A Liberal Case for Donald Trump
The article below is my “writing out loud” attempt to determine which presidential candidate is the lesser evil. I have focused on war and sentencing reform in this post. As you can see if you read the article, I begin by making a lesser evils case for Trump but vacillate toward the end. I am still vacillating.
Donald Trump has called women pigs, implied that Mexican men are more likely than others to be rapists and murderers, and mocked a disabled reporter among other things. Yet, in spite of these flaws and others, a strong case can be made for reelecting Trump. The case for his reelection is admittedly a lesser-evils one: because of his antiwar leanings and his sentencing reform, Trump is the candidate least likely to impose grievous hardship on young people from low-income communities.
The disastrous war in Iraq resulted in over 7,000 American deaths, 1500 amputations, and 1300 genital injuries. Additionally, there have been over 35,000 traumatic brain injuries. These tragic costs are born disproportionately by young people from low-income families. While the poor are not overrepresented in the military overall, the fact remains that soldiers from low-income families are far more likely to be wounded than soldiers coming from higher-income families. The disparity is so stark that two researchers, Douglas Kriner, of Boston University, and Francis Shen, of the University of Minnesota, claim that even more than previous wars, those in Afghanistan and Iraq have been working class wars.
Another discrepancy, one noted by the Arab news outlet Al Jazeera, is that green card troops — soldiers with green cards but without US citizenship — make up 10% of the fatalities in Iraq even though they are only 2.5 % of the troops overall. The reason for this difference appears to be that US citizenship is a requirement for admission into training programs for more highly skilled — and safer — jobs.
Joe Biden bears substantial responsibility for the disaster that is the Iraq war. He voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq in 2002 but he claims to have voted for the war resolution in order to strengthen the US negotiating position. But, he had been calling for boots on the ground in Iraq as early as 1998 and as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, stacked the witness list in favor of war supporters. He also supported dividing Iraq into three separate states, an action that should be determined by the Iraqi people themselves and not by a foreign power.
In contrast, Trump has strongly criticized the war — although he did not voice open opposition as early and as vociferously as he claimed. His earliest statements, such as the one on the Howard Stern show, express doubt rather than outright opposition. As president, however, he has been notably averse to war. He is the first president in decades who has neither started a war or joined one already in progress, and he has continued the process begun by Barack Obama of withdrawing troops from foreign soil and bringing them home. Furthermore, Trump has made his opposition to spending American blood and treasure on endless wars a central part of his campaign speeches. His audiences nearly always greet these pronouncements with enthusiastic applause.
Although Trump does appear to be somewhat less hawkish than Biden, those people concerned with war and peace should not ignore the fact that Trump has reinstated sanctions against Iran and placed them on Venezuela. Sanctions seem especially cruel because they seem to rarely work in changing a foreign government’s policies but they do inflict misery that hits children especially hard. While Trump’s sanctions officially exempt food and medicine from the banned items, the penalties for violating them are so severe that many companies hesitate to take the risk of supplying even these permitted items. For ordinary people, sanctions have meant that their incomes have decreased while prices for food and medicine have increased — if indeed these commodities are available at all.
Also an issue is the great increase in air strikes — both manned and unmanned — over the Horn of Africa. Thus, while Trump hesitates to deploy large numbers of troops to these regions, he does not hesitate to bomb them.
One advantage to a Biden presidency would be his apparently greater willingness to ease sanctions and engage diplomatically with Iran, thus reducing the hardship experienced by civilians with the misfortune to live under a bad government. Given the widespread use of drones under Obama and Biden’s apparent assent to them, it remains difficult to tell what path he would take in this regard. His rather hawkish foreign policy team, though, suggests that he would not be averse to their widespread use.
Trump’s relatively greater opposition to military adventurism is not the only reason he may be the less evil choice in the upcoming election. A second involves federal prison sentences for non-violent drug crimes. By 1994, Biden had written or sponsored crime bills that allowed civil asset forfeitures of many items including cars, cash, and guns, even if the person whose assets were being seized had not been proven guilty of crime, increased the required time to be served before parole eligibility, and made sentences for crack cocaine much stiffer than those for powder cocaine, a difference that greatly increased the incarceration of African American males, thus depriving struggling communities of sons, fathers, and husbands. It also increased the number of offenses that could be punished with the death penalty even if the crime itself did not result in death.
Trump, of course, signed the First Step Act, which led to freedom for 3,000 prisoners and reduced sentences for many others. No doubt, this bill was a political ploy to get votes and the political payoff for such a bill remains uncertain. Still, Trump has added a bit of compassion to a justice system that is unreasonably cruel.
Even though Trump holds positions I find problematic, such as supreme court appointment and women’s issues and some I find horrifying, such as the separation of parents and children at the border, he does seem less likely to start wars and somewhat less likely to favor mass incarceration for non-violent crimes.
It is my judgment that war is so many orders of magnitude worse than these other issues. War is also difficult to prevent — think of the millions who opposed the Iraq war and were unable to stop. In contrast, massive public outcry to bring a halt to the automatic separation of families at the border in a matter of weeks. From this perspective, Trump is a safer bet than Biden because, based on track records, fewer people will be killed under the current president than under his challenger.
I would also add that mouthing anti-racist platitudes as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have done is meaningless if those politicians vote for wars in which low-income and minority young people are more likely to be injured. Similarly, voting for harsh and discriminatory sentencing laws gives the lie to their liberal pretensions.
However, an honest examination of the Trump phenomenon requires us to acknowledge the very real risks of a second term. Trump’s outlook has been conditioned by decades as a CEO and not by the political wrangling and compromise that has shaped the thinking of career politicians. Thus, he fires people with little concern for the political continuity of his administration. He calls for patriotic education that could easily segue into propaganda, and urges his rally crowds to beat protestors — at least he did in 2016 but I have not heard him do it in 2020. This introduction of violence to the political process undermines the spirit of democracy in which disputes should be settled through research, discussion, and compromise — not fists.
In order to combat these very real and potentially dangerous tendencies, two things must happen: American citizens must be willing to remain focused on social activism to prevent the country from slipping too far to the right. And, we must all work to keep the Democrats in control of the Senate.
