Ben Shapiro: Vote Donald Trump

Last week, we hosted the best debate of the election. Ben Shapiro is voting for Donald Trump. Sam Harris is voting for Kamala Harris. They spoke for two hours, with Bari moderating, about why. Click here to listen to, watch, or read it.

Today, we’re happy to publish an essay by each of them, in which they distill their closing arguments. Read Sam’s here, and scroll down to read Ben’s, which originally appeared on The Daily Wire.

So, it’s down to the wire. According to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, Donald Trump is up in national polling—by 0.1 percent. In Georgia, he’s leading by 2.3 percent; in North Carolina, by 1.5 percent; in Pennsylvania, by 0.3 percent; in Arizona, by 2.6 percent; in Nevada, by 1 percent. Meanwhile, according to that same average, Harris is leading in Michigan by 0.6 percent and in Wisconsin by 0.3 percent. Suffice it to say, every single one of these battleground states is well within the margin of error—meaning that a significant polling error in Trump’s favor turns the election into a blowout for him, and a significant polling error in Harris’s direction turns it into a blowout for her. 

According to AtlasIntel, Trump is currently leading in all the swing states; according to New York Times/Siena, Trump is behind in Nevada, but ahead in Arizona, and all the other swing states are essentially dead even, with Harris up slightly in Georgia, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. The bottom line: Nobody knows anything. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times points out, “Across these final polls, white Democrats were 16 percent likelier to respond than white Republicans. That’s a larger disparity than our earlier polls this year, and it’s not much better than our final polls in 2020—even with the pandemic over. It raises the possibility that the polls could underestimate Mr. Trump yet again.”

The early votes tell us. . . pretty much nothing. They show that the Republicans have done a far better job than in 2020 of getting out the early vote, but those may be high-propensity voters who were going to vote for Trump anyway. Meanwhile, female voters are, indeed, showing up in droves—but the same story applies.

Everyone is now attempting to read chicken entrails. So when Ann Selzer, widely respected as one of the best pollsters in the country, came out with a shocking poll on Saturday that had Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa by three points, Democrats erupted into spasms of ecstasy. At last, here was the evidence that Trump is finally going to be subdued, and Harris will emerge victorious!

But of course, it’s not quite that simple. The poll is pretty clearly an outlier. Emerson has Trump up nearly 10 points in the state right now. And Iowa is a Republican state at this point: The Republican Party has an advantage in registered voters over the Democratic Party of some 173,000 voters.

Bottom line: We should take the Iowa poll with a grain of salt. As Nate Silver says, “Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because—let me state this as carefully as I can—if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong.” 

So, here’s the bottom line: Stop reading chicken entrails and GO VOTE NOW. On Friday, I voted early. And I voted, of course, for Donald Trump.

Now, for the final time, let me explain why.

I want to explain why I voted for Trump not to the ardent Trump voter—you already know the case for Trump, obviously. And I’m not explaining it to the person who believes Trump is a Hitlerian menace—if you believe that, nothing I say can reconnect you to reality. I’m addressing people who might have holdups about Trump on character but like his policy; people who think that Kamala Harris is a “change” candidate; people who are worried about the supposed “threat” to institutions from Trump, but aren’t crazy enough to stay up nights worrying about concentration camps or boxcars from a second Trump administration. 

For all of you who are wavering, I think it’s necessary to explain my reasoning. After all, I went from someone who didn’t vote for either Trump or Hillary in 2016—my first time abstaining from a presidential vote ever because I felt both were unfit—to voting for Trump in 2020; to voting for, campaigning with, and giving money to Donald Trump in 2024.

There are essentially three reasons I support Donald Trump: The first is Donald Trump, the second is Kamala Harris, and the third is the institutions.

Let me begin by acknowledging many of the concerns of those of you who are hesitant about Donald Trump. As you know from listening to the show consistently, I don’t like a lot of the things Trump says. I’m not in love with his statements on TruthSocial about various controversies of the day. (I’m not voting because I care about his hot takes on Taylor Swift.) I’m not big on the bulls******ry that Trump often bandies about with regard to topics large and small. I think the evidence is skimpy that there is widespread pet barbecuing in Springfield. But here’s the thing about Trump: Underlying a lot of the bulls*****ry is truth. Trump speaks in superlatives. He exaggerates for effect. He tells stories he’s half heard, and then repeats them in inflated fashion. But he’s generally right on the central point: Illegal immigration is out of control; the regulatory and tax regime of the Biden-Harris administration has generated historic inflation and burdened America with a future of economic stagnation; Biden and Harris are unprecedentedly cowardly and weak on foreign policy.

And here’s the biggest thing: I’m not voting for Trump because I need a moral exemplar. I’m not a child. I’m an adult voter, and I have plenty of people I use as moral guides and sounding boards: my parents, members of my community, philosophers and thinkers. To me, politicians aren’t gods or great leaders—at least, not very often. They’re plumbers. The question is whether they’ll fix the toilet.

Donald Trump fixes the toilet. Kamala Harris throws a cherry bomb in it. We don’t have to speculate about this. We know it’s true. Donald Trump has already been president. And he was a hell of a lot better than Kamala Harris has been as vice president.

So let’s talk policy.

Anti-Wokeness: Beginning with his general governing worldview, Trump believes that America’s founding principles are great. He doesn’t believe that America was built on racism, sexism, bigotry, and homophobia. He believes that America is a land of opportunity for everyone—and that it should be. He doesn’t identify winning with exploitation or losing with victimhood. He doesn’t believe in any idiotic oppressor/oppressed matrix by which we can determine, solely based on someone’s failure, whether society has been mean to them. This is actually the great battle of our time. Because, as I will discuss, Harris is a devotee of wokeness: the belief that those who fail are oppressed, and those who succeed are oppressors. And that worldview means incentivizing failure and punishing success in every area of human life.

Economic Meritocracy: Donald Trump generally believes in economic meritocracy. Trump is about winning. This, we all know. Like it or hate it, it’s his gauge of success. What that means is that he values merit. He wants an economy where innovators and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are given the freedom to take us to Mars, not an economy where Kamala Harris’s Department of Justice sues Musk for failure to hire enough refugees or immigrants on new visas. He wants an economy where businesses are worried about creating the best goods, products, and services for the lowest price, not about the dumbest regulations coming from the EPA or the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime of the corporate office. This is why Trump wants lower taxes, less regulation, and more dynamic business as a result. What of his talk about tariffs? Yes, tariffs are generally bad policy. But Trump is transactional; he uses tariffs as a way to cudgel other countries to behave according to the basic rules of the road in international markets. Tariffs, he believes, are a great way of ensuring that countries like China don’t simply dump endless amounts of money into industries that threaten American safety while stealing American technology. And he’s not wrong. This is why Trump had a thriving economy: Wage growth beat inflation by 15 percent, and inflation grew at just 1.9 percent per annum. There is a reason people are nostalgic for the Trump economy.

Foreign Policy: Because Trump is not a devotee of the evil oppressor/oppressed matrix, he knows that other countries have interests that are not ours. When Trump says “America First,” he doesn’t mean isolationism, as he himself told me; he doesn’t mean Charles Lindbergh or Father Coughlin. He means that America’s interests ought to be first and foremost—and that very often, those interests can be protected by the credible threat of use of force. Trump innately understands deterrence. I’ve told this story before, but it’s worth telling it again: When I held a fundraiser for Trump a few months ago, he told this story. He said:

You want to know why Vladimir Putin never invaded Ukraine on my watch? Because I called him and I told him, “Vlad, Vlad, don’t you do it.” And Vlad said, “Why not, Mr. President?” And I said, “Because, Vlad, if you do, I’m gonna bomb the s*** out of you.” And he said, “No, you won’t, Mr. President.” And I said, “Well, I might!”

And then Trump turned to me and said, “And you know what? If there’s even a five percent chance that the United States military, the most powerful military in the history of the world, is going to bomb the s*** out of you, you don’t do it.”

Trump knew that innately. That’s why the world became far more peaceful under Trump. China, for the first time, saw that perhaps it didn’t have a patsy in Trump, and believe it or not, bipartisan opposition to Chinese aggression grew radically under Trump. Russia didn’t invade Ukraine under Trump, even though it did under Obama and Biden. And, of course, while Obama and Biden radically incentivized the growth of terror by Iran, it was Trump who contained Iran, impoverished it, and brokered the Abraham Accords. Trump gets it. 

So that’s the positive case for Trump. Now to the case against Kamala.

Kamala Harris is not an important figure, in and of herself. She has been an empty vessel her entire political career. She’s quite bad at the game, actually: She couldn’t speak straight to the point if her life depended on it, instead spewing ghastly word vomit that would put the fat kid from the Stand by Me pie-eating contest to shame; she vacillates wildly between insane leftism, as in her 2019 failed presidential campaign, to faux-hawkish tough-on-crime prosecutor, as she’s been trying to do this year.

None of it washes. She’s totally insincere, utterly charmless, and terrifically inauthentic. She’s the Polar Express of political candidates, inhabiting the uncanny valley full-time. And she’s surrounded herself with other residents of the island of misfit, cloying, and uber-irritating tools: Doug Emhoff, her nanny-impregnating, religious Jew–impersonating, ex-girlfriend allegedly slapping husband; Tim Walz, the pretend ultra-man, who pretends to be a gun fanatic but can’t properly load one, who playacts at being a football coach but can’t even use the terminology properly; and all the rest.

Of course, Harris wouldn’t be there if she weren’t just a tool of the Democratic machine. She was put in place in 2020 by Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic upper echelon, who decided that Joe Biden needed a woman of color on the ticket; then, after failing dramatically as vice president in every job she was given, she was jabbed into the presidential nomination by the same machine, which suddenly realized that Biden’s brain had passed away some years before. She is not joy. She is not “brat.” She is an empty pantsuit. She always was.

But that doesn’t mean she isn’t dangerous. Because, like Joe Biden, she’s actually just an inept weather vane for the Democratic Party as a whole. And that party has embraced the failure and radicalism of its most insane members.

Pro-Wokeness: In regards to her worldview, Harris, like Biden before her, has said that “equity” ought to be at the center of all her policies. By equity, of course, she means equality of outcome. She has not been shy about this. She has said it repeatedly, in different contexts, for years. She truly believes that disparities are a result solely of discrimination. This means that any group that underperforms has been exploited by an evil system. The world is a system of oppressors and oppressed, and it is the job of the federal government to rectify those imbalances, both domestically and abroad. For some groups, no evidence need be shown to demonstrate victimization (say, women in the United States, who currently constitute a majority of college graduates) in order for that group to be labeled victimized; historic victimization will do. For others, even evidence of current victimization must be ignored (Asians and Jews), so long as members of those groups are disproportionately successful.

This is an evil worldview; it incentivizes failure, it punishes success, and it treats people not as individuals but as members of classes. It is entirely anti-American. It tears Americans apart on the basis of identity. And no, it isn’t going away. She’s trying to hide it, but it’s the essence of her entire campaign, which treats women and men as enemies, ignores hatred of Jews so long as it comes from intersectional communities, and promises endless benefits—including the very redefinition of reality—to “marginalized” groups. Which is how Tim Walz ends up stumping for tampons in the boys’ bathroom. And how the Biden-Harris White House has repeatedly attempted to enshrine racism into law.

Economic Redistributionist: Harris’s economic policies are rooted in this worldview, as are the Democratic Party’s as a whole. Thus, as they see it, businesses that are successful are definitionally exploiters; to have their wealth expropriated and spent as Harris and her friends see fit on groups they seek to cultivate then becomes permissible. Regulations are simply ways to establish equality of outcome. Innovators are to be punished as oppressors. “The rich” are seen as a separate class from everyone else, despite the fact that income mobility remains the hallmark of the American economy.

The answer to everything: control. Top-down control. Higher taxes, more spending, more regulation. Giveaways, takings, and borrowing: These are the programs of Kamala Harris. That’s why Joe Biden brought about 20 percent inflation and why inflation outpaced wages. It’s also why, even before Biden launched his massive spending initiatives, his White House forecast stagnated growth a decade into the future. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature: equality in stagnation.

Foreign Policy Coward: Extended to the realm of foreign policy, the woke ideology means weakness and surrender in the face of foreign predations. It treats muscular and self-confident American defense as a weakness and cowardice as virtue. Harris says she was the last person in the room on Afghanistan—and she probably was. Both she and Biden still brag about the worst foreign policy embarrassment of our lifetimes, in which billions in military equipment were left behind for the Taliban as erstwhile allies were hunted down or fell off wheel wells at Bagram Air Base where 13 American service members were blown up just trying to help innocent civilians escape, and which ended with 19 million women stuffed into burqas in basements and deprived of any hope of a normal or decent life.

It was that weakness that led Putin to invade Ukraine—and Biden’s first move was to offer Volodymyr Zelensky a plane ride out. Then Biden and team pursued the dumbest foreign policy available: a commitment to unspecified “victory” while slow-walking the actual aid that might attain something resembling it. Meanwhile, the Chinese are on the move, building steadily in the South China Sea, threatening Taiwan, and moving forward with every possible aggressive action short of war.

Move to the Middle East, and it’s the same story: Biden alienated the Saudis and Israelis in a misguided attempt to establish moral parity with Iran while simultaneously freeing up billions of dollars to Iran to spread terrorism. All this culminated in the current seven-front war launched on Israel by Iranian proxies, which began October 7, 2023. Hamas is still holding Americans hostages. Yet Biden and Harris have slow-walked aid to the Israelis too, while simultaneously undermining the government of Israel, openly threatening Israel with cutoffs in military shipments if they don’t take Biden-Harris advice on fighting Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran. And, most of all, Biden and Harris have been total cowards in standing up to the massive tsunami of Jew-hatred that has emerged from their own support base. Instead, Kamala Harris has implied that Israel is committing a genocide and that those protesting American support for Israel have a solid case.

Then, there’s the border. Because Kamala Harris believes that America is rooted in xenophobia and racism, she has presided over a wide-open border. There are only two reasons anyone in high office would do this: first, in order to change the voting demographic of the country; second, because they believe the United States somehow owes citizens of other countries residence in America thanks to the guilt of the United States. For Harris, undoubtedly both are true. 

Finally, I’m voting for Donald Trump because of the institutions.

I know this one seems to boggle minds, thanks to Donald Trump’s legal and public relations maneuvering between November 2020 and January 6, 2021. I saw no evidence of Trump’s contentions at the time, and said so; I thought his statements about Mike Pence’s ability to single-handedly refuse to certify votes was morally and factually wrong. I thought January 6 was wrong too, and tragic (although, to be sure, some of those prosecuted have certainly been over-prosecuted).

But Donald Trump is not the threat to the institutions of the United States. They survived him, with flying colors. Those who say there was not a peaceful transfer of power in January 2021 are simply lying. There was. That’s why Joe Biden took office without a military operation. It’s why Donald Trump left office as specified. The Constitutional checks and balances held up. And if Trump were to win, those particular checks and balances would never be implicated—specifically because Trump would have won, and thus there would be no further challenge to an election.

Democrats have far graver plans for our institutions. They say it openly. And what’s worse, they also plan to uphold the power of institutions that have totally lost their legitimacy.

Let’s begin with the institutions that must be preserved.

Supreme Court: The Supreme Court of the United States remains a bulwark institution in our Constitutional structure, of course. The power of judicial review is embedded in all of our legal structures. It was Democrats who killed the judicial filibuster, then whined when Mitch McConnell did the same in order to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. It is not the Republicans who threaten the Supreme Court. It is Harris, who has herself pledged to try to pack the courts or institute term limits. The Supreme Court is no longer the plaything of the left, and so the left will seek to destroy it.

Congress: Then, there’s the Senate. Harris has already said she would kill the filibuster, thus allowing controversial legislation to pass with a bare majority. Presumably, this would include the creation of two new states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, in an attempt to add four new Democratic senators. It would also include ramming through the so-called Equality Act, a grave violation of religious liberty; the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, federalizing election procedures and loosening protections against fraud and ballot harvesting; and other radical pieces of legislation. Meanwhile, it was Democrats who started the process of barring Republican nominees from committee assignments in the House; look for them to continue that practice and exacerbate it.

Department of Justice: For all the talk about President Trump attempting to weaponize the DOJ against his enemies, he never truly did. Hillary wasn’t locked up; Joe Biden wasn’t investigated. But Joe Biden has activated the DOJ against Trump. Democrats would certainly use the DOJ to target any political opponent they could, as they have Trump. Of course, that would only be the tip of the iceberg. Barack Obama’s IRS targeted his enemies too. The executive branch is large and powerful—and it is Democrats who have used it against their opponents.

Federalism: Harris would also be an ardent opponent of federalism, which divides power between the federal government and the states. Many have worried about the implications of the overruling of Roe v. Wade. But all that did is send the issue of abortion back to the states, where it originally was. Democrats pledge to give the federal government control over abortion and to do the same to nearly every issue. Democrats see federalism as the enemy and want a homogenous rule over all of the country. There are few policies better prone to lead to a breakdown of the union than that.

Churches and Families: Then, there are the institutions that matter most: churches and families, what Edmund Burke called the little platoons of society. These are the institutions that build social fabric—the places we make friends and share family, where we build lives together. Harris’s federal government crowds them out. Churches, in this view, so long as they do not become propagandists for the progressive worldview, are barriers to the rule of the elite and must be torn down. They must be targeted with tax law, broken in favor of abortion on demand. Families, too, are a danger, as they may, in fact, re-inculcate traditional virtue. Thus, federal policy must favor the destruction of families in favor of the values of the National Education Association and its friends: Children must be protected from their parents so that they can emerge from the chrysalis of left-wing values as full-fledged butterflies of wokeness. This is why Tim Walz’s Minnesota is a sanctuary state for so-called “transgender children”: Parents are the problem.

Then, there’s the other side of the coin: The institutions that deserve to be wrecked, but which Kamala Harris would preserve. 

Universities: The universities, for example, are the biggest scam in American life. Liberal arts studies have become indoctrination centers for the left; colleges now teach students to protest their own civilization rather than teaching them to be good citizens. And it is the left that has encouraged this. It is no coincidence that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was recently caught in an email telling the president of Columbia University to ignore Jew-hatred on campus, since only right-wingers were upset. The universities are the corrupt preserve of the radical left, and they are the breeding ground for Democratic donors and leaders. They are the engine of wokeness, and they ought to be torn down as they currently stand. Harris wouldn’t just preserve them; she would strengthen them by giving them billions of dollars in student loan bailout money.

Legacy Media: Next, of course, there is the legacy media. The legacy media are the tail end of the Democrat-Media Human Centipede; they ingest whatever Democrats tell them and then excrete the digested product onto the American people. That’s how the media spent two years telling us that Joe Biden was mentally competent, only to then flip when embarrassed and tell us he had to go, only to go right back to ignoring his mental decrepitude so as to preserve him in the presidency.

Not a day goes by in which the legacy media doesn’t prove to be a stenographer for Democrats. The same simply isn’t true for Republicans: When Republicans are in power, the legacy media hold them to account and treat them as the enemy. The legacy media must be wrecked by the free market—and that’s happening. But it won’t happen if Harris and her friends work to enshrine their monopolistic dominance by cracking down on the social media platforms that allow alternative media to thrive. And that’s precisely what they plan to do.

I’ve made the case here for Donald Trump and against Kamala Harris. There are good reasons to vote for Trump other than disliking Harris, as I’ve made clear. But here’s the funny thing about this election: Very few people think the opposite. Most Democrats believe that voting for Harris is worthwhile not because they can make an affirmative case for Harris; that case is essentially un-makeable. They can only make a case against Trump.

And that should worry you. See, here’s the thing: That case is speculative. And back before Donald Trump was president, I might even have agreed with that case: As I’ve said, I didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016. But then he was president. And so I know what his presidency will be: a solid economy, an excellent foreign policy, and a fight against woke ideology that endangers our future.

And I know what she will be, too. Because that’s not speculative either. Kamala Harris can’t name a single way she disagreed with Joe Biden. And Biden was a tool of the woke left. He presided over economic stagnation, foreign policy collapse, and the continued fraying of our social compact. She would do the same.

Which is why you should ignore all the alarmists. There is no mystery to this election. We know what Trump 2 would look like: Trump 1. And we know what Harris would look like: Biden 2. That’s the call. That’s the whole thing.

So you don’t have to love Donald Trump. Hell, you don’t even have to like Donald Trump. But you do need someone to fix the problems that plague the country, not exacerbate them. And that man is Donald Trump. Which is why I voted for him, and I hope you will too.

Ben Shapiro is the co-founder of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show.

Watch his debate with Sam Harris on Honestly, and read Sam’s closing argument on why you should vote for Kamala Harris here. 

For more coverage of the 2024 election, click here.

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