Top New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens said on Monday he’d be voting for Kamala Harris to prevent another Donald Trump presidency.
“I really would rather have just sat out Election Day. But Jan. 6 and election denialism are unforgivable,” Stephens told his columnist partner Gail Collins in an article published Monday. “As my friend Richard North Patterson likes to say, ‘Donald Trump is literally bleeping crazy.’ And what crazy brings in its wake is JD Vance, whom I find worse than Trump, because he’s just as cynical but twice as bright.”
Stephens was previously a Harris skeptic, questioning MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle on Real Time With Bill Maher why Harris had not sat down for a real interview, and more clearly articulated her policy positions for undecided voters like himself.
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In a widely shared viral moment, Ruhle took him to task: “We have two choices. There are some things that you might not know her answer too. In 2024, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”
Stephens characterized his reluctant vote as “99.999 percent“ a vote against Trump and ”0.001 percent” a vote for Harris, who he described as “every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage.” He said he feared she’d stumble against foreign adversaries like China and Russia and would make policy decisions in service to more progressive values.
Still, he said, “I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest.”
Stephens, a columnist whose columns on climate change and Jewish people have invited much criticism, has long detested Trump.
During his tenure as a Wall Street Journal columnist, he wrote scores of pieces decrying a Trump presidency ahead of the 2016 election, and in 2018, he argued in the Times that Trump should be impeached. In the run-up to the 2020 election, he tried to walk skeptical Republicans through the concept of being a “Biden conservative,” arguing a Joe Biden presidency would serve conservatives better than another four years of Trumpism.
“The domestic issue of our time is not the size of government,“ Stephens wrote at the time. ”It’s the unity of the country. We are living through the most serious social unrest in 50 years. We have a president who sparks division by nature and stokes it by design.“
Trump has expressed no love for Stephens either, calling him a “Trump hating loser” who “seemed totally confused and unsure of himself” last month after Stephens described Trump as “antisemitic adjacent” on Real Time with Bill Maher. Stephens said at the time he wouldn‘t vote for Trump, though he didn’t commit to a Harris vote either.
In voting for Harris as president, Stephens said on Monday, he wants to prevent a complete Trump takeover of traditional Republican values.
“This election may be the last chance for Reaganite conservatives like me—the ones who are for lower taxes, free trade, deregulation, free speech (including for those who don’t agree with me), a strong military and the defense of embattled allies like Ukraine—to drive a stake into the heart of Trumpism,” Stephens told Collins. “If he wins, we’re going to be saddled with an isolationist and nativist conservative movement for generations to come.”
