President Donald Trump in his first term cut taxes for middle-class families, appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and hundreds of good judges to lower courts. He also kept the United States out of needless wars.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in contrast, would use the presidency to force gender ideology on America, advance a radical pro-abortion agenda, and advance the steady creep of government over our economy.
Over the next four years, then, Trump would probably be better for America, from a conservative perspective.
But judging by the last eight years, another Trump term will also do plenty of harm to conservatism in the long run. Would the long-term pain outweigh the immediate, concrete benefits?
An honest conservative who engages in a thorough examination of this question has to admit to uncertainty. But being a conservative means admitting uncertainty.
Long-term costs
One needn’t be a clairvoyant to say with confidence that another Trump term will cause long-term harm to conservatism.
We can start with the political harms that are likely, and then progress to the cultural ones.
First, consider the 2026 and 2028 elections; with Trump in the White House they would probably produce big wins for Democrats. The 2026 Senate map favors Democrats already, and the out-of-power party typically gains seats in a midterm. So if we have President Trump, expect a Democratic House and Senate after just two years. Under a President Harris, on the other hand, it’s likely Republicans would retain Congress for the next four years.
Under Trump, we could expect the political backlash to be bigger than average. Look at what has happened to Republicans in the last eight years.
In 2016 Republicans controlled 31 governorships and 68 legislative chambers. Now they control only 27 governorships and 56 legislative chambers. The Trump era has been historically bad for the national standing of the GOP.
Republicans lost the Senate in 2020 because Democrats won two runoffs in Georgia thanks to Trump’s refusal to accept his reelection loss.
He is uniquely off-putting to a huge swath of the electorate, and as long as he’s atop the party, Democrats gain an edge.
Trump has also transformed the party so as to attract sub-par candidates such as Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
This not only leads to losses of winnable races, but also leads to lower quality lawmakers, who are less able to advance conservative legislation. Republican dysfunction in the House is at least partly a result of Trump building a cult of personality within the party and a platform for performers.
The Trump era has also seen conservatives become more prone to conspiracy theorizing. His Stop The Steal madness in 2020 was the clearest instance, but look at Marjorie Taylor Greene or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for other examples. Four more years of Trump running the GOP means four more years of conservatism conforming to Trumpism.
That is, Trump harms conservatives by making conservatives more like him — vulgar, dishonest, and disconnected from reality. At the same time, he harms conservatism and the GOP by turning people away from them.
Trump as wokeness fuel
Consider how opinions on abortion have changed since Trump took over the Republican Party.
In 2015, a bare majority of voters told the Pew Research Center that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and the pro-life side was gaining ground. Since 2016, though, America has become less pro-life and more pro-choice. By the time the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, the pro-choice side had a 61% to 37% advantage in polling.
This is part of a broader trend: In the Trump era, voters, particularly young adults and women, are becoming more left-wing, especially on social issues.
Voters born in the 1990s, those who became adults in the pre-Trump era but were still impressionable when Trump came to power, have become less Republican in the Trump years, surveys suggest.
A very slim majority of women identified as Democrats in the five years leading up to Trump (2010 to 2015). When Trump came into office, the number jumped to 57%.
In that same period, Democrats’ advantage among millennials jumped from a 15-point margin before Trump to a 27-point margin during Trump’s presidency.
The loss of young voters has continued throughout the Trump years. People aged 18 to 24 are twice as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, according to Pew’s latest numbers.
The trend is most visible in the rise of the single woke female, a demographic that is increasingly developing group consciousness and group politics — a left-wing politics.
There are many causes behind this trend, but by all appearances, Trump has accelerated the wokification of young women.
A moderator for the Free Press asked a panel of Gen Zers about this phenomenon, and two female college students pinned their demographic’s leftward shift on, “Donald Trump running for president.”
“Gen Z has only had really one Republican candidate to vote for in their entire life, and that’s been Donald Trump,” Amber, a College Democrat on the panel explained.
“He’s had a lot of sexist rhetoric,” Stella, another College Democrat said. Stella said she didn’t think the GOP was misogynistic as a whole, but that Trump’s rhetoric has scared away women. “He said you could do anything, grab ’em by the pussy, who cares. …. I think that deterred women from the Republican Party in general.”
So one long-term effect of Trump is making the younger generations less pro-life, more liberal, and more likely to vote Democrat. The longer he is the standard-bearer of the GOP, the more he pushes young people and women towards bad ideas and bad political allegiances, which may last the rest of their lives.
Political allegiance and policy views aren’t the worst part of this shift, though. More consequentially, the wokeward shift of young women means less marriage and less family formation.
As more young women become left-wing, they become less likely to marry and have children, in part because they come to believe that marriage and family are outdated. Less marriage and fewer families makes us a sadder, less hopeful, less loving culture.
A second Trump term
Four more years of Trump would likely deliver conservative victories, such as bring more good judges to the federal bench, and avoiding needless wars. There would also, however, be plenty of stuff conservatives will dislike.
Trump has reportedly pledged to lean on Kennedy for health policy. Kennedy has regularly pledged to use the power of big government to enforce his vegan, naturalist, anti-vaccine views on the public.
Trump wants to make the abortion issue go away, and he has pledged to mandate universal coverage for in vitro fertilization. If Trump has his way on these matters, it will harm conservatism in the long run.
A party that makes IVF a fundamental right loses credibility on abortion because IVF involves creating dozens of extra embryos. If you’re OK with creating embryos and storing them indefinitely in freezers, it’s hard to argue that you value unborn life. If you don’t value unborn life, you have no good grounds for opposing abortion.
Trump promises to undo the good tax reform he started in his first term. A conservative tax code has lower rates and fewer loopholes. Trump 2024 promises new loopholes every month — no tax on overtime, tips, etc. Making the tax code more complex plays into liberal hands because it transforms the code into a tool for social control.
The same is true for Trump’s tariff plans. Creating tariffs inevitably means creating exceptions from tariffs, which inevitably means more lobbying and special-interest pleading.
A more complex tax code and more tariffs suck business deeper into the swamp of dependence on and favors from the federal government. The more intertwined Big Business and Big Government get, the worse it is for small business and for freedom in general.
Fog of war
The above harms of a second Trump term aren’t certain, but they are likely. A discerning voter will ask himself if these harms outweigh the likely benefits of a Trump term.
Will conservatism be better served by a Trump win in 2024 or a Trump loss?
The conservative answer is: We don’t know.
Conservatism as a philosophy is rooted in intellectual humility. Conservatives embrace tradition because we believe that tradition includes thewisdom of succeeding generations, and rapid changes cause unintended harms. Conservatives generally oppose government meddling because we believe power corrupts and that clever central planners tend to cause more harm than good.
That humility ought to keep conservatives from saying with certainty whether Trump’s long-term harms will be outweighed by his short-term benefits.
If we cannot say whether a Trump presidency would be better in the long run than a Harris presidency that makes voting a different sort of question than it normally is.
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Some will vote based on the fact that they are more ideologically aligned with Trump, treating the vote as an expression of allegiance. Others will vote for Trump because they are so fed up with the Left, the news media, and the Democrats — a protest vote of sorts.
A different sort of conservative protest vote, though, would opt for a third party, a write-in vote, or a blank top line on the ballot. If you see a vote as an affirmative statement “this person ought to be president,” then it’s sensible to vote for neither Harris (whose plans are awful) nor Trump, who lacks the virtues that make one fit for the job.