Why I won't vote for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris in the 2024 election

Every four years I write an article explaining my vote, or lack thereof, for president. I don’t expect anyone to be influenced by what I choose to do with my vote. In fact, I increasingly get the impression that fewer and fewer people agree with me, which is fine. All I can do is follow my journalistic and political instincts, then report back the findings for anyone who might be interested. If that helps some poor sap out there clarify his own thinking, OK. If not, OK.

I perform this quadrennial ritual because I have always been against the antiquated custom of journalists obstinately concealing their private political preferences. In recent years, this taboo has substantially eroded — more journalists than ever seem to be enthusiastic partisans, happily proclaiming their preferences day in and day out. Even so, I don’t see this as diminishing my personal obligation to transparency.

So: as with the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections, I did not vote for either major party candidate in 2024. I did still physically go and cast a vote, perhaps because I still feel some residual attachment to the idea that exercising one’s franchise is an important part of citizenship — but I have to say I’m also increasingly detached from even that proposition. 

In the presidential race I wrote in Fred Flintstone, largely because it’s an amusing fictional character to see written on a presidential ballot. But in hindsight, I might have been subconsciously channeling a palpable sense of foreboding about this election: that either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could well send us hurtling back to the Stone Age, albeit a less cheerful one than the Flintstones inhabited. Yes, of course this is an exaggeration — I don’t seriously expect the United States to be reduced to (Barney) Rubble by 2029, no matter which yahoo gets elected this week. But the prospects are still grim across the board, and that’s the sentiment meant to be captured by my functional abstention.

No, I don’t find any of the Third Parties credible. The Green and Libertarian Parties are at best Potemkin parties.

So I perceive the most value in once again voting for a cartoon caveman, which seems like an appropriate simulacrum of the real-life choices on offer. I’m perfectly aware that other people have all kinds of convoluted rationales for why they deem it an urgent moral necessity to vote for candidates they do not support — like a “lesser of two evils” calculus, or other leaps of logic. But I take the simple view that I will decline to vote for candidates I do not support. This is also helpful for retaining emotional distance from either of the candidates, as I would have played no formal role in their acquisition of power.

I realize mine is a marginal and largely despised position. Most journalists, pundits, and operatives are rabid adherents to the strange belief that checking a box on a form intrinsically confers some sort of grand civic virtue, and thus aggressively browbeat people into voting for candidates they do not support. The bullying and lecturing already has more than enough “journalistic” practitioners, so I will happily provide a corrective in the other direction.

To introspect, I have found the persistent confusion around Trump to be the most maddening thing about this election cycle. In keeping with my longstanding theory that some unknown cosmological event ruptured the space-time continuum in the year 2016 AD, heaving us into a perpetual time loop, the arguments around Trump seem overly-stuck in an enervating eight-year limbo. People continue to interpret Trump with the same sort of speculative wish-casting that they would’ve employed in 2016, before he had a four-year record in power for anyone to analyze. In 2016, this was at least somewhat defensible: Trump hadn’t held any public office or served in the military, and had no traditional record to analyze. He was a celebrity pundit and beauty pageant proprietor. Therefore, the only available analytical method for projecting what he might do as president was to discern patterns or instincts.

That’s not the case anymore.

For starters, Trump escalated the war in Afghanistan, sending thousands more troops in 2017, and dropping a record number of bombs in 2019. Apparently according to some of Trump’s most confused supporters, we’re supposed to believe that the “military industrial complex” deplored the opportunity to manufacture large amounts of munitions for this purpose. Trump then insinuated an intent to withdraw all remaining troops toward the end of his term, but never did so. Now, he has retroactively adopted the same position on Afghanistan as his newfound nemesis Liz Cheney, whom he once called a great “friend” while they were carrying out joint policy initiatives during his presidency; he also lauded her father Dick as a “tremendous supporter.” Weirdly, back when Trump was in office, he identified scant ideological disagreement with the Cheneys. Their relationship was ultimately severed after Liz decided to devote her life to the events of January 6, 2021, voted for Trump’s second impeachment (she defended him on the first), and subsequently got booted from the Republican Party. Anyone pretending as though this dispute signifies any real substantive policy shift should specify what exactly they presume Trump would do as it relates to Israel and Iran that the Cheneys would find objectionable.

My consternation with faulty perceptions of Trump is perhaps best encapsulated by this tweet:

Have you seen much critique of Trump, in the “alternative media” or elsewhere, that deals with his actual policy record? I sure haven’t. The “alt media” podcaster clique has totally failed this election cycle — and yes, I’m purposely generalizing, because I don’t care to overly-personalize the matter. OK, I’ll make one exception: alternative media personality Russell Brand melodramatically reciting the Lord’s Prayer alongside Jordan Peterson at a Trump campaign rally — apparently impelled by a vague belief that restoration of Republican executive power will bring salvation to America. This is just puerile stuff. Makes me almost yearn for the days of the media being dominated by three television networks. OK, not really — I’d be out of a job — but I say that just to emphasize the depths of my disenchantment.  

A theory: what was once a necessary corrective to liberal anti-Trump hysteria has converted into outright pro-Trump advocacy. I was one of the first people with any media-adjacency to critically cover the “Russiagate” saga, starting in July 2016. I have been consistently critical of the damaging excesses of the liberal reaction to Trump, particularly when those reactions involve embracing the national security state. Much of the “mainstream” Trump criticism incentivized bellicosity on the international stage — from Russia to North Korea to Syria — and simply made everyone dumber. The average anti-Trump liberal still cannot complete a sentence about the man without overwrought shrieks of “racism” or Jan 6. All four of the post-presidency criminal prosecutions have been spurious in my view, including the one that was supposed to be the most deadly serious and straightforward: the so-called “classified documents” case, which resurrected the Espionage Act and implied the arrogation by the DOJ National Security Division of supreme authority over the government’s classification powers. So, I get it all — believe me.

But the “heterodox” media, or the YouTubing podcaster clique, or whatever you want to call it, has largely become a Trump cheerleading squad. The lack of serious critique of the Trump candidacy this cycle is extraordinary. I know that may on its face sound bizarre, with Trump perhaps being the most-criticized figure on Planet Earth. But the liberal variant is perpetually obsessed with the tedious and superficial infractions: screaming about his latest wisecrack, or bleating about the downfall of “democracy.” That’s where a more rational and reality-based critique is supposed to come in, and it’s virtually nowhere to be found. For instance, I tried and failed to get anyone to notice that Trump facilitated the largest-ever disbursement of Ukraine war funding back in April. This fact, demonstrated with direct reporting from the figures involved, remains virtually unknown across the entire media and populace.

Trump has repeated ten zillion times this election cycle that the Ukraine War and the Israel War “never would have happened” if he was president. The convenient thing about this formulation is that it’s inherently unprovable. It’s a counterfactual assertion, and therefore cannot be proven or disproven. It also conveniently shrouds whatever Trump’s actual policy position is on these conflicts, which he has steadfastly obfuscated and almost never been challenged on. The right-wing podcasty type media he now most frequently appears on prefers to just kiss his ass, leading to sycophantic and uninformative quasi-interviews. When he does still occasionally interact with the “regular” media, the subject is hardly probed.

In 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on the pledge of “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” but offered few specifics, instead relying on his assumed perception as a learned and experienced statesman. The “peace” he subsequently implemented consisted of prolonging and expanding the war, escalating the intensity of aerial bombardments, extending the geographic scope of the war into Cambodia and Laos, and adopting what came to be known as a “madman” strategy, whereby he would make crazed nuclear threats against the Soviet Union and hope for the best. This seems ominously like the closest parallel to the 2024 Trump campaign. “Of late, Mr. Nixon has begun to promise that he can end the war without explaining how he will do it,” observed the New York Times editorial board on September 30, 1968. Sound familiar?

“He kept us out of war,” was the slogan of Woodrow Wilson’s re-election campaign in 1916, who then proceeded to enter the US into World War I. So declared Franklin D. Roosevelt on the eve of the 1940 election: “While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” We all know how that one went. Which makes it all the more imperative that presidential candidates are pressed for policy specifics, instead of just allowing them to recite hollow platitudes. Trump has been officially running for president for nearly two years straight, and has still not been made to articulate any concrete policy position on these conflicts. 

However, there’s still some relevant data we might evaluate. Trump was the first president to arm Ukraine, and continues to brag about it to this day. He abrogated the INF Treaty with Russia, accelerating the breakdown of any mutual arms control paradigm. He also expanded NATO twice, including expanding NATO infrastructure into Ukraine itself. If you read Putin’s speeches on the eve of the Ukraine invasion, many of the US policy grievances he cites occurred under the Trump Administration. Trump has recently confirmed that one of the tactics he supposedly employed to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine was to threaten Putin personally with bombing Moscow, including Putin’s own private residence. After the February 2022 invasion, Trump joined the chorus of Republicans calling for the Biden Administration to more aggressively furnish Ukraine with weaponry, and said what he’d do is send US nuclear submarines off the coast of Russia to intimidate Putin into capitulation.

Of course, all of this is largely unknown to the general public and the “mainstream” media, which stay resolutely tethered to the interminable narrative that Trump is an illicit colluder with Putin. Just like when it was widely claimed that Republicans would take control of the House in 2022 and instantly cut off “aid” to Ukraine, only for “MAGA Mike Johnson” (Trump’s nickname) to preside over the disbursement of the largest-ever Ukraine “aid” package. “Alternative” or right-wing media performing their dutiful role of GOP cheerleaders also don’t really acknowledge any of this.

As for the war in the Middle East, Trump has earned the distinction of running on the most fanatically “pro-Israel” platform of any major party candidate ever. This is virtually beyond dispute. His central critique of the Biden-Harris administration is that they’ve been insufficiently aggressive in supporting Israel, despite the Biden-Harris administration providing more unfettered armaments to Israel than any US administration, ever. He has now taken to proposing that Israel bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, and had a phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu congratulating him on invading Lebanon. This all while RFK Jr. runs around declaring Trump the candidate who will “make peace” in the world, and dismantle the “warfare state.” Again, I have seldom seen such ludicrous propaganda — but no one in the media is really interested in refuting it, particularly right-wing media, which has a tremendous commercial reliance on bolstering Trump. Perhaps RFK Jr. should ask Miriam Adelson sometime why she has poured $100 million into the Trump campaign operation. (If you want, you can view a ZeroHedge debate I took part in on the Trump/Israel issue here.) 

As for Kamala Harris, on some level it’s impossible to even treat her candidacy as legitimate. She and the Democratic “insiders” which facilitated her nomination have blown up the presidential primary process, which for all its faults, at least subjects candidates to a lengthy period of something resembling “vetting” before a mass electorate. In its place, the Democrats imposed a crude Soviet-style bureaucratic putsch, out of which emerged Kamala.

The Democratic Party’s unanimous refusal to do the slightest reevaluation of their failed Ukraine policy, which has resulted in very little other than hundreds of thousands of corpses piling up in the Donbas, is shockingly disqualifying. So too is their Middle East policy — subsidizing and enabling an Israeli pulverization rampage for over a year while pretending to dabble in surface-level “diplomacy.” Meanwhile their principal campaign message seems to be: vote for Democrats if you want to federally re-impose abortion in Oklahoma. Alright, best of luck with that.

But it hasn’t been difficult to explain to people — at least in my (limited) circles of influence — the deficiencies in Kamala Harris’s candidacy. That’s almost taken as a given. The great tsunami of confusion continues to prevail around Trump. And yes, I do think his enduring cult of personality, seemingly more potent than ever, is an ominous harbinger.

I recall back in January 2020, when the MAGA movement virulently coalesced in support of Trump’s drone-assassination of the top general of Iran. Here’s what Tulsi Gabbard said about it at the time:

And here’s the censure resolution Tulsi Gabbard introduced the previous month:

Now she has abandoned her critiques and transitioned into a new role of full-time Republican campaign operative. Well, alright.

For as long as I’ve been legally eligible to vote, I have based my voting decisions overwhelmingly on foreign policy. The reason is simple: the US is the most powerful hegemon in world history, intervening militarily and economically all over the planet, constantly. Thus, there seems to be a special obligation for US citizens to take that into account when selecting political leadership, however much people might want to endlessly whinge about abortion and Trans Women In Sports, or whatever the latest Culture War bugaboo is in any given year. I recognize that the vast majority of voters do not share my outlook on this. Like I said, I freely accept that I’m an extreme outlier.

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