A Note on Voting for Trump
A Note on Voting for Trump
Further context on what my voting for Donald Trump means
I believe that if you’re going to write publicly about politics you should be open about your own biases and how you plan to vote, if you plan to vote, and why you plan to vote that way. I did not announce that I’m voting for Donald Trump because I wanted or expected it to be some kind of spectacle—very few people actually read this Substack you probably won’t be surprised to learn—but I think it’s important since I do write about politics, in the interest of transparency, that people know that I plan to vote for Donald Trump so that they can contextualize everything else that I say appropriately. We all have biases to whatever degree, so people reading this Substack should know that I’m voting for Trump in case it somehow colors my other writing, and if you simply want to write me off as a traitor to America for voting for Trump in 2024, God be with you. Please feel free to block me as soon as possible.
One of the things that I hate most about politics is the tribalism and treating it like a team sport where one’s “side” can do no wrong and the other “side” can do no right. I think that, if anything, if you vote for someone it is your responsibility to be even more critical of the person you voted for given that you chose to vote for them, not less, and that is how I intend to cover Donald Trump for the remainder of this campaign and as president should he be elected. I am not on Donald Trump’s team, I do not support Donald Trump, and my intention to vote for him is not an endorsement of Donald Trump, per se. My political goals are to decentralize political power away from the U.S. federal government as much as possible, ending all wars and funding of wars that the U.S. government is involved in, and extending as much freedom to the individual as possible; Donald Trump is not generally in favor of those goals, and his theoretical election would not further those goals.
I will support Donald Trump when he is working to further my goals, and I will oppose him when he’s not, which will be most of the time. I supported his efforts at diplomacy with North Korea during his presidency, and I will support him again when I think he’s right. I supported Barack Obama when he negotiated the Iran Deal and I supported President Joe Biden when he ended the war in Afghanistan, even if the execution of that policy was a complete disaster. For the most part, however, I think Obama, Trump, and Biden were all terrible presidents, and have spent most of my time in opposition to their policies. That is not going to change simply because I am going to vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024.
Here is my initial post announcing my intention, and the reasoning behind it, to vote for Donald Trump:
