In the culmination of months of speculation, on Tuesday, Rep. Justin Amash officially launched a third-party presidential bid, seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination to challenge President Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. The Michigan congressman is already coming under fire from both sides, as the establishment moves to swat down a potential disruption to the two-party status quo.
“He can’t win! Spoiler! Voting for Amash is just a vote for Biden/Trump!” the partisan agents and tribal loyalists will undoubtedly screech. Even if those charges were true — and they’re not — they wouldn’t actually matter. No one is owed your vote just by virtue of belonging to a party. Fundamentally, a presidential election poses a simple question: Who would be the best president? On that count, Amash is clearly superior to both alternatives.
Joe Biden is a frail septuagenarian who looks like he belongs in a nursing home, not on the campaign trail. I say this not to be cruel or glib, but because the former vice president now truly cannot speak in coherent full sentences half the time, regularly forgets what state he is in, and can’t even get through a television interview articulately — even when he’s obviously reading from notes.
The man is past his prime in every way, to say nothing of his, frankly, awful policy agenda.
Biden has arguably the worst foreign policy record of anyone still in mainstream American politics. The mistakes and miscalculations are almost too numerous to count: from his vote and subsequent cheerleading for the failed Iraq War that killed hundreds of thousands, support for unconstitutional military intervention in Syria, and continued commitment to our failed nation-building disaster in Afghanistan. (To his credit, Biden stood against the Obama administration’s intervention in Libya, a position clearly vindicated after our regime change push turned it into a failed state).
So, too, Biden’s domestic policy agenda is an incoherent hodgepodge of massive tax hikes, socialist healthcare-lite, foolish gun control measures, support for campus kangaroo courts and anti-due process policies, and taxpayer-funded abortion on demand —and his tax-and-spend policies, in particular, seem even less sustainable than before, given the pandemic.
Yet even still, perhaps the most frightening element of a prospective Biden presidency is not the man himself, but the increasingly radical Democratic Party types that would fill his administration. As Trump has argued, President Biden would likely be deposited in a nursing home while young ideologues would be allowed to run wild in his White House. Especially given Biden’s overtures to all-out socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, it’s not hard to imagine a Biden administration featuring Elizabeth Warren, who would defer government choices to transgender children, as Treasury secretary or crooked cop Kamala Harris as attorney general.
Amash would clearly make a much better president than the decrepit corpse of a Democrat establishmentarian who’s currently wandering his way to the November election. But we also must view the libertarian-conservative challenger in contrast to Trump, and this is where, for many on the Right, things get more complicated.
It’s understandable that many conservatives, even those who opposed Trump in 2016, have been pleased with the Trump presidency on many counts. He has given us constitutional stalwart Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, stuck up for due process and basic dignity by standing by Brett Kavanaugh, and filled the lower federal courts with qualified conservative jurists. Trump has also signed into law a mostly good tax cut, and his administration has pursued deregulation, educational freedom, a hands-off approach to hot-button cultural issues such as gay rights, and many other things libertarians and small-government conservatives alike can appreciate.
But the reason Amash is superior to Trump as a presidential prospect comes down to three things: Character, competence, and true commitment to small government.
Even Trump’s backers know he is a fundamentally indecent man. Between the dozens of sexual misconduct allegations against him, his bragging about such conduct, his alleged affair with a porn star, and the never-ending stream of petty insults spewing from his Twitter account, this has long since been made amply clear. Amash, on the other hand, is a fundamentally decent, honest, and respectable man, one whom voters of both parties could truly be proud of and who could model our values to the world.
Whereas Trump deals with criticism through lies, lashing out, and sometimes substantiated but always hyperbolic screeches about “fake news,” the “deep state,” and Never Trumpers, Amash embraces radical transparency. The congressman takes to social media to explain all of his votes and responds to queries with honesty, accountability, and openness about his record.
On the competence front, the divide is even more clear. Trump’s vitriolic and off-the-cuff style certainly has its upsides, but its downsides are too significant to be outweighed. If the coronavirus crisis has shown us anything, it’s that we cannot entrust the leadership of our country, a literal matter of life and death, to a man who must have his name sprinkled into national security reports or he won’t read them and whose lack of discipline leads him to speculate openly at presidential press conferences, at least uselessly, if not dangerously, about whether injecting disinfectant could cure the coronavirus.
Amash offers a serious and competent alternative to Trump. He’s also a formidable candidate whom conservatives might actually support, in sharp contrast to the Libertarian Party’s unserious and somewhat un-libertarian 2016 ticket.
And don’t forget the most important difference between Trump and Amash — the Libertarian candidate is fully committed to shrinking government. Sure, sometimes small government principles overlap with Trump’s agenda, often to positive outcomes. But in crucial areas such as the truly out-of-control national debt, to which Trump is totally indifferent, and job-killing anti-trade policies, which the president emphatically backs, the divide could not be more clear.
If you believe in the principle of limited government, the Libertarian challenger deserves your attention. But even if you don’t, if you do value competence, character, and rational policymaking, you should look into Amash. You may find you’re better off in his camp than backing Trump or Biden.
