Reasons Why Not to Vote Trump

I’m not American, but I am heavily invested in America (as is most of the world to varying degrees):

• I have assets (stocks) and many customers and clients in the US,
• I have only worked for US companies
• I paid over 1,000 times the taxes that Trump paid in 2016 and 2017, and
• The whole world is indirectly affected by the US.

I don’t want to go down on the wrong side of history for this. So I want to take a stance: If you vote, and particularly if you’re in a swing state: Don’t vote Trump. (But still vote — even if not for the president, then at least for reps, senators, etc.)

I initially wrote this for the 2020 election. But I’m updating it with points for the 2024 election, for which Trump is again the candidate.

Also, I’m not enamoured by the “other side”. Frankly, I hate the two-party system and politics in general. My ideal government would be a boring committee that gets stuff done and whom I never have to think about, kind of like the management team of a bank.

Overview of Why Not Vote Trump

I don’t think America should re-elect Trump for one core reason: because he’s not a good person.

It’s not even about politics in the old-fashioned sense. You can be for or against small government, gun control, abortion, etc. I know people have different beliefs about the reach of government power. That’s fine.

But please, put someone in charge who is a good person — someone honest, who has values, who shows humility, who does things they believe in, and who sticks to their word. There have been past Republican Presidents and candidates who meet this description — many of them.

I don’t like to get into arguments based on feelings. I like to have reasons, backed by statements made by people, from sources I can trust. So a few things I avoid are using insults and epithets because I don’t think getting into name-calling is helpful or intelligent.

Here is a list of reasons why people shouldn’t vote Trump.

In summary, they’re because of

• Racism: Trump frequently makes racist comments and shows racial bias
• Dishonesty: Trump is patently dishonest and doesn’t do what he said he would do, and misuses people’s beliefs
• Poor character: Trump is frequently accused of and occasionally found liable for / guilty for sexual misconduct.
• COVID-19 Failure: He failed Americans in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, leading to over 400,000 deaths by the time he left office
• Authoritarianism: He abuses his authority to remain in power
• Misogyny: Trump is obviously misogynist, frequently thinking of women as less than men, and valuing their physical attributes.

Also see my final follow-up notes about what to do in the Election.

Something wrong — or missing — in this article? Contact me.

Reason #1: Trump is Racist and has Racial bias

Firstly, Trump has had many instances where he has used race as a weapon, has made outright racist statements, and has also allowed white supremacists to believe he’s on their side.

Here are a selection of examples:

• Trump used race in attacking Obama. He questioned whether he was born in America, and didn’t question a reporter who referred to Obama as a Muslim.
• Trump repeatedly refuses to condemn white supremacists. In the first presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked if he would condemn white supremacists, including the “proud boys”. His response was: “Proud boys: stand back, and stand by”. Not “stand down”. He later said he doesn’t even know who the proud boys are. He condemned white supremacy only once in an interview days before the election.
• Trump implemented a travel ban across many countries in 2016; the only thing tying those countries together was that they were majority Islamic.
• It took him two days to denounce the KKK and neo-nazis after the Charlottesville attacks in 2017, only doing so after pressure. He initially had condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.”
• Trump calls the Coronavirus the “China Virus” or the “Chinese Virus”., and brushed off White House officials using the term “kung flu“.
• At his campaign kickoff event in June 2015, Trump called Mexican Americans rapists and criminals. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
• He accused immigrants of being murderers. “You have people come in and I’m not just saying Mexicans, I’m talking about people that are from all over, that are killers and rapists and they’re coming to this country.”
• He says a lot of just bad things about Blacks. Referring to Obama, he said, “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.” And “Laziness is a trait in blacks.”
• He refuses to apologise for calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, convicted and then exonerated for raping a woman. The five teens (four Black, one Latino) were violently interrogated and deprived of food and sleep, and ultimately offered a coerced confession.
• Trump claimed Obama was admitted into Columbia and Harvard because of affirmative action.
• He has called Black Lives Matters, an organisation aiming to end police brutality against Black people, an “extreme” organisation (though it has had some controversies in its management). He refers to his own rallies as “peaceful protests“.
• He deported the parents of many children in an attempt to deter Central American migration. The parents of 545 children separated at the border can’t be found.

Reason #2: Dishonesty

I want a world leader who doesn’t lie and who isn’t dishonest. Trump has a long track record of lying for no reason even though it’s obvious he’s lying. Below is a small snapshot.

• Trump claimed that during 9/11 in New Jersey, “thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down”. He added that this took place in areas where there were “large Arab populations.” There are no reports of this, and the police say it did not happen.
• At the first presidential debate, Trump repeated his claims that he was against the war in Iraq prior to the invasion. However, he is on the record in 2002 saying that he supported the war.
• Trump dodged the Vietnam draft with a made-up injury.
• Trump claimed that that Barack Obama’s grandmother is on record saying she witnessed his birth in Kenya; but this specifically excludes many follow-up statements where she immediately clarifies that she was in Kenya while Obama was born in Hawaii.
• Trump said on the campaign trail that he “never” settles lawsuits, for fear that it would prompt others to sue. Yet he has done so in at least 100 cases, most involving people who were hurt at Trump properties.
• Trump refuses to release his tax returns, claiming he can’t because he’s under audit — which does not prevent him from releasing his tax returns. (When finally obtained, they showed he paid $750 in taxes in 2016, the year he ran for president).
• Trump said in his 2016 campaigning that he would “build a wall” with Mexico, and that Mexico would pay for it. Without even analysing the merits of building a wall, as of 2020, there is very little wall built, and Mexico isn’t paying for it.
• Trump claimed that he never called for profiling Muslims as a security measure in an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Yet earlier in that same interview, he said that America had “no choice” but to profile Arab or Muslim men.
• During a presidential debate, Trump said that he had never called global warming a Chinese hoax. But in a 2012 tweet, he said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
• Trump claimed that Barack Obama spent $4 million in legal fees to make sure that no one saw his college records. Federal Election Commission filings show that the campaign paid $7.2 million to a legal firm from from 2007 to 2015. However, experts say campaigns use lawyers to vet a wide range of issues, and Trump has not provided any proof of his claim.
• Trump’s campaign fabricated a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that was so poorly crafted that even staunchly republican Fox News wouldn’t publish it for being “lack of authentication”.
• He uses faith disingenuously as a tool in his favour. Most Americans don’t see Trump as religious.
• Both Twitter and Facebook have had to take new measures to prevent disinformation campaigns from Trump’s campaign. They even banned political ads — Twitter before the election, and Facebook after the election.
• Trump appointed and confirmed a conservative Supreme Court judge days before the election, despite a long-standing tradition of not doing so in an election year (a tradition to which the Republican Party held as recently as four years previously).
• He claimed to have done the most for Black people in America since Abraham Lincoln at the NBC town hall event in October 2020. This is in the context of widespread Black Lives Matters protests, and his tacit support (or lack of condemnation) of white supremacy.
• He has claimed to have great respect for women, despite displaying many signs of misogyny.
• Trump didn’t build a wall with Mexico, despite promises to do so (and get Mexico to pay for it). As of late 2020, the CBP claimed 307 miles have been built, though only 3 miles are new. The wall was funded by the US federal budget. (Note: I don’t support a wall, but this still constitutes a failed promise.)
• Trump claimed (while out of office) that Biden and Harris were “anti-vaccine“. Actually, many more Republicans are anti-vaxxers.
• He changed his mind about Tiktok. He previously signed an executive order banning Tiktok, which couldn’t be enforced, but in the wake of the 2024 bill to ban Tiktok, he has opportunistically become against it. (Pretty good political sleight of hand, I admit!)

Reason #3: Character issues

I like a national leader to be a good person, regardless of other politics. You know, a Captain America type who has integrity and always does the right thing. I know relationships can take any form as long as there’s consent, so this is by no means saying “Trump must conform to monogamous relationship expectations between a man and a woman”. I’m just saying — I want a leader to be honest and treat people with respect.

This is related to the above about honesty, but specifically, there have been so many cases related to the abuse of women that it adds up to a sketchy picture. You might not believe them, but they do seem to align with Trump’s obvious misogyny evidenced by things he has said (see that section below).

• Trump cheated on his current wife (Melania Trump) with Stormy Daniels. You might disagree with this (he denies it) but it’s also not hard to believe, and not unique to politicians of any political affiliation. Regardless, he paid hush money to cover it up, claiming the money was unrelated. It’s hard to look at that evidence and come to any other conclusion (imagine a man telling their female partner they gave money to a porn star and it was not related to anything sketchy…). While the payment was not illegal, he was found guilty in May 2024 of falsifying business records to make it, though I expect that to be appealed (and, editorialising, probably overturned).

Side note — the 2024 guilty verdict of falsifying criminal records is the first guilty verdict against a US president in history.

• Trump was found liable in a civil case for sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. His subsequent defamatory comments meant the original $5M of damages ballooned to over $80M. (In the original criminal proceeding, he was found to have raped Ms Carroll by modern definitions of the crime, but not by definitions of the crime at the time, which defined it as nonconsensual penetration of the vagina by a penis.)
• Trump’s marriage to former model Ivana Trump (mother of Donald Jr, Eric, and Ivanka) ended because of a high-profile and public affair between him and an actress, Marla Maples. In the divorce proceedings, Ivana Trump alleged Donald Trump had raped her, though she later walked back those allegations.
• While he owned the Miss Universe franchise, he’d frequently go to the dressing rooms of Miss USA and Miss Teen USA contestants while they were in various stages of undress. He has been accused of kissing them and groping them without consent.
• Trump has been accused of groping and kissing many people without consent, including receptionist Rachel Crooks who met him in a Trump Tower elevator, People magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff who was interviewing him and his wife, model Kristin Anderson who was just sitting next to him on a couch at a nightclub. And many more.

Some outlets think this is a smear campaign. But women rarely report sexual assault because of the shame and stigma involved. Given that, and the number of allegations, it’s hard to look away. It just isn’t a thing you hear about most Presidential candidates from either party.

Reason #4: Trump deliberately mishandled the COVID-19 Pandemic for his own benefit

This is a sub-section of dishonesty in general.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Trump mishandled the pandemic and used it for political purposes, costing the lives of nearly a quarter of a million Americans by election day.

• Trump made many false claims about the COVID-19 pandemic. A few are that there would be zero cases by the end of February 2020 (there weren’t) it would weaken in April (it didn’t), and that Coronavirus numbers were going down (at a time at which they had plateaued at around 1,000 per day).

Here’s a chart from The Independent with Trump quotes mapped against stats.

• On 39 separate occasions, Trump claimed the virus would disappear “like magic”.
• Trump refused to wear a mask, downplayed the importance of wearing a mask “because I don’t want to create a panic”, and allowed mask wearing to become a display of politics.
• His administration ignored public health advice and allowed businesses and cities to re-open as early as 16 April, before the second and third waves hit.
• He used political language like “Liberate” (Michigan, Minnesota, etc.) in calling for and end to lockdowns.
• The administration made many cuts to the CDC.
• Trump’s administration blocked information from reaching the CDC in a timely manner, sending it first to his administration, reducing the CDC’s ability to respond.
• Trump halted funding to the WHO, blaming them for mismanaging the pandemic.
• Trump lied about a “big surge” in New Zealand at a time when there were only 90 active cases, all under surveillance.
• He claimed on May 11 2020 that the US had “prevailed” over the pandemic (see tweet below). At the time, deaths had surpassed 80,000.

"We have met the moment and we have prevailed," Trump says at the White House, as COVID-19 deaths go over 80,000.

Previously his son-in-law Jared Kushner said the administration's response was a "great success story." At that point deaths were at 58,000. pic.twitter.com/G52OwL3Nf2

— American Journal News (@AmerJournalNews) May 11, 2020

• Trump claimed he was taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, and promoted its use (it has no proven effect, and didn’t at the time either).
• In response to his failures, Trump tried to rewrite history to avoid blame. He said he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” and “always viewed it as very serious”. He didn’t.
• Trump himself was diagnosed with COVID-19 in early October 2020. After a week of treatment, he said he was virus-free and that it “seems like I am immune”, something for which there is no evidence.
• Trump selectively used metrics that nobody else has used to try to find some evidence that the administration has done well, for example, “death as a proportion of cases” in an interview by Fox’s Jonathan Swan.

.@jonathanvswan: “Oh, you’re doing death as a proportion of cases. I’m talking about death as a proportion of population. That’s where the U.S. is really bad. Much worse than South Korea, Germany, etc.”@realdonaldtrump: “You can’t do that.”

Swan: “Why can’t I do that?” pic.twitter.com/MStySfkV39

— Axios (@axios) August 4, 2020

• Trump selectively misquoted Dr Anthony Fauci to claim that Fauci has praised the administration’s efforts, although separately Trump has described Fauci as a “disaster“.

See here for many more Trump claims proven false about Coronavirus.

• Trump was a huge driver in promoting the vaccine, funding Operation Warp Speed (“OWS”) for rapid development and deployment. But Pfizer began developing its vaccine well before OWS, helped by Germany’s government with a 375M Euro grant, and was never part of OWS as part of the design and manufacturing process. Nonetheless, the Trump administration did at least accelerate FDA approval and organise widespread distribution of the vaccine — though also paradoxically benefited from the politicisation of vaccines in general.

Reason #5: Authoritarianism

Trump displays many unpleasant characteristics of authoritarianism, including abuse of public office for personal gain, a refusal to accept responsibility and instead a tendency to shift it to others, and taking extra measures to stay in office.

• Trump delayed nearly US$400M in aid from Ukraine unless they committed to investigating Joe Biden, his main political rival at the time. This led to his impeachment, though he was acquitted by the Senate.
• Trump pressured Attorney General William Barr to announce the results of an ongoing Russia probe, which would violate the DoJ’s guidelines designed to prevent the department from influencing elections.
• He refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, insisting that any election result that shows him to have lost will have been fraudulent.
• The Republican Party has been actively engaging in suppressing the vote in 2020 by defunding the post office, claiming that mail-in-voting will lead to massive fraud, and refusing to extend deadlines — voting on party lines on the issues.
• Trump has said he expects newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — a staunch conservative — to play a pivotal role in deciding the outcome of the upcoming presidential election.
• Trump unleashed authoritarian measures on cities like Portland, sending in Customs and Border Protection officials to abduct people in protests and take them away.
• Trump has frequently refused to take responsibility for things even though he’s the top person. He blamed Obama — whose presidency ended three years prior — for anything wrong with the Centre for Disease Control, saying they “inherited a broken system“. His own words: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Finally, the icing on the cake (which occurred after I originally published this post) is the attacks on the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, for which Trump was impeached a second time (and again, acquitted by the Senate).

Reason #6: Trump is a Misogynist

Misogyny means valuing women less than men (this is the common understanding of the word, though etymologically it means hatred of women).

Here are some of the many examples of when Trump has valued women less.

• Trump’s infamous recorded conversation on Access Hollywood saying he can do anything to women because he’s a celebrity — kiss them or “grab them by the pussy”. He dismissed this as “locker room talk”.
• He aimed to and indirectly succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade, the case that gave women in America the right to an abortion. This put him in the anti-choice camp, meaning Trump is in favour of the government dictating what a woman can and cannot do with their body. (This was his stated policy and eventually happened, in 2022, thanks to the Trump-appointed judges on the Supreme Court.)
• Trump said of his daughter Ivanka: “If she weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” He has made many awkward statements about his daughter, including “Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?” She was 16 at the time. He has called her “voluptuous” and a “piece of ass”.
• He frequently thinks women’s attractiveness is one of their primary assets, e.g. saying that a reporter wouldn’t have her job if she weren’t beautiful, that one of his key advantages as a candidate was that his women are more beautiful, and that people shouldn’t vote for Carly Fiorina because of her face.
• He thinks it’s a woman’s role to satisfy men. “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?“, “Does she look presidential, fellas? Give me a break.” and “How come the deeply troubled women … are the best in bed?”
• He likes to call women names. “Horseface,”, “Lowlife,”, “Fat, Ugly”, and of course, “Nasty”.

Donald Trump can't quite seem to hide his disdain for women #debatenight pic.twitter.com/7C5OQQBOOw

— Mic (@mic) October 20, 2016

Final thoughts — What should you do in the 2024 election?

I initially wrote this for the 2020 election. But the points are still valid for the 2024 election, with a few extra ones (they keep adding up).

As I mentioned at the beginning, even though I’m not American, I have a say. The US has impacted me personally and impacts most of us globally.

My personal suggestion is that I suggest you vote for anyone that could unseat Trump. While I don’t actively like the Democrat candidate (and dislike what he has done in some ways) at worst, he’s not all the abovementioned things.

If you don’t want to vote to unseat Trump (I get it), then still don’t abstain from voting altogether. You still vote for Representatives and Senators that can change the balance of power.

I don’t suggest that you:

• Vote for an independent. Because of the structure of US elections, this is ineffective and can distort an election (or give voice to a usurper)
• Don’t vote at all. (Always vote, at least for other members of government.)

I know you might not support Democrats, for whatever reason, which is entirely up to you. Even if you don’t, the best anti-Trump vote is a vote for the Democratic nominee. But I do really wish that the electoral college system would be reformed.