstable, and too many people who are stable don’t want to work for him. Trump fired members of his cabinet via Twitter. Erick says the presidency, and who we vote for, is more than about one person. It’s about the administration, and the executive branch people around the president. But that’s not really true.

America doesn’t have a parliament. We don’t vote for a party and prime minister. The president must be qualified. If you can say you’ll vote for the president based on party, you’re really not saying much. This is especially true with Trump, who cares nothing about being a Republican—he made the party in his own vision.

What we know about Trump is that he’s the scorpion asking for a ride across the river. We don’t know much of his values, other than he apparently has none. The administration he will install will reflect himself. It will be chaos. Perhaps our foreign adversaries, or rogues like Kim Jong-un, might think twice before provoking the chaos engine, but they all know they’ll get more mileage from pretending to kiss his orange tuchas. We know this because we all saw it with our eyes.

The devil we know is Kamala Harris. She’s reliably a conventional liberal politician, in the style of Joe Biden, or Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. We know Harris is none of those people—Clinton and Obama can out-politick her without trying, and Biden has the advantage of knowing everything since he personally witnessed most of it (even if he’s forgotten).

We can reliably predict what Kamala Harris will do. She will do what the focus groups tell her. She will support a fracking ban, then not support it, then go back to pro-ban if it pleases her base. She will be pro-open borders, then pro-immigration enforcement, then back to open borders if it makes a better political statement. Harris will continue Biden’s policies while selling herself on change. She’s a chameleon, a retcon candidate, a lightworker of vibes and jazz hands. But the point is, we know this.

What we know about Trump is that he’s not predictable. We don’t know anything. We can’t predict what a second Trump term will look like. Erick might be right about everything, but it’s like Schrödinger’s cat, you have to open the box to know. And to me, it’s just as likely that Trump will be pro-abortion (he’s been that way all his life), treat nuclear war as imminent versus a horrifying threat (because he has always said it), and be disrespectful of everyone and everything (because he is).

I have to agree that America will end up with one devil or the other. We are going to have Harris or Trump as president. But I don’t agree that we should vote for a party, because the office is a person, not a party. I don’t agree that I owe my vote to one of the two devils because the outcome is going to be a binary choice. They’re both unacceptable.

Either way, nobody can justify voting for Trump because he’s somehow going to give us something that Harris won’t. And I can’t justify voting for the devil we know. As of now, I am taking the third option, with 66 days to go.

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