RUTHFULLY YOURS

As I write this, the outcome of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is not yet known. Besides observing that she is eminently qualified, there is just one thing we can say with confidence: The president trying to seat a third justice on the nation’s highest judicial tribunal is not Hillary Clinton.

Those two words, “Hillary Clinton,” more than any others that can be uttered, explain why Donald J. Trump is president of these United States.

Out of the 17 Republicans who sought the party’s 2016 nomination, Mr. Trump was at or near the bottom of my preference list. More times than I can count, I’ve argued that the best thing he had going for him in the final showdown against the Democrats was . . . the Democrats — in particular, their nominee.

Plus ça change . . .

But Trump is unfit, many proclaim. Tell me about it. Conservatives and Republicans have made that case with great persuasive force since the New York real-estate magnate first announced his candidacy in summer 2015. The consuming narcissism, nonstop dissembling, infantile outbursts, inability to admit error, withering attacks on well-meaning officials he entices into working for him — though Trump has been a much better president than I thought he’d be, it’s not like the leopard’s spots have faded away.

The indictment continues: Trump is unprincipled — that’s the modifier invoked by those without patience for the grand-master designation preferred in MAGA Land, transactional. The norms he is demolishing are not, in fact, musty, deep-state relics; they are, to the contrary, the essence of the presidency, of its capacity to influence world events for the better. So deep runs his solipsism, so thin is his skin, that he cannot — not will not, cannot — distinguish between his own petty interests and the vital interests of the nation. Nor can he spot friends from foes, thus becoming infatuated with the rogues who flatter him and antagonistic toward allies anxious to preserve the post–World War II international order and America’s stabilizing centrality in it. His social-media fusillades, more befitting Don from Queens on his fourth beer in the saloon than the leader of the free world, degrade the office, undermine the rule of law (Attorney General Bill Barr has said that the president’s tweets sometimes “make it impossible for me to do my job”), and confuse both American officials and foreign powers regarding what the position of the United States is on matters of great importance.

We could go on, as some have indeed gone on in this vein for four years running. Yet this argument has always missed the point. The most compelling case for Trump has never been Trump. It has always been, and remains, Trump . . . as opposed to what?

A  presidential election is not the occasion for a personal endorsement. It is a choice. Donald Trump is a deeply flawed man. I get that. I’ve never not gotten it. Trump was not my choice to be president. He was the choice on offer when my preferred candidates were no longer in the running. At that point, there were only two left, Trump and Clinton. I don’t condemn anyone for rationalizing that a U.S. presidential election is not a binary choice; for myself, though, I don’t buy the notion that, because I could always write “Clarence Thomas” on the ballot, I am able to soar above the grime that is real-world politics.

In the world where I come from, we put twelve ordinary people in the jury box and expect them to decide, faute de mieux, guilty or not guilty. Sometimes the FBI collects evidence in unsavory ways but the evidence shows that the defendant is a ruthless criminal. Our fellow citizens do not get to escape the choice because it’s excruciating. We expect them to use their best judgment, understanding that “guilty” is not an endorsement of brass-knuckles police tactics and “not guilty” is not necessarily an exoneration. But there is no evading the decision; to abdicate it just means foisting it on other citizens.

Donald Trump or Joe Biden is going to be president. That’s the alternative.

Biden, too, is deeply flawed, in ways different from Trump. His embarrassingly patent senescence and habitual incoherence are problems, to be sure. But in his prime, such as it was, he was never regarded as serious presidential material, despite his several attempts. Mediocrity is something he’d have to aspire to. He was a gentleman’s-C undergrad who went on to finish 76th out of 85 in his law-school class. He entered politics in a one-party state right out of law school, and there he has stayed for a half century, plagiarizing his way through as he did in school. If he has distinguished himself, it is mainly by being wrong on virtually every issue of great public consequence, often after vacillating from one side to the other. His accomplishments are nil. The defining attribute of his current campaign is to run away from a few sensible positions he used to hold. Otherwise, he would not have been viable to today’s woke Left, against which he is largely impotent.

The certainty that he will be rolled over by the Democrats’ extreme flank is Biden’s salient demerit, just as it is Trump’s saving grace. In modern government, presidencies are more than ever administrations, not just the chief executive elected to lead them. The choice in 2020 is not simply Trump or Biden. It is: Do you want Mike Pompeo running foreign policy, or, say, Susan Rice? Should we continue building up our military and preparing for China as the great geopolitical challenge of the 21st century, or revert to the Obama-Biden program of hollowing out the armed forces and appeasing Beijing?

Should we follow the free-market economic and financial predilections of Larry Kudlow, or the confiscatory authoritarianism of Bernie Sanders? Should we continue promoting economic innovation, including the natural-gas production that has significantly reduced carbon emissions; or should we follow Biden’s confidant John Kerry back into the Paris climate accord while commencing implementation of the national suicide known as the Green New Deal, touted by Democrat darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Should we continue the regulation-slashing that unleashed economic prosperity and lays the groundwork for recovery even from a once-in-a-century pandemic; or should we empower Biden ally Elizabeth Warren to “reimagine” capitalism and markets under the government’s crushing demands and the Democrats’ grievance politics?

Should we back the nation’s police departments, prioritize the rule of law, and restore order on America’s urban streets; or defund police budgets and adopt the “progressive prosecutor” model — which is to say, the nonenforcement model — favored by Democrats? Should the Justice Department and intelligence agencies be run by Bill Barr and Trump’s team; or should we opt for a Keith Ellison–style radical as attorney general, accompanied by the return of Obama officials who politicized intelligence reporting and weaponized the investigative process against political opponents and conservative activists? Why do you suppose Trump was only too ready to put out a list of judges he’d appoint, while Biden declines to identify his alternatives — ideologues who view the judiciary as an instrument of social change? Why do you suppose Biden mulishly refuses to say whether he’d pack the Supreme Court, expanding it so that he could appoint liberal justices and thereby destroy it as a judicial institution?

Because Trump is president, and for no other reason, there is a real chance that a solid originalist majority could steer the high court for a generation to come, guided by the vision of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia and anchored by Justice Clarence Thomas’s enduring commitment to the Founders’ Constitution. Because of President Trump’s election in 2016, Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are just two of 218 jurists — adherents to the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation models of judicial restraint, rather than the lawyer-Left template of progressive activism — who have been appointed to the federal bench. This includes a remarkable 53 conservative judges added to the all-important circuit courts of appeals, which decide many more cases than the Supreme Court and largely determine the jurisprudence that decides cases throughout the United States.

Donald Trump did that. But it is a transformation that has yet to be solidified. Many of the slots filled by Trump judges were previously held by Reagan and Bush 41 appointees who took senior status or retired. That enabled a Republican president to fill the vacancies, with indispensable assistance from a GOP-controlled Senate led by Mitch McConnell. To make the judicial branch a bulwark against the unconstitutional overreach and stifling of liberty that a future Democratic-dominated government would portend requires reelecting the president. That is to say, Donald Trump’s candidacy is once again the thin barrier separating what remains of our constitutional order and the very different governing construct that Democrats would impose.

Trump’s candidacy is the difference between retaining the most unapologetically pro-life administration in American history, and having one that would implement a regime of abortion on demand, abortion at late term, and abortion underwritten at home and abroad by American taxpayers. Trump’s candidacy is the difference between having a Justice Department that invokes civil-rights laws to vouchsafe religious freedom, economic liberty, due process on campus, and colorblind college-admissions processes; and having one that contorts civil-rights laws to hamstring police, eviscerate due-process protections, promote the deranged notion of sexual identity as a mental state or social construct, and impose quotas and wealth redistribution based on the insidious “disparate impact” theory of implied, systematic, and institutional racism.

The Trump administration unabashedly set itself against jihadist terrorism and annihilated the ISIS caliphate. Would it be preferable to again have a Democratic administration that forswears use of the word “jihad,” regards terrorist attacks as “man-caused disasters,” purges law-enforcement and intelligence agencies of training in the sharia-supremacist ideology that animates anti-American violence, and turns a blind eye as ISIS amasses a territory larger than Britain? The Trump administration renounced the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, reinstituted sanctions to squeeze Tehran’s monstrous regime, and eliminated its top commander, who’d made a career of targeting Americans. Trump further neutralized Iran by fostering an unprecedented alliance between Israel and Sunni Islamic states, accomplished through peace pacts previously thought unattainable. It was Trump who had the nerve to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem — a confidence-building measure that administrations of both parties had promised to execute, only to renege time and again — over the strident objections of a foreign-service bureaucracy teeming with transnational progressives.

Lest we forget, the Obama-Biden administration’s parting shot was to orchestrate a United Nations branding of our ally Israel as an international outlaw — over settlement construction in territory the Jewish state righteously holds. That was after the Obama-Biden administration meddled in Israel’s election while paying cash bribes to the world’s leading sponsor of anti-American terrorism — the Iranian regime that, to this day, vows to annihilate Israel. A Biden presidency would mark a return to those days.

Given the vigorous opposition of congressional Democrats and judges appointed during the Obama-Biden administration, Trump has made only halting progress on enforcement of immigration law and border security, his signal 2016 issues. But there has been progress, and his stance is the antithesis of the open-borders, nonenforcement Obama policies that Biden would be sure to reimplement. As he ducks the Court-packing question, Biden also dodges the potentially even more destructive Democratic gambit of eliminating the Senate filibuster, which would end minority-opposition rights and pave the way for such debacles as statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico (to cement Democratic control of Congress); a bailout of disastrously mismanaged blue cities; skyrocketing taxes on income, wealth, and business; and such job- and growth-killing green voodoo as bans on fracking and pipeline construction. On the menu would be the Marxist Left’s agenda of a complete government takeover of health care (including a ban on private insurance); the end of school choice; a universal $15-an-hour minimum wage that would deprive young and lower-income people of jobs and entry-level experience; slavery reparations; forced urbanization of the suburbs; and so on. By the way, if you think I’m exaggerating, you need to read the Working Families Party’s “People’s Charter,” recently released and promptly endorsed by leaders of organized labor, Black Lives Matter, and progressive groups, as well as AOC’s Democratic “Squad” in the House.

You don’t want to support President Trump? I certainly don’t blame you for standing on your principles. He does have an exhausting penchant for saying the wrong things. On the coronavirus, to be sure, the president’s rhetoric, understating the seriousness of the pandemic and the imperative to take sensible precautions, has frequently been harmful and unbecoming. But it is absurd for Democrats to blame him for the more than 200,000 COVID-19 deaths while ignoring his restrictions on international travel (which they initially condemned as xenophobic) and the vigor with which the administration ramped up production of medical equipment and development of therapeutics and, possibly, a vaccine. There is no reason to believe Biden would have done better (especially after the Obama administration’s swine-flu foibles). And I won’t argue with you, because I agree, about Trump’s maddening insouciance on runaway entitlements and the metastasizing crisis of debt. I concur that the tariffs and trade wars are counterproductive. I’m frustrated by his lack of discipline and inattentiveness to detail in, for example, failing to formulate a market-oriented replacement for Obamacare — and thus handing Biden and Democrats their best campaign issue.

But to make the election all about Trump is to ape the president’s signature self-absorption. It is not a matter of liking or despising Trump. It is a choice between Trump and what the Biden-Harris Democrats would do to the country. It is not a choice that any of us can avoid. So, I’m making it: I’m for Trump.