I will begin this month by completing my political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. I explained what I am doing and set the ground rules in Part 1, and there assessed the Harris-Walz platform (summary | detail). Here I will conclude by assessing the Trump-Vance platform (summary | detail), and compare their scores. Already I must warn you, their policy document is startlingly amateurish and jingoistic, so it’s hard to take seriously. But I’ll try. And fair warning: their “expanded” policy descriptions (really just Donald Trump’s “rants”) are not well organized to the policy document, and are littered with additional claims, usually outrageous or absurd.

Also note that I am not scoring them for Project 2025. They disavow this publicly, so I will only score their own affirmed policies (which they call Agenda47); but you, as a voter, have every right to suspect their disavowal a sham. And in that event, there are already plenty of online analyses of that platform for you (from the ACLU, the CAP, the NAACP, FactCheck, Vox, etc.).

The Trump-Vance Platform

Trump’s slogan is “A Return to Common Sense,” which doesn’t actually connect with any policy vision (every path forward can be called that), or “Make America Great Again,” which doesn’t communicate anything (what do they mean by “great,” and in what decade was America the “great” thing they want to “bring back”? If they mean the 1950s, then Trump needs to completely revise his promised tax policy). But these slogans at least tell us what they want us to believe their platform particulars will achieve.

The Trump-Vance platform (on their campaign website) enumerates twenty promises, some of which are vacuous. For example, they promise to “unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success” (note I am here removing their caps lock), but they never expand on that. They don’t explain what “success” means or how they will “bring” that “record” success, or how it will “unite” our country. Per my rules of analysis, those claims go in the wastebin as empty blather. There is no policy there. Instead, they organize their platform into ten chapters, which contain a mixture of yet more empty blather but occasionally something near to a real policy (hitting most of the twenty promises in one way or another), even though they never cite any studies or science or expert polling in support of anything they claim.

• Inflation

They promise to “defeat inflation and quickly bring down all prices.” But they lie about the problem they intend to solve, claiming we are in “the worst inflation crisis in four decades.” We are not. In fact, inflation is now quite low, at only 2.5% and falling. It was worse under Reagan (interest rates, something in his expanded rant Trump also claims are “soaring,” are also, to the contrary, dropping, and were also worse under Reagan). Indeed, even the worst inflation under Biden was comparable to the 1990 Reagan-Bush recession. So there doesn’t seem to be a problem here to solve. The Biden administration beat them to solving it already (insofar as you can even credit a Presidential administration for “beating inflation”). Worse, cutting inflation won’t “bring down prices.” That would require deflation, which is generally economically bad, and thus not something any administration should be promising to pursue. There is a path to productive deflation, but it requires very specific conditions that can’t so easily be promised, and in any event require stating an actual and effective policy, not wishes and dreams.

So…what’s their actual plan? How will they lower inflation? (Much less prices, which is not the same thing.) They think they can do it by “unleashing energy production” including “nuclear,” but Biden already did that. Domestic oil production is higher now than ever, and Biden has already set the unleashing of more nuclear power. So there is no clear way any policy here can “do better” so as to reduce inflation further than it already will go from policies already in place. And at any rate, their platform paper does not say how they will do this anyway (here Trump’s long expanded rant is a litany of lies and non sequiturs). How can they increase energy production more than is already underway? Do they intend to spend trillions more on nuclear energy development? How will they pay for that? And how much could that even reduce inflation, much less prices? Because this same policy document claims that increasing taxes or government spending increases inflation (not its only contradiction, you’ll see).

Even their expanded rants don’t help here. They will say things like they will exit the “Paris Climate Accord” (again), but they don’t explain how that will impact any of this. That treaty does not put any brakes on energy production—that’s why Biden’s is at record highs already. There is no clear way it could be contributing to inflation or prices. So without connecting those dots, their wingeing about it is vacuous. Likewise, for example, they complain about Biden’s canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline (notably without promising to build it), but that was simply to extend the already-existing pipe transport of Canadian crude to more diverse American refineries. It would not substantially increase production or impact prices.

So what wizardry do they imagine accomplishing?

Since they don’t say, this gets a score of 0. On the fundamentals, Harris is already set to do all of this anyway, so there is no policy distinction here, even insofar as there is any policy here.

Next they claim they can “immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending” (sic) but they do not explain how that would even work (much less “immediately”). This appears, again, to be a problem already solved. The spike in stimulus spending to survive the pandemic caused the spike in inflation; but that spending has already been cut. So there is nothing left to cut that would impact inflation. They seem to hope readers of this document don’t know that it is not government spending that causes inflation, but sudden spikes in stimulus spending that does (emphasis on spikes and stimulus). In fact that was the point of it: to reverse the deflationary contraction of the economy under the pandemic. But that’s in the past. The government could be spending a lot more on social services like universal healthcare, and inflation would be unaffected. Compare inflation in Canada and Sweden, just to pick two at random: they spend way more on their citizens as percentage of GDP, yet are no worse off in inflation.

Their document also doesn’t say how government spending will be slashed—so again, there is no real policy here. Even in their expanded rants, they don’t say. For example, Trump has a long rambling ra-ra for “impoundment” policy, but never explains what they can impound or how they can do it without Congress already agreeing to, which is just a dog chasing its tail: if Congress will cut spending, you don’t need an impoundment loophole; whereas if Congress won’t curt spending, they won’t let you impound it either. So you end up back at the same place you started.

Moreover, if the government is already at max-lean, there isn’t anything to cut. The only appreciably large budget items we have are the military, and social security and medicare (and pensions for retired federal employees), which typically Trump and the GOP swear they won’t cut. But there isn’t anything else to cut. Everything else is too small a budget item to have any impact by cutting. The next largest line-item is servicing our national debt—but the only way to bring that down is to raise revenue, which means, returning to a more sane and rational tax regime, not “cutting taxes,” which only makes things worse.

Anyway, they have no policy here; so, score 0.

Their next suggestion is to cut government regulations. But they don’t mention any to cut. Even in Trump’s bizarre extended rant about this, where ironically he suggests he will cut regulations by implementing even more regulations, he never specifies any such regulations he will cut, or explain how it will save any money, much less reduce inflation, even less prices (which, again, is still not the same thing). This is true even of his extended weird rant about a litany of Biden housing market regulations that don’t exist as described. For example, I don’t think Trump knows what the AFFH actually does; and he confuses Biden’s incentives (not mandates) to reduce regulations by eliminating many zoning restrictions—which would in turn reduce housing prices—as somehow increasing regulations that Trump can then cut so as to (!) reduce housing prices. I cannot believe Trump knows a whit of what he is talking about here. But either way, their policy lacks any specific example of a regulation (as opposed to the absence of one, or incentives rather than mandates), or how cutting that specific regulation (whatever it is supposed to be) would save money, or curb inflation, or reduce prices. So it’s hard to discern a policy here.

I discussed this problem last time when I dinged Harris for the same vaguery about “cutting regulations.”

Trump and Vance also don’t explain how this would help with inflation. They claim Trump’s deregs “saved Americans $11,000 per household” (no citation) but that metric confuses an increase in discretionary spending power with a decrease in inflation or prices. So I’ll chalk this up to their semantically annoying but politically tolerable lumping together of different ways to improve spending power for ordinary Americans, and assess the policy that way. First, is it even true? Eleven thousand dollars is not a plausible amount average families could have been spending each year on regulations before Trump that they aren’t now. And Trump has publicly said the amount is a lot less, only $3000. So someone is lying. Even three thousand is implausible, and lacks any real evidence to support it.

The issues are complex, but generally, regulations do have a cost. For example, regulating weights and measures costs money to maintain and police, and those costs get transferred to everyone in prices and taxes. But regulations also generate revenue. For example, far more income is made by everyone (consumers as well as producers and retailers) in result of regulating weights and measures, because it unleashes confidence in markets that results in vastly more business and trade. That’s why this was one of the earliest and most successful government regulations, as old as Athens itself, and is widely agreed to generate vastly more money and growth than it “costs.” A more obvious example of this effect is regulating crime: this costs money (privately: alarm systems, security guards, losses; publicly: police, courts, prisons); but the result of reduced crime is increased trade and decreased economic losses, such that the system ends up making more money the better it is policed and protected against crime, so the associated costs produce a return on investment. In either example, “cutting regs” would actually cause more expenses to the average citizen.

The Trump calculus ignores the return on the investment part, just counts the costs, and assumes this is a good thing—when obviously, in those two examples, it would be a terrible thing. They also egregiously lie about the numbers, often inflating even their estimated costs by a factor of a hundred. But that’s not even the most problematic thing about this claim. The real issue is that we cannot assess whether “cutting regs” is good or bad without a full accounting of the costs of deregulation. So you need a more specific policy proposal than just “we’ll cut some regs somewhere, and boom, you’ll have thousands of dollars in your pockets!” What regs are they going to cut? And how will that be a net gain monetarily? Moreover, Harris already makes the same vague promise to cut “red tape” and unnecessarily burdensome “regulations.” So there is no policy distinction even at that scale of analysis.

Score: 0.

Their next suggestion is one of their platform’s Universal Solutions (it comes up as a pretended solution to almost every problem): closing our borders and deporting undocumented immigrants.

They claim not doing this has “driven up the cost of Housing, Education, and Healthcare for American families” (sic). But they don’t document that even being true; nor do they provide any accounting of how they will pay for any of this (much less assess the impact of those costs back again on “American families”). Immigrants don’t really have a large impact on housing prices (every 1% increase in population causes only a 1% increase in housing costs; and even by Trump’s absurdly false estimates of the undocumented immigrant population, they amount to less than a 1% increase in the population). For healthcare, immigrants actually reduce costs—because they pay more into the system than they use. And it’s not clear what impact they have on education costs. Public school is free, but assuming Trump means in “taxes” paying for it, undocumented immigrants also pay taxes, and indeed pay more than they receive in benefits (contrary to Trump’s ranting); and immigrants also spend their money, so they boost economies and thus bolster even citizen wages and income, thus also offsetting any increased costs. They even help defeat inflation while growing the economy (they don’t steal American jobs—they fill jobs Americans aren’t stepping up to do; and then create jobs because they buy stuff). So, really, any problems our education system is facing are due to our under-investing in it relative to other countries. To illustrate what I mean: the stated Trump-Vance desire to increase the native population will create all the same problems. So clearly, increasing the population isn’t really what they think the problem is.

So since “stopping all immigration” won’t have any of the effects they claim, I wont score this here (I’ll treat their immigration policy on its own terms later).

Finally, they have this strange policy proposal: “War breeds Inflation while geopolitical stability brings price stability,” which is (sort of) true, so “Republicans will end the global chaos and restore Peace through Strength, reducing geopolitical risks and lowering commodity prices.” The non sequitur is perplexing. First, we aren’t in any wars (and thus inflation isn’t increasing). Second, while others’ wars can still add to our costs (directly, through allied funding, and indirectly, through market impacts), they have not actually explained what they will do about that. For example, Putin’s failed illegal conquest of Ukraine raised oil prices here and food prices abroad, but those have gone back down since; and Trump and Vance aren’t saying what they will actually do to end that war (or any other), or how that will improve the price of anything in America. It is also self-contradictory to claim you will “end the global chaos” without “going to war.”

So what magical policy are they imagining? The best one might guess is that they mean by “Strength” spending more on our military so as to “be scary” and threaten everyone with war (per rant after rant)—but that’s precisely the thing that raises inflation in wartime. Wartime spending without a war is illogical when you just said wartime spending is bad. And it’s even worse when you state no plan to pay for it. And that’s all apart from the problem of what happens when someone calls your bluff—threatening war does not always get you peace. Case in point: in his expanded rants Trump outlines declaring and prosecuting a literal full-scale international war on “drug cartels.” This from the guy who just said war is bad for the economy. I don’t know how to score a direct self-contradiction like this, so I have to go with the policy document over the video-taped rant, and not downscore this unimaginably expensive world war.

Since that leaves Trump’s “no war” statements devoid of any specific policy, and only a general vision that is hopelessly obscure and illogical, which lacks any explanation of how it would lower prices, it definitely scores 0. Leaving this entire policy section at 0.

• Immigration

Trump vows to close our borders to end “a tidal wave of illegal Aliens, deadly drugs, and Migrant Crime,” which is another false premise. There is no migrant crime wave. Almost all of the people he is talking about are refugees and laborers. Mexican border crossers are also way down relative to their peak under Bush-Cheney; the increase is now mostly made up of refugees from war and oppression (and are mostly entering legally). The rest are seeking jobs (and we actually need the labor, and benefit from it, so we should be giving them work visas). And the “deadly drug” crisis won’t be solved by policing immigration. More people are killed by legal drugs; and the drug war shouldn’t exist anyway. Legalize, tax, and regulate should be the policy, just like the last time; and national mental healthcare would solve most of the remaining problems. All of which renders Trump’s associated rant on drugs a mere litany of lies, vagueries, false premises, impossibilities, or trivialities that signal no plausibly realizable difference from actual Biden-Harris policies. But set that aside. Fact is, “deadly illegal drugs” are predominately smuggled in by American citizens, and literally driven or flown across the border legally. So Trump’s plan won’t work.

More importantly, Harris already backed the solutions to the “immigration crisis” that Trump wants—Trump is the one who killed the bill. Moreover, Harris does not discuss this in her platform documents, but she has repeatedly called for increased funds to police the border, and other solutions; and has already helped Biden enact policies against drug trafficking, compared to which Trump has proposed nothing better. So there is no policy difference here (just hypocrisy from Trump). That alone would score this a 0.

But it gets worse…

What actual policies does Trump promise to enact to “solve” the immigrant “problem”?

• His policy doc says they will “complete the Border Wall” (which will have no effect and cost tens of billions of dollars he does not explain how he will pay);
• “halt all releases of Illegal Aliens into the interior” (which will cost billions more dollars he does not explain how he will pay—the reason we exercise parole programs is to save money, due to rising backlog, and it is only for applicants who have a prima facie claim for asylum, a fact to which Trump rants his total indifference);
• “shift massive portions of Federal Law Enforcement to Immigration Enforcement” (which means a massive loss of funding for domestic law enforcement, a disastrous decision to say the least);
• “use advanced technology to monitor and secure the Border” (they never explain what that will be, nor explain how they will pay for it);
• move “thousands of Troops currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border” (presumably at zero net cost—but what will be the consequences of removing all our military capability-and-defense around the world?—I thought their policy was Peace through Strength, not surrendering every position we hold?);
• “deploy the U.S. Navy to impose a full Fentanyl Blockade on the waters of our Region—boarding and inspecting ships to look for fentanyl and fentanyl precursors” (without explaining how he will pay for this brobdingnagian task, or why surrendering even our control of all the world’s seas would be a good thing, or in line with their alleged global Peace through Strength policy—or how this can be done without severely slowing our supply chain, which we now know is not a good thing);
• refuse all refugees and asylum seekers (which is inhumane);
• refuse all (sic) “Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists” (contrary to the basic rights enumerated in the United States Constitution);
• use “extreme vetting to ensure that jihadists and jihadist sympathizers are not admitted” (we already don’t “admit” such people, but you should be disturbed by the dogwhistle of “sympathizers,” which can ominously mean any “political opponent” of the Trump regime, and “extreme” vetting, which ominously sounds like harassment—an abusive treatment of anyone remotely describable as a “Christian-hating Communist, Marxist, or Socialist” or, say, looks or sounds Arab or Asian);
• police everyone “overstaying Visas” and “remove all known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States” and “Begin Largest Deportation Program in American History” (without explaining how this ungodly task will be paid for, or how “all” such people will even be found);
• “returning all trafficked children to their families in their Home Countries” (we already do that);
• “cut federal Funding to sanctuary jurisdictions that release dangerous Illegal Alien criminals onto our streets, rather than handing them over to ICE. We will require local cooperation with Federal Immigration Enforcement” (you can explore why this is even just pragmatically a terrible idea);
• “prioritize Merit-based immigration” (we already do that; rather, they mean making baby Jesus cry by turning away “useless refugees,” and, given their closing promise to “end Chain Migration,” which perhaps they don’t fully understand, I think they also mean to exclude spouses and family members, but that would not square with their stated belief in the importance of supporting families and that family labor—child care and elder care—is meritorious and valuable);
• “ensuring those admitted to our Country contribute positively to our Society and Economy and never become a drain on Public Resources” (the statistics show that’s already the case, per links above; in fact, it is citizens who are substantially more likely to freeload and commit crimes).

This list of policies is disastrous. Its price tag alone would bankrupt our country. While the other consequences (from national and global security, to the constitution and our humanity) are equally bad. This is such a catastrophic policy it has to score a full -1. Harris has far safer, more effective, and less costly solutions to any of the issues that really exist here. Trump is now at -1.

As an aside, their policy document doesn’t mention it, so I won’t score it, but Trump’s Agenda47 rants include a lot of “the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers” anti-crime rhetoric. It is an empirical fact that that has no effect on crime rates, and any benefit you can imagine for it is more than offset by the inevitable increase in innocent people it will kill. The death penalty is not a solution to anything; it is itself rather a problem. So if you are a voter against the death penalty, this dings Trump in your column. Likewise, it’s also not in the doc, but Trump rants about eliminating birthright citizenship, on the basis of a completely bollocksed reading of the Constitution. Even the conservative Cato Institute called bullshit on that. Another thing not in the doc but in an Agenda47 rant is a vow to outlaw “ESG investments,” an astonishing interference in free markets coming from a Republican (Reagan is turning in his grave). Since it’s unconstitutional (courts have consistently ruled such laws violate investors’ freedom of speech and association guaranteed in the first amendment) and not in the doc, I won’t score it. But do be aware.

• Economy

Here Trump and Vance propose to “slash Regulations that stifle Jobs, Freedom, Innovation and make everything more expensive” (sic). But, once again, as they don’t list any such regulations, this doesn’t count as a policy (as I noted before, even Harris couldn’t score with this). A more substantive policy is their pledge to “Make Trump Tax Cuts Permanent and No Tax on Tips.” However, Harris is also doing the no-tax-on-tips thing (and with more specifics), so that can’t score, leaving the “Trump Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” thing, a.k.a. tax cuts for the rich. But Trump’s tax policy is disastrous. It made our national debt worse, even further reducing our spending-revenue (which has to be diverted to service the debt); and this is even worse given the vastly expensive new projects Trump’s platform is piling on as part of his policy program, which require raising, not reducing, revenues (for a business to cut revenue and expand and expect to do better is not the kind of ill logic I would expect from someone who is supposed to be a businessman—though, of course, Trump is actually bad at this). We need to return to something closer to the tax policy that drove our most successful economy, which was the late 1950s (see above). But that aside, as Trump’s policy is multiply disastrous here, it scores another -1; putting him now at -2.

The Trump-Vance platform also claims here that they will (sic) “continue forging an America First Trade Policy” and “standing up to Countries that cheat” and “prioritizing American Producers over Foreign Outsourcers” and “bring our critical Supply Chains back home,” but they never give any examples of any of these things, and they never explain how they will do any of these things, or how they will pay for it. So this is all another non-policy, and as such cannot score. Even in the expanded rants we don’t get anything intelligible. For example, Trump rants about Biden driving up drug shortages by not enforcing a buy-American-only policy, which is contradictory (the policy Trump wants would drive up shortages by grossly shrinking accessible supply; the Biden “buy anywhere” policy makes more drugs available), and counterfactual (drug shortages are already declining under Biden, and Trump offers no specific policy to accelerate this that isn’t already being implemented). There is nothing wrong with wanting to expand our local production capacities; but to have a “policy” you need to be more specific about what (which drugs; why those) and how (physically and financially).

• Affordability

Here Trump-Vance make a lot of vague promises, but again propose no actual policies. For example, they say they “will reduce mortgage rates by slashing Inflation” but don’t explain how that will work (housing and rents don’t track to inflation; at most rising housing costs contribute to inflation, but less the other way around) and we already saw they had no credible plan to reduce inflation any more than it already is anyway. They say they will “open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction” but that doesn’t make any sense. Housing prices are not for want of land, but for want of construction. And yet Trump’s expanded rant bizarrely imagines us saving money (!) by building entirely new cities in the wilderness and revamping our entire transportation industry with flying cars that don’t exist (I’m literally not kidding—needless to say, neither thing will ever happen). Then they handwave to “Tax Incentives and support for first-time buyers” but unlike Harris (who presented a genuine upscored policy on this), they don’t propose any actual policy we can evaluate. At most they say they will “cut unnecessary Regulations that raise housing costs” but Harris said that, too, and she seems far better informed on the matter, and yet I still gave her no score for this by itself because she, also, did not give any evaluatable specifics.

Then they say they will “reduce the cost of Higher Education” by supporting “the creation of additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree,” but again they give no examples or specifics. In his expanded rant, Trump envisions spending “billions and billions” of dollars to create a totally free online university called “The American Academy,” which he claims will be paid for by money that won’t exist—since in no way will he ever succeed in “taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments,” at all, much less to end up with “billions” of dollars. Of course an “online university” is way too sketchy a promise coming from Donald Trump. But it still isn’t a policy—because we already have what he means: it’s called The Internet; or if you want a more specific example, Khan Academy. What will be different about his plan? For example, how will one’s progress be vetted so as to be certified as real—the entire purpose of a degree? And how will people “go” to this college while working multiple jobs—the actual problem with college? And with no real money to spend on it, how can it even exist? Lacking any plausible specifics, this gets a score of 0. (You might also notice they often mix up subjects; this should be in their Education chapter, but whatever.)

To reign in “healthcare and prescription drug costs” they promise to “increase Transparency, promote Choice and Competition, and expand access to new Affordable Healthcare and prescription drug options,” but this is just a vacuous string of words. There is no discernible policy in here. What do they mean by transparency, and how will it reduce costs? And how will it be any different from what Biden or Harris are doing? How can they increase choice and competition? The ACA already maximizes that in the healthcare market. So what do they mean to do here? Trump promised this last time; and it was one of his most infamous failures to deliver. While what they’ve been hinting at in public lately is disastrous. I would down-score on that point, but since their policy doc lists no policy at all, and in his last presidency none materialized, I will assume this scores a 0 for simply being an empty promise, and not clouds foreboding an American nightmare. The same goes for his associated yet weirdly vague rants on “chronic illnesses”, wherein no policy is described, just vague threats to sue “Big Pharma” for some inadequately stated reason (maybe a dogwhistle to antivaxxers, but it’s not in the doc, and too vague to call),

Trump also vows not to touch medicare or social security, but so does Harris. Another score of 0 (I discussed their relative honesty on this point last time; here I’m just scoring the promise—you can decide as a voter which of them will keep it). Trump also here introduces his vaguest of promises to “reduce the Regulatory burden, lower Energy costs, and promote Economic Policies that drive down the cost of living and prices for everyday goods and services,” which is another complete absence of any stated policy—he simply never is clear what these “Economic Policies” will ultimately be, and nothing is offered in their platform document. As for how he will lower Energy costs compared to Harris, I addressed that above (and see my discussion of the Harris-Walz energy policy plan in Part 1). Likewise this vague notion of cutting “regulations.”

As there are no policies here, Trump gets a 0, leaving him still at a net -2.

• Trade and Labor

Under this category Trump and Vance promise to “balance trade.” How? First, with those infamous “baseline Tariffs on Foreign made goods,” which will in fact be a disaster in almost every measurable way. This scores an automatic -1, bringing him now to -3. Ironically, Trump adds that he will also do this with the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, even though this is self-contradictory. It would inevitably lead to all our goods to be tariffed by everyone else (equal tariffs, remember?), and promising to cut our tariffs if they cut theirs would eliminate Trump’s entire tariff plan (China can just use the TRTA to eliminate Trump’s tariffs on them!). I can only assume they aren’t even paying attention to their own policy platform.

And no surprise, as Trump’s associated rants are rife with ignorance of basic economic principles—e.g. our trade deficit is already declining, has often been larger, and isn’t inherently bad; and his grasp of the history of U.S. tariff policy is below even amateurish. Trump’s entire desire to eliminate foreign tariffs on U.S. exports by “reciprocating” on imports also contradicts his hostility to exactly such policies. Because in case you didn’t notice, what he’s talking about is a free trade treaty—hence NAFTA is a TRTA; yet Trump rails against NAFTA. So it is clear Trump literally does not know what he is talking about in this area. I imagine they would try to harrumph this inconsistency away with some sort of handwaving, but that would just admit this is a dumb policy they have no intention of ever actually implementing as described. Score, 0.

They also claim (sic) “As Tariffs on Foreign Producers go up, Taxes on American Workers, Families, and Businesses can come down” which is literally false: tariffs are taxes on “American Workers, Families, and Businesses,” since almost all the cost will be transferred to them. Tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, and the importer has to pass the cost on to their customers, where it gets transferred all the way downstream to consumers; while local producers will capitalize on this by raising their prices to claim the dividend, thus producing a universal sales tax. But that just reiterates why their policy already scored a -1.

They particularly have a “screw China” policy that is not all that brilliant. There are issues with China, warranting serious-minded policy (even some targeted tariffs are sound). But Trump just rants and rants and rants about it. They say they “will revoke China’s Most Favored Nation status,” but since all that means is that they can tariff China, it’s not an additional policy. They say they will “phase out imports of essential goods” and “bring home critical supply chains,” but don’t explain which “goods” or “chains” that means here, or how they will accomplish this, or how they will pay for it. And in any case, in simple math the goal is impossible, because Americans consume vastly more goods and services than they have the labor to produce themselves, which is precisely why we depend on China’s billion-worker labor market. So that’s another absence of a policy. There is a sensible idea in there (as I discussed last time in Part 1), but Trump seems unaware of how to find a way to it. They also say they will “stop China from buying American Real Estate and Industries” but they are unclear how they will do this, how they will pay any costs of China’s trade retaliations for it, or even why it needs to be done. China buys almost no agricultural land, and very little of anything else, while Chinese-national home ownership in the U.S. is already in steep decline. So this appears to be a non-problem (Trump’s associated rant here is just fact-distorted hysteria). On balance (negatives against positives against pointlessness) it scores 0.

Then they claim they will “revive the U.S. Auto Industry by reversing harmful Regulations” but (yet again) don’t mention any, or how this will help, making this another non-policy that can’t be evaluated—with one exception: they suggest “canceling Biden’s Electric Vehicle and other Mandates” (Trump’s expanded rant on this is barely intelligible, but actually he means emissions standards). I personally think this would be a bad policy on their own metric, since they’d be killing jobs and causing the U.S. to fall behind in the world market for an essential future technology. It would also be bad for the environment and thus entail increased costs for everyone, all the way down the line (see why We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming—it’s not for the cute penguins). However, since this is a technical matter of whether or where a mandate should be set (or how it should be structured), which has arguments pro and con (since there are other ways to meet the same goals), I’ll score it at 0. Likewise for their “preventing the importation of Chinese vehicles.” There isn’t really a significant market in the U.S. for “Chinese vehicles.” But Biden has already acted against them, and Harris will likely continue that policy. So Trump has no distinctive policy position here to score.

• Elder Care

Trump complains about “corrupt politicians” who “have robbed Social Security to fund their pet
projects” (that’s not quite true, but he doesn’t name anyone, so who cares). To combat this he says he will “ensure the long-term sustainability of Social Security,” but since he never offers a single suggestion as to how (even his extended rant just lists a bunch of things that don’t have any causal connection to this issue), that’s another non-policy. Score 0. He likewise claims he “will protect Medicare’s finances from being financially crushed by the Democrat plan to add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare,” but since no such plan exists, score 0.

Trump says he “will support increased focus on Chronic Disease prevention and management, Long-Term Care, and Benefit flexibility,” but he doesn’t state any policies that would accomplish any of those things (though I must admit “Benefit flexibility” sounds like code for cutting benefits; and I already noted the “chronic disease” thing sounds like an anti-vaxx dogwhistle). Likewise, they “will expand access to Primary Care and support Policies that help Seniors remain in their homes and maintain Financial Security,” but they don’t describe how they will do any of that, or how they will pay for it (which I’m not the only one to notice). He also says he “will shift resources back to at-home Senior Care, overturn disincentives that lead to Care Worker shortages, and support unpaid Family Caregivers through Tax Credits and reduced red tape,” but again states no specifics, so this is another non-policy that can’t be evaluated. Harris states the same policy goal, but I also scored her at zero for offering no particulars.

That’s all they have here. Trump holds at -3.

• Education

Besides what they already said in an unrelated chapter (per above), Trump and Vance also “will support schools,” I assume they mean secondary and primary schools, “that focus on Excellence and Parental Rights” (no details as to what that means in the doc—though in the associated rant, it means stopping non-existent gender-surgery) and “support ending Teacher Tenure” (which is contradictory, as this is not under federal control, and they end this section declaring for states’ rights), “adopting Merit pay” (ditto; and also, no details as to what they mean or how they will implement it, much less fund it), and “allowing various publicly supported Educational models” (again, no details in the doc, while this or that rant has a random laundry list of ideas, most half-baked, falsely premised, or not under federal control), and enforcing “Universal School Choice” (which the rant confirms is code for vouchers to Christian private schools, an unconstitutional plan that would devolve and corrode the American education system and make us increasingly uncompetitive on the world stage). They will also “support Homeschooling,” which will further devolve and corrode the American education system. They say they will “expand 529 Education Savings Accounts” and though their policy document doesn’t explain what they mean (expand how and for what?), Trump’s expanded rant says what analysts feared: he means to give parents a $10,000 tax deduction for homeschooling kids, which is not a great idea. We need to pay more for better teachers, not lose revenue for worse teachers.

These decisions are starting to add up to a negative.

They also say they will support tooling schools to make kids suitable for jobs, with things like “project-based learning” and “schools that offer meaningful work experience,” but they offer no actual policy for how they would do this, or how they would pay for it if it’s to be done the usual way (which is by the federal government bribing state school systems to comply with the policy—the policy that has yet to be specified). It’s a neat idea. But as it’s attached to no actionable policy, I can’t score it. Likewise, when they say they will “fund proven career training programs,” they give no details—how will a program be rated as “proven” so as to be eligible, and how much money will be in this fund, and how will they pay for that?

But then they go predictably fascist by insisting they “will expose politicized education models,” which is code for state censorship and federal interference in states’ rights, but since it is again attached to no actual policy, it can’t be scored by itself. Likewise they “will support overhauling standards on school discipline,” but give no examples (not even in his rant), nor explain how they (the federal government) will do this (as schools are state controlled), or what it will amount to, or how they will pay for it. What exactly do they mean needs changing in “standards on school discipline”? And what changes are they proposing? They don’t say. So the claim can’t be vetted. No score. (Though you might infer they have nothing good in mind, they also have no proposed way of implementing it.) Likewise when they say they will “advocate for immediate suspension of violent students” (which is anti-empirical) and “support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning” (which is disturbingly worded—did they just say they intend to turn schools into prison bunkers?—Trump’s rant describes arming teachers and piling in armed guards in all schools, at evidently outrageous expense). Those also come with no attached policy (what exactly do they mean; how will they do it; what will it cost; how will they pay for it?).

They then say they “will restore Parental Rights in Education” (how so?) and “enforce our Civil Rights Laws to stop schools from discriminating on the basis of Race” (where is that happening?). They are unclear what they mean, but I suspect this was preamble to their next claim, that they will “ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda” like Critical Race Theory and Gender Indoctrination (a.k.a. they want fascist anti-scientific censorship and 1984-style government control of public knowledge). Here, finally, they actually propose a specific policy action: “We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars” and will instead “reinstate the 1776 Commission,” and related mandates.

All of this, in sum, wins them a score of -1. Because fascist anti-scientific censorship and 1984-style government control of public knowledge, on top of degrading our entire educational system, is not only inherently evil, it’s a really bad precedent. Once you admit government gets to rewrite facts, your enemies will rewrite your facts as soon as they hold the reins of the monster you made. As history should have taught them by now. But conservatives are really, really bad at history.

Trump is now batting -4.

But it gets worse. They vow they “will champion the First Amendment Right to Pray and Read the Bible in school, and stand up to those who violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.” Since students already have those rights, they can only mean something else: they want to compel students to be subject to these things (class prayer, sports prayer, classroom bible reading), which is what it actually means to “violate the Religious Freedoms of American students.” This gets them another -1. So their abolition of the Founding Fathers’ entire dream of separation between church and state, and producing instead a stepwise theocracy, gets them to -5.

Ironically they conclude all this with a vow to “Return Education to the States,” after having just listed a bunch of federal interferences in state control of schools. Again, they weren’t really paying attention when they assembled this document. Anyway, what they mean is, really: “we are going to close the Department of Education” (without explaining what department, then, will be implementing and enforcing all the national school regulations they just proposed). Ironically, their reasoning is that “the United States spends more money per pupil on Education than any other Country in the World, and yet we are at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results” (neither statement is true, though it exaggerates a truth). Except that’s not federal money they mean (so why is putting all the power onto states going to help here?), nor is that how “any other country in the world” solved this problem: they all have far stronger equivalents to the department of education than we do (and the most successful countries all employed similar solutions despite very different local cultures, so one should take notice). Which means an empiricist would go in that direction, not abolish the thing globally proved to work better than what we are doing.

This is all disastrous. We need a more effective and scientific department of education, curating “best practices” models of evidence-based education policy that is skills-based and templated for states to choose from and execute, so citizens can become better and more informed critical thinkers, and thus better voters, and strong competitors on the world market. Turning us into a third-world country by abolishing our department of education entirely is empirically bad.

So here they get another -1. Now they are at -6.

I will note one other irony, even though it’s not a policy statement and so doesn’t score: in their cheesy outro here they declare, “Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party,” after having just said they’d kill their tenure protections, dictate their curriculum, divest schools of federal money, and push for home and private schooling. That doesn’t sound very cherishing and protective of teachers to me. Why not just pay them more and improve their effectiveness and quality, like every other country did?

But anyway, moving on…

• Random Patriotic Things

That concludes pretty much anything that passes for substantive policy or even “concepts” of policy in the Trump-Vance platform document. Their closing chapters contain a grab bag of things they either already covered or that are weirdly trivial and seem only to reflect some kind of performative patriotism that is hard to evaluate as actually being worth anything. But it’s in their platform. And some of it actually counts as vettable policy. So let’s keep going…

They suggest they will add funding or somehow take over and regulate “Police Departments,” but with no specifics (much less how they will pay for or accomplish this or why it would be good). By itself there is nothing to evaluate in that. But they get more specific when promising to protect “Officers from frivolous lawsuits,” and in his associated rant Trump adds yet more specifics (e.g. he will “require” police “receiving DOJ grants to return to proven policing measures such as stop-and-frisk,” which is actually a proven failure, and deploy “the National Guard to restore law and order when local law enforcement refuses to act,” which is illegal). All of this ominously sounds like they mean to give total criminal and civil immunity to American police, unleashing the most lawless and savage police force in the developed world, reverting us again to a third-world country. Likewise when they claim they “will stand up to Marxist Prosecutors.” What is a “Marxist Prosecutor” and how will they “stand up” to them? Trump’s expanded rant basically answers with what you expect: that they intend to weaponize lawfare to punish their political opponents. For all of this I must downscore them with a -1.

Trump is now at -7.

They vow they “will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage, the blessings of childhood, the foundational role of families, and supports working parents” and “will end policies that punish families” but they give no examples and thus advance no actual policies here, again. There is also a vague proposal to “beautify” D.C. and clear it of all crime, but they don’t say how. Even their claim to “reassert greater Federal Control over Washington, DC” in order to do that is void of any specific policy. Even when they say they will “ensure Federal Buildings and Monuments are well-maintained,” they have something like a policy, but it is unclear how it differs from their opponents. We can be sure Harris will also be doing this. So one might wonder if this is, instead, some hint at protecting monuments to racism from being swapped out for monuments to something more moral and humane, but again, they don’t say. They give no examples. There is no policy to assess.

They also say they will “defend the Right of every American to live in peace” and “compassionately address homelessness to restore order to our streets” but don’t say what either of these things means, or how either thing will be achieved. There is no policy here. Just vague wingeing about vague problems, and vacuous posturing. However, Trump’s expanded rant on this describes things like rounding up the homeless into isolated concentration camps (“tent cities” away from population centers), and funding new insane asylums to incarcerate them in—and he explicitly includes homeless veterans in this policy plan. He also describes expanding draconian punishments for homelessness, albeit with vague references to “help” or “treatment,” but no actual policy attending those words (what help, at what cost, and how will it be paid for?). The policy is too ominous and ill-sketched to get a positive score, but is also too vague to get a negative score. It’s conceivable a tolerable treatment-and-help policy could condense out of Trump’s deranged rhetoric on this issue, after being honed in the crucible of Congress. Although as a voter, you have reason to doubt it—to wit…

They then say they will support veterans by ending “luxury housing and Taxpayer benefits for Illegal Immigrants and use those savings to shelter and treat homeless Veterans.” But none of that exists. “Illegal immigrants” don’t receive taxpayer benefits (though as already noted, they often do pay into them); and there is no such “luxury housing”, but tiny studio and one-bedroom units, and not for “illegal immigrants” but homeless U.S. citizens—and that isn’t using any federal money that they could “redirect,” and it already prioritizes veterans. So there is no policy to vet. There is no “pot of money” here that they can transfer to “homeless veteran” care.

Even when Trump’s expanded rant says he will redirect “shelter and transport of illegal aliens” to homeless veterans, no actual policy is stated—how can you round up “illegal aliens” and stage their exportation with no funding to transport and shelter them? What extra money is there to move here? It would be a great policy that I would score for if they actually said they would spend substantial money on ending veteran homelessness, but since they are saying they will only spend imaginary money on it, not real money, they lose the point. I’ll simply add this: the fact that Trump shits on an actually superlative solution to homelessness here (for citizens and refugees) warrants doubt that anything good will come of his homelessness policy. So it’s your judgment whether to downscore him on it.

They don’t actually have anything new for veterans, as best I can tell. They say they “will restore Trump Administration reforms to expand Veterans’ Healthcare Choices” but it was never actually ended so as to need restoring—it was folded into an even better program. It’s now a policy being maintained by Biden and thus likely Harris. So no score here; but kudos to them for a rare reference to an actual named policy. Whereas their claim to “protect Whistleblowers and hold accountable poorly performing employees not giving our Veterans the care they deserve” is void of any specifics (and contradicts Trump’s ranting insistence on punishing whistleblowers he doesn’t like). Whistleblower protections already exist; so what will they improve? And what is a “poorly performing employee” in this context? Who are these people and how will they find them, and how will this differ from any existing policy?

Trump and Vance then vow to “Make Colleges and Universities Sane and Affordable” but once again they don’t state any policies. They say they “will fire Radical Left accreditors” but they don’t give any examples of this even being a thing, nor how they will “fire” them. Accreditors aren’t state employees. They are private peer-review companies that the government endorses for certain programs like the G.I. Bill. So one might suspect (per rant) that they mean they will eliminate accreditation altogether—that they mean they will disavow all existing accreditation agencies and replace them with rubber-stamp agencies that will guarantee the collapse of quality in the American college education system. But since they don’t say this (they state no actual policy at all) I can’t downscore them here. Still, as a voter, you can use your own judgment as to what they “mean” here.

Likewise when they promise to “drive down Tuition costs” (they never say how) and “restore Due Process protections,” which is a reference to litigating sex crimes, in which at large there are valid points on both sides about how to frame policy; but Trump and Vance never say how exactly they or Harris would do anything differently on this point; so, no score. They also support “the restoration of Classic Liberal Arts Education,” but they don’t explain what they mean or how they will do this or how it will differ from anything already a thing. You can already get a classic liberal arts education in every state of the union. Since students choose their majors, do they mean they will force students into these majors? Or do they mean they will offer state funding to expand access to and the availability of these programs? And if so, how? And how much? And how will they pay for it? No policy, no score.

Likewise when they say they’ll prosecute colleges that “discriminate,” which is again not expanded into any vettable policy. Since this is already being decided by the courts, including the Supreme Court, there is no discernible way they can “change” the current state of affairs, or any differently than Harris could (since, for example, Harris is not calling for a constitutional amendment to frame it any differently than SCOTUS is doing). This is a veiled attack on “affirmative action” (per rant and rant), but since that is a catch-all for a large variety of different kinds of policies, and they state no specifics, there is no way to score their plans here. As a voter, you can reasonably infer they mean to support white supremacy by every means available; it’s just not explicitly in their platform.

They also of course “condemn antisemitism,” despite being on record kind of antisemitic. But they don’t offer any policies related to this, either, other than to “support revoking Visas of Foreign Nationals who support terrorism and jihadism,” but they never explain how that would be any change from current policy—who are the terrorists and their supporters they mean who are still coasting on American visas? Likewise, they swear they “will hold accountable those who perpetrate violence against Jewish people,” but how will this be any different under Harris?

They promise to “organize a National Celebration to mark the 250th Anniversary of the Founding of the United States of America,” but there is no reason to believe Harris won’t as well (so even Trump’s ranty details are moot here). And they also vow to “promote beauty in Public Architecture and preserve our Natural Treasures” and “build cherished symbols of our Nation, and restore genuine Conservation efforts,” but they give no examples. What will they build? They don’t even explain what they mean by “beauty.” And they don’t explain how they will promote it. They don’t even describe what the problem is that this nebulous policy is supposed to resolve. They also, of course, don’t explain how they will pay for it. They vaguely vow to “celebrate our Great American Heroes” that they “are proud” of, along with “the Story of America” that “makes everyone free,” but they don’t explain what that is or how they will do any of this—again, no actual policy is described (beyond what they already said about this elsewhere that I already scored, like the 1776 Commission, or more vows to do what Harris obviously already will).

Nothing more scores in this category. It is a vacuous patriotic chest-pumping section void of policy. But by throwing into that category Brutal Antiscientific Policing, Trump holds at -7.

• War on Woke

As usual, they never explain what “woke” means or how one can “stop” it or even why anyone should. But we know it’s just a catchall for anything too progressive for conservative reactionaries to tolerate. Their governing category for this is, actually, “government of, by, and for the people.” So, what do they offer by way of policy here?

They promise they “Will Stop Woke and Weaponized Government,” meaning they will “hold accountable those who have misused the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents,” which we already know isn’t a thing (and which they elsewhere vowed themselves to do, so this document contradicts their own public statements). But since they again state no policy here (what will they do?), it’s vacuous and unscorable. As a voter you can take this to mean that, in fact, they plan to weaponize “the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents,” as Trump has repeatedly and publicly vowed to do, i.e. this is an Orwellian promise: they mean exactly the opposite of what they are saying. But, alas, they don’t specify here, so the document lacks any policy to score.

They then promise to “declassify Government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees,” but again with no specifics—what documents do they mean, who do they mean, how will they find them, and how does this differ from any existing policy? Trump’s expanded rant on this sounds like an Orwellian purge; but it’s too void of either specifics (“up to 100,000 government positions could be moved out of Washington”) or believable goals (“term limits on members of Congress”) to score. Even admirable goals he rants up (like reducing errors in FISA warrants) are not scoreable, because they aren’t backed by any policy explaining how they will achieve it; or because they refer to things that don’t exist (like his vow to declassify “all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power”).

By contrast, I can (just barely) discern a policy (especially in light of Trump’s rant after rant) when they promise to “ban the Federal Government from colluding with anyone to censor Lawful Speech” (they must mean national security and law enforcement coordination with public-address systems, banning which would harm national security and law enforcement) and to “defund institutions engaged in censorship.” They give no examples of who they mean, so it is unclear if there is anyone to defund here, or what they mean by “censorship,” but again I do think we can reasonably infer that this is just another Orwellian code for “we will censor,” by defunding institutions and punishing employees who do not exercise their free speech rights (or indeed even professional obligations) exactly how Trump and Vance want, which would be the beginning of the decline of American freedom and its descent into tyranny.

Since these are clear enough to discern as actual policy goals, I have to score them. And it’s a -1. Trump is now batting -8.

They pledge to defend “religious liberty,” without any examples of the threats to that that they believe need addressing, but they do offer one half-baked policy here: they will “support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” No explanation of how this will work, how they will pay for it, what powers it will have, or what actions it will take, or even what standards it will apply—or even how it differs from already-existing civil-rights and hate-crime enforcement. Their ominous threats to wage lawfare against their “opponents” and engage in massive state censorship and control of information suggest this, too, could be Orwellian code for a literal Inquisition, thereby destroying freedom of speech and religion, and even the rule of law (since they insist religious liberty means getting to do anything you want that your religion tells you to do). But, alas, they state no policy here, so I can’t evaluate it. But as a voter you have a right to worry this is a dark threat against the separation of church and state.

This is also ironically where they insert their promise to “Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life.” They claim that when the “14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process” it includes fetuses. It does not. It explicitly begins (emphasis mine) “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.” They then contradict themselves by claiming that “the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.” The 14th Amendment does not empower states to classify fetuses as citizens, and by Trump and Vance’s own logic here, if it did, then the States would not get to “choose” whether to do this: they would be constitutionally required to. This contradictory messaging and its disingenuous purpose has been much remarked upon. But since “allowing” states to violate the human rights of women and cause a rise in citizen deaths and a decline in quality care is uniformly bad, even their disingenuous assertion here scores -1. Trump is now at -9.

To be fair, they also claim to support “mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments),” but they state no policy here. How will they “support” these things? What “policies” will they enact to this end? No word, no score.

Then they circle back to wokephobia with a promise to “End Left-wing Gender Insanity” by various means (echoed un Trump’s associated rant): they will “keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.” This is a substantive (enough) policy to score, because it explicitly describes steps they plan to take: to rewrite Title IX protections for trans students (against even this conservative Supreme Court), to (presumably? somehow?) federally outlaw transwomen from competing in women’s sports (though apparently they are okay with transmen competing in men’s sports), even though most women’s sports is through private enterprise that should be free to make its own decisions about that, and even those under federal funding should be free to make their own decisions as to how to accommodate transwomen’s rights (contradicting their just-stated position on abortion, Trump and Vance support states’ rights—except when they don’t).

They also vow to remove gender reassignment from covered procedures under (I presume they mean) taxpayer subsidized insurance plans (since we have no national healthcare system), but it’s unclear how much that is even a thing. Federal law already does not require insurance companies cover this; and as medicare insurance is actually privately structured and sold, even it does not have to cover this (in each state its private issuer can decide). But I imagine some tax dollars get there by some convoluted route or another (through subsidizing premiums, for example, or medicare’s negotiation of pricing), and I imagine they mean to somehow put a stop to all that, though they don’t describe any plan as to how. In general, the standard guidance is to only cover it when it is medically necessary, which is a decision doctors, not the state, should be making (just as with abortion, the state should not be in the business of dictating medical facts—those are dictated by reality, which requires expert professionals to discern).

These two policies violate human rights and cause widespread harm to American citizens, so they score -1. Trump is now batting -10. And don’t confuse me here for supporting what they imagine as “radical” left-wing gender ideology; I am merely talking about evidence-based and freedom-optimizing policy. There are nuanced and science-based ways to meet the needs of transwomen athletes. But I have covered this enough elsewhere. Transrights policy must be humane and evidence-based, not callous, fear-mongering, bigoted, and contrafactual. So Trump gets the minus here.

Then we get to “election integrity.” They here promise to “implement measures to secure our Elections, including Voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of Citizenship, and same day Voting.” These are all unequivocally bad policies that will oppress votes and disadvantage the poor—and that solve no actual problem. There are sound versions of these policies—if you mandate voter ID, then you must fund for all citizens the easy and cost-free acquisition of IDs (though it’s cheaper to just use signature verification, which has proven efficient and reliable); if you mandate “proof of citizenship,” then you must fund for all citizens the easy and cost-free acquisition of that proof (though it’s cheaper and even more reliable to just stick with the way we already confirm this); if you mandate “same day” voting, then you must make that day a national holiday (and pass legislation guaranteeing even those who still must work that day the right to leave work to vote without penalty) and you must mandate more funding nationwide to increase voting access (reducing wait lines, travel costs, and other vote-oppressing barriers). Of course, it’s cheaper and more efficient to just do what progressive states already do: universal mail-in and early voting, which has proven to be as effective and accurate as “same day” voting. Otherwise, if you will not do these things (and Trump and Vance have signaled no desire to), then your policies are harmful, not helpful. Score -1.

Trump now scores -11. (I won’t score “We will not allow the Democrats to give Voting Rights to illegal Aliens” because that isn’t happening. So it signals no actual policy difference with Harris.)

There is then a strange rider here about protecting the “territories of Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico,” declaring them “of vital importance to our National Security” and welcoming “their greater participation in all aspects of the political process.” This is weird because they don’t explain what they mean or why this statement is here (in this chapter). I can only suppose this is some sort of grift, whereby they hope an aspirational pat on the back of these disenfranchised citizens will win them votes from associated minorities in the U.S. (ironically the same people they attack as foreign invaders who ought to be expelled and forbidden to vote).

But again they have stated no policy here. How will they “protect” these territories any more than they already are? Is this a promise to increase federal infrastructure and disaster relief for them? Then how much? And how will they pay for it? Or does this mean building up American bases there? That can’t be, because they already said earlier that they would dismantle all foreign bases and bring all those troops home to police the border. And how will they welcome “their greater participation” in voting? Do they mean they will enfranchise citizens in these territories? That would require some kind of constitutional amendment or admitting them as states to the union, but I doubt Trump or Vance would countenance that. Since there is no policy here—indeed, not even a “concept” of a policy—it scores 0.

Trump holds at -11.

• “Peace Through Strength”

Finally, at last is their platform section on “peace through strength.” But again, light on policies. First, they “will ensure our Military is the most modern, lethal and powerful Force in the World” and “will invest in cutting edge research and advanced technologies.” We already do that; so, what are they proposing we do differently? Trump’s rant on this is devoid of reality (all his “our arsenals are empty, our stockpiles are bare” rigmarole is bullshit). But so is their policy doc. They want “an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield.” But that makes no strategic sense. As his expanded rant suggests, Trump seems confused about what it is he actually means. Iron Dome is a short-range, small-scale defense system against low-altitude attacks. It would be useful if we were at war with Mexico. But it won’t do anything for the kind of hypersonic and intercontinental ballistic missiles we’ll be facing from China and Russia in any future war; and it would be impossible to cover the entire country with it (Israel is vastly smaller than the U.S.).

We have been trying to build the kind of missile defense Trump seems to mean since Reagan, to limited success (our current system for this purpose is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense—which, of course, we already have). As for Iron Dome systems, America actually does have two already; they are deployed for the limited battlefield defense that they can provide. They are outrageously expensive to operate, so the military does not want to depend on these systems for forward line defense anyway. Even if we were at war with Mexico, we could never cover our entire southern border with any Iron Dome system (Israel polices only a few hundred miles with their systems; we’d have to police a few thousand). Since Trump’s suggestion here betrays a basic ignorance of what he is even talking about, and is strategically and financially impossible, I will be kind and score it at 0, because even a Republican Congress will never vote for it.

Trump and Vance then say they will support “higher pay” for the military, but since they don’t explain what they will increase it to or how they will pay for it, I can’t really score this. On such a vague statement, congress under Biden is already doing it. So there doesn’t seem to be any new policy here, or any difference from Harris. But then they say they will “get woke Leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible” (meaning, I assume, from the military). They don’t identify who that is they want to fire or why they need to. But one might infer they mean to re-ban gays in the military, or do something (?) about transgender soldiers, or end all morale programs designed to diffuse racial tensions in the ranks, or something like these, which would all be bad ideas (as every real expert in the military has explained to them). And making bad decisions that will turn the entire military into a political apparatus, and harm our national security thereby, definitely scores -1. Trump is now at -12. (And yes, the irony here of promising to weaponize the government to attack political opponents even in the military does betray their previously suspected Orwellian dishonesty about that.)

They then insist “our Allies must meet their obligations to invest in our Common Defense and by restoring Peace to Europe,” but they already are doing that, so there is no policy to recommend here. They promise to “stand with Israel, and seek peace in the Middle East,” a somewhat contradictory dream that differs in no way from Harris-Walz. They say they “will rebuild our Alliance Network in the Region to ensure a future of Peace, Stability, and Prosperity,” but there is nothing to “rebuild” (our alliance network is as strong there as ever). They say they “will champion Strong, Sovereign, and Independent Nations in the Indo-Pacific, thriving in Peace and Commerce with others,” but this is just a vague platitude, not a policy. What will they do any differently than is already being done and will be done under Harris? Will it cost money? Indeed what nations in that region do they mean lack these features that they would restore—and how will they restore those features? And are they here asserting the national independence and increased military armament of Taiwan? They don’t say.

Their document just dissolves from there into more aspirational blather void of any policy. They “will strengthen Economic, Military, and Diplomatic capabilities to protect the American way of life from the malign influences of Countries that stand against us around the World.” Nice. But…how? Indeed, which countries do they even consider our enemies here? Because Trump seems to think Russia is an ally, for example. They refer again to their dream of a border wall and a massive militarization of the border (already scored above), and refer again to their dream to “revive our Industrial Base, with priority on Defense-critical industries,” but still describe no policies. They don’t even say what industries they mean; and again, they already said this (in their China policy, which I discussed above). The only new thing here is their promise to “use all tools of National Power” to “protect” us “from malicious cyber actors,” even making this a “National Priority,” including raising our “security standards.” But they never say how they will do any of this, or how what they plan to do will be any different from what Biden and Harris are already doing.

And that’s it. No concluding remarks. The paper just suddenly ends.

Conclusion

In Part 1 I scored the Harris-Walz platform at 8 net-positive policies, and none negative. For the Trump-Vance platform, I found things the other way around, at 12 net-negative policies, and none positive (and yes, the score would be way worse if they ever admitted they intend to implement Project 2025, but here I am only scoring their admitted platform). Indeed, the Trump-Vance platform demonstrates a repeated ignorance of how the world even works, making numerous false statements, stating problems that don’t exist, proposing solutions that don’t work, and backing none of it with any evidence (much less of quality); in contrast to the Harris-Walz platform, which is well-informed, reasonably accurate, and empirical. So the choice between them on this metric alone is thus clear. When we add all the other essential metrics that I discussed in my introduction last time (from honesty and character, to impact on the judiciary and constitutional democracy), the metrics all lean the same way, and strongly.

So we need to max out the vote for Harris-Walz to stop Trump-Vance. Because no matter what your objections, all elections are Trolley Problems, a choice of lesser evils. And it’s time to pull the switch.

Go pull the switch.