A Message for Haley Voters Still on the Fence

Understand, clearly, what Trump will do, what he could do, and also what Harris won’t be able to do.

On February 24—South Carolina primary day—Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley votes at her polling place in Kiawah Island. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

WELL, HERE WE GO AGAIN . . . 

Four years ago, I sat in my Oakland bedroom with hair down to my shoulders and two coronavirus test kits on the nightstand, tapping out a final plea to the reluctant Trump-voting aunt in all of our lives. That person who recognizes Trump’s flaws but is still planning to vote for him because of ideology, or party, or social pressure, or an abiding belief in the danger of Democratic governance. 

At the time, I relied on an appeal to virtue. Many of these voters had supported the honorable veterans Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush against Slick Willy in part due to character. They had rallied behind George W. Bush’s commitment to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” when Clinton left. 

As such, I figured that I could appeal to the better angels of their nature, to their love of country. To their belief that with Trump gone, America could once again be a Shining City on the Hill and we could retrench to our partisan corners and fight over the issues with more honorable men and women as our representatives.

Ahh. Youthful naivete is wasted on the young. (Or early middle aged, in this case.) 

While I’m sure my pious moralizing and paeans to John Winthrop made Bulwark readers feel good about their choice, in retrospect, I find it hard to imagine that it was particularly convincing to the target audience. 

So this time I want to get off my high horse and try a more hard-headed and practical approach in the hope that maybe we can win over a few of the last remaining wavering Republicans. 

For starters, let’s define who I’m trying to reach. This way you will know who best to send the link to (and who to avoid): It’s a specific strain of Nikki Haley voter. 

This is for someone who has traditional Reagan-era, Republican views. Someone who dislikes Trump’s rhetoric, is turned off by his character, but also thinks things weren’t all that bad during Trump 1.0. Maybe they appreciated the Abraham Accords or the tax cuts. Maybe there was some useful deregulation in the industry in which they work. Maybe it felt like their paycheck was going further, that their family vacations were less of a financial strain. This person may think that under Biden, the border was mishandled and the projection of “weakness” has played a role in increased global instability. They probably worry that once we “turn the page” to 2025, a Harris administration might instead turn back the clock to her more progressive 2019 self. 

I could try to rebut these points individually or attempt to add nuance that makes the picture more favorable to Harris. But honestly, those fights are for another day. 

What I would rather do is try to convince these Haley voters that their perspective on Biden, Harris, and Trump 1.0 could be entirely accurate . . . and it would still not justify a vote for Donald Trump 2.0. Because Trump is telling us what he plans to do in a second term, and his agenda is both dangerous and fundamentally at odds with their worldview. 

Let’s break it down into three sections:

1. What we know Trump will do. 

2. What we worry Trump could do. 

3. The realistic limits on left-wing excesses in a Harris administration. 

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What Trump Will Do   

If you listen to Donald Trump, the agenda he has planned for a second term is not at all ambiguous. There are five main planks.  

1. Significant across the board tariffs that he says he can implement without involving Congress

2. Mass deportations 

3. Expanding domestic energy production 

4. No new wars and a direct negotiation with Putin over Ukraine

5. Using the Department of Justice to target his political foes

He also mentions random things he says plans to do (no tax on tips!), but when it comes down to it, tariffs, migrants, and “liquid gold” are what he talks about in every speech and every interview. When he said he wanted to be a “dictator on day one,” that was the policy agenda he said he would implement with his imagined autocratic powers. 

So when old-school Republicans argue that they like “the policies,” it seems to me they are mostly speaking through a retroactive lens. (Unless they’re focused entirely on domestic fossil fuel production.) Because the rest of his agenda doesn’t look anything like what was proposed in past GOP administrations.

The tariffs, in addition to being an affront to free-market conservatism, will be massively disruptive, inflationary, and lead to myriad harms that are impossible to predict. On top of that, Trump’s ability to arbitrarily implement them would incentivize new and novel types of crony capitalism. 

As for the mass deportations, needless to say this is a far cry from “compassionate conservatism.” But even if you are open to the policy, there is no practical conservative argument I could make against mass deportations stronger than the one JD Vance made in a since-deleted blog post. 

A significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self-deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. 

In foreign affairs, Trump is promising to hand over parts of Ukraine to Putin and retrench from America’s role as leader of the free world. As a result, hundreds of national security officials and retired military officers—including high-ranking Trump appointees and self-described Reagan Republicans—are either opposing Trump or outright endorsing Harris. 

In summary: Anyone who fashions themselves a traditional Reagan/Bush Republican won’t find much to like in Trump’s policy agenda. And there’s no evidence that Trump intends to recreate the policies of 2017 that were largely outsourced to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell while he was still getting his D.C. sea legs. He is hellbent on pursuing his own agenda now. 

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What Trump Might Do 

I purposefully ignored the targeting of political foes as an item in the “what Trump will do” section—not because he isn’t certain to try, but because we can’t predict what that will look like. 

Trump can issue tariffs unilaterally and will have full party support for deportations and expanded energy production. In foreign policy, the president has a ton of leeway as long as he can find advisors who are aligned with his vision. But getting federal law enforcement and/or the military to go after his enemies is likely to be met with resistance, the efficacy of which is impossible to know.

Here’s what we do know though: Trump is committed to vengeance. He has said so in countless interviews, even when the Fox hosts beg him to modulate his language. We also know that in the first term he had a team of lawyers and traditional Republicans around him (Don McGahn, John Kelly, even Jeff Sessions) who went to great lengths to resist his extralegal demands in an attempt to keep him inside the bounds of the law. Top advisor Gary Cohn even went so far as to steal material off Trump’s desk so he wouldn’t act on it! 

The White House would look quite different in a second term. There is an entire apparatus dedicated to ensuring that Trump 2.0 will be staffed by loyalists. That’s the demand side of the equation. On the staffing supply side, ask yourself: After seeing what happened to Mike Pence, who in their right mind would go into the White House with the intention of trying to constrain Trump? 

On top of that, the checks on Trump from the other branches of government will have been severely weakened. The Supreme Court is now 6-3 and so in favor of executive power that it recently created a writ of presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. Paul Ryan has been replaced by Mike Johnson, who was the lead House member on an amicus brief that was one element of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Mitch McConnell is out as Senate leader, and if Trump wins, McConnell’s replacement is sure to be whoever the president-elect endorses. 

So the “institutional guardrails” that held (to various degrees) in the first term have been severely weakened. To what extent, we won’t know until they’re tested. 

On top of all that, by the time Trump’s term ends, he will be 82—older than Joe Biden is today—with declining mental faculties. And on top of that, old man Trump might still be facing criminal jeopardy when (if?) he leaves power. If you have any doubts about Trump’s character and impulse control, this scenario should frighten you. 

Now, maybe we’d survive it. Maybe Trump would leave willingly, simply passing the baton to JD Vance without incident. But this seems like an unnecessarily risky bet. Would you take such a chance in your personal life? Or your kids’ and grandkids’ lives? 

The risk/reward calculation here is wildly out of whack. 

Especially when you consider the alternative. 

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The Harris Risk 

Look, Kamala Harris might not be a great president. Maybe she’ll rise to the occasion; maybe she’ll flounder. I don’t know, and neither do you. But we do know a couple of things. 

1. She’s shown a deep pragmatism in this campaign, pivoting to the middle on several issues (including fracking and immigration) and speaking about foreign policy in a way that is more reminiscent of John McCain than Trump (or Obama, even). 

2. Her election would come with a mandate to respect the rule of law and strengthen America’s role as a leader of the free world.

3. In victory, she will be indebted to folks like Liz Cheney, who gave her bipartisan cover and campaigned on her behalf. 

So there are signs that she would seek common ground and intend to run her administration from the (relative) center.

But let’s say that’s wrong. Even so, the doomsday arguments made from the right-wing media about a Harris/Walz administration (taxes on unrealized gains! Green New Deal!) are all exceedingly unlikely to come to pass, for basic political reasons. 

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LET’S START HERE: Unlike Trump, Harris will have a 3-6 Supreme Court to contend with. If she tries to enact an illegal executive action, the Court will block it as they did with Biden on student loans, and Obama on immigration. The recent Chevron ruling vastly limits the power of executive agency rulemaking without support from Congress.

Additionally, Harris is all but certain to have a Republican Congress for her entire first term. Right now, Republicans have a clear path to 51 Senate seats, and they have decent odds to get even higher if they can win one of five swing state races. 

If Harris were to win, in 2026 she would likely suffer the same first term midterm losses that have bedeviled almost every modern president—which would leave her without a unified congressional majority during her entire term. The best possible case I could point to for the Democrats would be a Harris win, followed by a miraculous midterm which would give her a two-year window in which she had an absolute maximum of 51 senators. This window would occur right as both she and swing state Democrats had to start worrying about their re-election bids. Such a narrow majority might be enough to ensure Democrats can jam through popular items like free home health care for seniors or some of Harris’ other mainstream priorities. But there’s no chance she could pass any of the far left agenda items that Fox fearmongers about.  

As for the executive branch, the team around Harris will be the typical center-left, Ivy League–educated subject-matter experts. Sure, there will be some regulatory rulings conservatives don’t like and some weirdly worded press releases about “pregnant people.” But the Harris administration would not be filled with the types of radicals who would do anything that could fundamentally transform America or meaningfully harm your life. They might even do some things you like, such as strengthening NATO, investing in American manufacturing, and building 3 million new homes (don’t worry, not in your neighborhood, NIMBYs). 

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IN SHORT, I’M ASKING YOU to consider all the risks and make a practical decision. Both a Harris and a Trump administration would have policies that you, the fence-sitting Nikki Haley voter, do not like. In fact, both administrations are certain to try to enact policies that are fundamentally at odds with your values!

But only one of these administrations would be led by an elderly, unchecked aspiring strongman who you know has deep character flaws that could manifest in myriad unpredictable ways with disastrous consequences. 

Giving an unrestrained Trump four years to wreak havoc on the country is just not worth the risk. That’s why his own vice president and chief of staff—who are almost certainly even more conservative and Republican than you!—aren’t on board with Trump. 

Which brings me to my final question. Do you really think you are better suited to make this risk calculation than Trump’s top national security advisers and his own vice president? These people saw him day in and day out for four years. They weren’t TDS-addled Never Trumpers wringing their hands about mean tweets. They were in the room watching and listening to Trump when there were no cameras around.

This is not meant as an insult, but how could you possibly have a better sense of the risk Trump poses than they do?  

Here’s all I am asking:

When you walk into the voting booth next week, start by checking the Republican box in all the down-ballot races. Take a moment to fantasize about how excited you will be to support a Haley/Youngkin ticket in 2028. Hold your nose and cover one eye. Then fill in the bubble next to Kamala Harris. 

It’s just this one time. 

Our country, and your family, will survive it. 

And I bet you feel a little bit relieved to know you helped the country turn the page on Trump.