Anonymous asked: I'm not the specific person you asked, but in order: probably increase tariffs and/or cut business taxes, people who hate him hate him because he's not a liberal and I hear exactly the same criticisms (so evil, basically Hitler) about EVERY conservative (but charitably maybe you think he's extra evil because he's also rude and you're worried he wants to end the world and because he's exactly as immoral as all politicians), not really but I like to hope, 1/2

2/3 it depends on what other candidates say because we only have limited choices (but his statements about torture have come close, for me, to making him as bad as the rest), my life will not improve, poor currently-unemployed formerly blue collar whites will do much better (well-paid executives may make more money but money isn’t utility and they will probably be exactly as happy), “we had a nuclear apocalypse,” “he lied, he’s really a liberal,” “the economy tanked” or “there’s lots of rioting” 3/3 and to clarify, I’m not the specific anon you asked this of. Their answers may not be the same as mine. Their positions may stand or fall separately from mine. Oh, also, I’m really hoping to hear a detailed refutation from you! You seem very thoughtful and smart and like your heart is in the right place. If you can’t be convinced to agree with us, I REALLY want to know why, because it’ll be an important issue, I am sure.

Thanks! So, first thing: I agree that any person in the public sphere will attract some people saying they are super evil. I agree that any Republican candidate for president will attract some people saying they’re the worst Republican president in history. It makes sense that you would just start ignoring anyone who says ‘Trump is evil’ because there were also people who said “Romney is evil” and people who said “McCain is evil”.

But this does cause you to model Trump opponents really really poorly. I like McCain; I might have voted for him. I wish the Republican party was less in favor of government intervention in peoples’ private lives, and if it ever backed off on that a little* then I would probably vote for Republicans as often as Democrats. The people who are terrified of a Trump presidency (or I guess I can only speak for myself, but at least many people who are terrified of a Trump presidency) are not in the habit of calling politicians evil. Even your charitable guess at why people think Trump is evil falls way, way short of understanding the other perspective here.

Trump enjoys veiled calls for violence against his political opponents. That is something you see in failing democracies, it is something you see in countries that are on the brink of tearing themselves apart with ethnic and political riots, correlation is not causation but if you’ve read enough history, major party candidates making repeated comments that it’d be nice if, after their opponent wins, something were to happen - or that it’d be nice if her security detail were withdrawn - or that an obnoxious protestor at a rally would sure have it coming if beaten up - is very strongly correlated with the failure of democratic processes of selecting our leadership. Trump likes flirting with authoritarianism. Trump likes flirting with rule in which his opponents get their chest kicked in for yelling at him. Trump rallies disintegrate into violence from both sides with some frequency, which is utterly terrifying, and Trump has made comments encouraging this, which should be absolutely beyond the pale in any democratic society.

Trump has committed fraud. His habit of pledging money to charity, collecting the accolades for that promise, and not giving the money to charity is very well documented. Sometimes he’ll finally give the money once reporters trace it and notice that he never did; he does not apologize. All politicians lie, but I cannot find a single other example of a politician stealing millions of dollars from charity and acting like this is not a big deal.

Trump is incompetent. What I can tell of his business career is that it was more rent-seeking than value-creation, and since he refuses to release any tax returns (the first candidate from either party in four decades to refuse) people are reasonably assuming that he actually has less wealth than if he’d taken his inheritance from his father and put it in an index fund. He has no policy proposals specified to enough depth that anyone can evaluate them. It is not at all clear to me how he’d make policy decisions, it is plausible he would just sign whatever crossed his desk but equally plausible the country’d end up basically being run by some advisor who he thought was a great guy (and I cannot even begin to guess whether that person would be a conservative or a liberal, because as far as I can tell Trump does not have principles such that it’d be harder for one than the other to puppet him). Anecdotes from people who know him, even favorable and generous ones, suggest he is vindictive and rationalizes all his own behavior and can excuse anything to himself and desperately needs to believe that he is winning.

A lot of foreign policy requires genuine delicacy, the ability to be discreet, the ability to parse oblique statements, the ability to maintain a polite facade toward people who are rude to you. Trump has demonstrated none of those skills. Even generous-to-him accounts of his business deals do not contain any examples of him doing any of those things. I think he will be constantly picking pointless fights with foreign leaders, having tantrums on Twitter because a negotiation was delicate or difficult, and will in general dramatically reduce America’s leverage and standing with the rest of the world.

It is my honest expectation that someone with those traits will be tremendously destructive to the country. I don’t think many of his policy proposals will pass; he will tank lots of international trade deals, which will sort of have some of the same effects as raising tariffs, he will almost certainly fail to cut taxes successfully because navigating a budget deal requires more attention to detail and more finesse than he has ever demonstrated. I think he is not very likely to go to war but if he did go to war would be very tempted to use nuclear weapons. I think that even if successful implementation of his policies would help poor blue-collar whites, which is a big if, his presidency will be a disaster for them along with everyone else, because he has no idea how to implement his policies, none of the people who’d end up doing the steering in his administration actually care about poor people, and there is no way to bring ‘back’ manufacturing jobs that have moved overseas, not even with considerably more finesse and economic knowledge and in-depth policy acumen than Trump has demonstrated.

I think Trump’s administration will be extremely high-turnover, because his campaign has been, and will have difficulty attracting competent people, because he is toxic to associate with and does not leave his associates better off. Optimistically, maybe this will just mean that the country has no federal government for four years, but I think that optimism is misplaced. Most of the horrible things that are ongoing will sort of continue going on if the government that put them in motion is headless. The FDA will continue over regulating, for instance. The prison problem will get worse as there are fewer and fewer federal judges appointed and confirmed and therefore the system runs more and more off plea bargains. The resources Trump wants to divert to deportations will come from somewhere else in federal law enforcement, probably something that contributes a lot more to the violent crime rate than illegal immigrants who have not broken any other laws and are thus currently not a law enforcement priority.

Of your four predictions that would make you regret a Trump presidency, I think it’s very likely (90%) that the economy will tank, equally likely that there will be a lot of rioting, unlikely-but-not-unlikely-enough that there will be a nuclear war, and - well, he definitely will be shown to have lied, he lies constantly, but I do not think ‘he lied, he’s really a liberal’ will happen. He’s not ‘really’ anything deep down. He has no principles beyond self-aggrandizement. He is not likely to spontaneously develop them in office, so that, at least, you need not fear.