Harris seems to me a focused and competent adult with integrity, who can work with people to get things done while taking the awesome responsibility of the Presidency seriously. I expect she, like me, recognizes that a leader’s public behavior, character, and decency to other humans matter. There are plenty of public figures setting a bad example of how to live without the leader of the free world doing it, too. I expect she knows it’s morally wrong and particularly repugnant for a political leader in this era to bully and slander because it puts people in real danger. I expect she will never say things that lead to people and organizations getting death threats.

I expect she knows it’s also just not smart strategically to have a long enemies list if you want to have a positive effect on the world. I expect she will not inflame tensions or bring out the worst in crowds by suggesting that if not re-elected, certain doom will befall the country. I expect she feels some shame when lying. She has certainly lied, but I would gladly invite a comparison with her opponent.

I expect she won’t waste hours a day on social media or cable television getting a distorted and false view of the world. I expect she’ll recognize what she doesn’t know, and will learn from expert advisors rather than just people who praise her. Any decent economic advisor would warn her that blanket tariffs would be massively inflationary and risk starting a trade war that would endanger our own exports. (We should ask why the executive branch’s control of tariffs are so powerful.)

I expect she’ll recognize that the rule of law–state laws, attorneys general, and courts–decide how elections and recounts are run and adjudicated. I expect she won’t pretend as if recounts, investigations, or court cases didn’t happen or bring up lies already debunked by law enforcement.

This is not a particularly high bar. Arguably every major party candidate in recent history–save one–easily cleared it. I suppose if a candidate were exceptionally capable you could argue letting a few of these things slide, but in my opinion…

Donald Trump does not seem exceptionally capable.

His tax cuts raised the debt by trillions while achieving none of the promised outcomes. The economy he is credited for was a steady continuation of the 2012-2017 post-recession period as you can see on any graph of the major economic indicators like GDP and unemployment; there was no Trump bump. To be generous I could say he didn’t break anything (but the debt). Analyses of his tariff proposals look disastrous for the economy. There’s no credible theory of how he would reverse the worldwide phenomenon of inflation without a time machine, and to “bring back his economy” you’d need to fire lots of people because unemployment is lower now.

Subjectively, during his presidency he seemed driven by daily distractions and grievances he came across on social media and cable news, and he lacked the focus to ignore what didn’t matter and ignore the haters–he created more every day. His obsession with being perceived as having the greatest everything of all time led to national embarrassments like Sharpiegate and “alternative facts“. Although his team’s efforts to fast track COVID vaccine development and rollout should be applauded, he routinely undermined his own government’s efforts by downplaying his own family’s vaccinations and giving spotlight to fringe figures and unproven therapies [1]. There were weeks when one could argue his public behavior was a greater help to the outbreak.

I’m further convinced by the large pool of former Trump administration folks not endorsing him up to and including his former VP. All these people cannot just be chalked up to Trump Derangement Syndrome; they worked directly in his orbit.

He would be the oldest President in history, we know nothing official about his health, and if he passes in office it will lead to a man taking office who is at least on board with Trump’s demonization of immigrants and past behavior, and has promised to follow Trump into the darkness of testing the limits of post-election lies and the rule of law.

No thanks.

[1] For their part, scientists and politicians surely damaged their own reputations by various means in the COVID era, but I believe there were at the very least many thousands of deaths that could be attributed to the politicization of vaccines, and that will sadly continue.