Trump vs. Biden: A Question of the Lesser of Two Evils – On Steroids

What do you do when you don’t like either candidate for President?  When, in fact, you think both candidates will leave the country worse off by the time they leave office? 

Well, the first thing you do is hope you are wrong.  I have supported candidates because l thought their policies would make the country better off.  Sometimes that has happened and sometimes it hasn’t.  Sometimes the policies didn’t work like I thought they would.  Other times the candidates didn’t do what they said they were going to do.  You can never be sure.  But you have to decide what to do in an election on some basis, and the only thing you can do is to look at what each candidate is likely to do and go from there.

Which brings me to 2020.  Since he is the incumbent, let me look at President Trump first.  I liked the 2017 tax reform bill, the deregulation, and the judicial appointments.  But these are areas where President Trump seemed to outsource his policies to other people.  Paul Ryan and Pat Toomey, among others, did the hard work on tax reform.  Deregulation has been done by some of the good people he has appointed (perhaps by accident).  On judicial appointments, it’s mostly been the Federalist Society (and they have done a good job).

With respect to things President Trump has been involved in himself, however, such as trade policy, Covid-19 response, foreign policy and relations with other countries, etc., his policies have been abysmal.  His neo-mercantilist trade policy, which seems to think bilateral trade deficits are important, is economic illiteracy.  Adam Smith demonstrated this in The Wealth of Nations in 1776.  President Trump still doesn’t get it.

I am not sure another president would have done that much better on the coronavirus.  It wasn’t President Trump, after all, who forced nursing homes in New York to take Covid-19 patients from hospitals.  Would the CDC and FDA have done a better job on tests at the beginning of the pandemic under a different president?  I don’t know.  But I do know that President Trump could have provided better moral leadership.  Leadership on masks and social distancing, for example, might have helped.

His foreign policy and our relations with other countries has been terrible.  It has no logical basis that I can figure out, other than some kind of single-transaction, go-it-alone approach.  Apparently, he thinks that “America First” means “America Alone.”  He treats foreign policy as a series of stand-alone construction contracts.  Every deal is by itself, and credibility doesn’t count.¹ 

I think this is dangerous.  Former Defense Secretary James Mattis says that the Marines have a saying: “When you’re going to a gunfight, bring all your friends with guns.”  President Trump doesn’t think friends are important.  I’m not saying the world is the same as it was when the Berlin Wall was still up, but I do think our friends and allies are an incredible plus for us in an increasingly dangerous world.  In fact, our alliances, even now, after four years of President Trump, are the biggest advantage we have over China and Russia.  They have clients.  We have friends and allies.  Why President Trump wants to chase them away is beyond me.  It may be that he doesn’t know enough history to understand the advantage they give us.  It may be that he really thinks allies don’t matter.  In any case, I think he is terribly – and dangerously – wrong.  

Next, let’s look at former Vice President Joe Biden.  His policies are bad, too.  His domestic policies are to the left of the Obama administration.  Some people think that is good; I don’t.  A Biden administration would give us more regulation, which I think will slow down the economy – and make people poorer.  His appointments to the courts will not approach the law and the Constitution in the way I think should be done.² 

His “green” policies will raise costs without, I am afraid, getting much done.  I understand climate change is a real concern, but saying it is important doesn’t mean that doing the most expensive thing we can right now will get us the best results 30 or 50 years from now.  While Vice President Biden has indicated he won’t ban fracking on private land, he apparently will on public land and who knows what his administration will do to hinder the development of anything other than green energy.  Is he willing to support a carbon tax, which would use the market to help cut carbon emissions or is he just going to impose new top-down regulations that cost a lot and don’t get as much done?

In foreign affairs, he won’t be good.  I don’t want another Barack Obama in foreign policy.  Bombing Libya to take out Moammar Gadhafi when we had no plan on what to do next was a terrible decision.  As a candidate, then-Senator Obama criticized George W. Bush for invading Iraq without a plan on what to do next.  But that is what President Obama did in Libya.  Also, overthrowing Colonel Gadhafi went back on an implicit commitment we made in 2004, when Colonel Gadhafi gave up his nuclear weapons.  He gave up his nukes; we killed him seven years later.  I would imagine leaders around the world have learned the lesson in that.

Then there was crossed red-line in Syria.  And the surge in Afghanistan, when President Obama announced the date the troops would be leaving at the same time he was sending them in, thereby letting the Taliban know how long they had to wait before ramping up their attacks again.

Vice President Biden’s own ideas on foreign policy haven’t been that good, either.  In 2014, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Vice President Biden: “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."  And Secretary Gates reaffirmed that view in 2019.  However, I do think Vice President Biden would try to maintain good relations with our friends and allies and that is important.

Which leads me to my conclusion.  The decision in the presidential race this year may not be a matter of whose bad policies are worse.  It may, rather, be a matter of whose bad policies can be more easily corrected and whose are irremediable.  Looking at it that way, I think that President Trump’s “America First”/“America Alone” foreign policy is so bad and so potentially unfixable that I have to hope Vice President Biden wins.  Respect and trustworthiness among nations, as between people, is hard to earn and easy to lose.  And once lost, it may not be possible to regain it.

Vice President Biden’s policies will be bad.  He will most likely leave the country worse off than he finds it, but I don’t believe he will chase all of our friends and allies away.  And I think it will be easier to fix the problems he creates than the ones President Trump creates.  Which this year is the meaning of “the lesser of two evils.”
--------
¹ I don’t think this is the way to run a business either
² A detailed discussion of the differences would take an entire post, if not a book.  I will just leave it at this.