I called an old friend at the urging of his daughter, who told me her dad was undecided about voting at all. We caught up for an hour and exchanged views on this election. Below is the follow-up I wrote him.

This is not a normal election.

Whatever your issues with Kamala Harris—and if your gut tells you that you don’t trust her, then I have little more to say about her, except that she’s a conventional Democrat with conventional Democratic agenda. It’s still a binary choice.

Four years ago, I responded to another friend who asked me to cite a rationale for supporting Joe Biden without reference to Donald Trump. This time Trump’s agenda and his means of achieving it are clearer than they were amid the chaos and Covid of his term. Having spent 50 years(!) observing the political arena as a journalist and policy analyst, I submit:

Trump presents himself, in his own words, as dictator. But his Madison Square Garden rally a week before the election looked like a circus if you muted the sound. With the volume on, I heard an 87-minute grievance-filled, fascist tirade. Back in Washington await acolytes ready to serve him: House Speaker Mike Johnson, who wrote an audacious Supreme Court brief for overturning the 2020 election; Mitch McConnell’s successor, who will no doubt come from the MAGA wing; and scores of officials who served under Trump and stand ready to implement Project 2025. They understand that the executive branch is a machine that can be manipulated if the constraints of law and custom are removed. Ours have been removed.

It sounds ridiculous that the United States could ever have a dictator, but our norms have collapsed over the past 30 years. From inside the Capitol, I watched Newt Gingrich practice politics as war, employing rhetoric and lies and remaking the role of House Speaker as the only power center among 435 representatives. When McConnell refused to meet with a Supreme Court nominee eight months before the 2016 election, and then four years later pushed through a nominee when voting had already begun, it marked the end of customs. Because we had long separated into polar camps, pushed by a media landscape in which Fox News and its imitators presented what Trump advisor Kelly Ann Conway in 2017 termed “alternative facts,” our concern about customs was merely situational. What my side does is okay, because the other side is the enemy. January 6 became a matter of perspective, and a half-universe of America dismissed it.

Then in July the Supreme Court gave the president criminal immunity, a decision without basis in the Constitution or custom. The president could order the assassination of Americans as an “official act” and not be liable for prosecution even after his term. As Trump talks about “enemies within,” including again at Madison Square Garden—a spectacle reminiscent of the 1939 Nazi rally in the same arena—is it far-fetched?

Trump’s allies—the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and the rest—have been intimidating county election officials since the last election. Some allies are county clerks responsible for counting the vote in more than 3,000 jurisdictions. A Colorado clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced this month to nine years in prison for her role in breaching voting machine security in 2020. A Nevada clerk, Jim Hindle of Story County, was indicted in Trump’s “fake elector” scheme. He’s still in office. In May I visited Virginia City, the county seat. In a town that relies on nostalgic tourism, homes and businesses on the historic drag displayed signs such as “FUCK BIDEN and fuck you for voting for him.” That the city tolerates such polarization is consistent with the First Amendment, but it’s of questionable value for promoting commerce. Trump didn’t hang those signs, but he talks the same way, and he instigated Peters’s and Hindle’s actions. Peters will have a long time to ponder hers while Trump holds adoring rallies. This is our culture now. We created this.

The alarming event last week was Jeff Bezos’s interference in The Washington Post’s publication of a Harris endorsement. Bezos stood by the paper in all its reporting and editorials throughout the Trump administration despite the president’s attacks on his businesses and him personally. He never interfered, according to Martin Barron, the executive editor who retired in 2021. This time, it appears, the billionaire looked at a potential president and decided his businesses were at risk. Other CEOs are keeping quiet, hoping they don’t fall between Trump’s crosshairs. This is foolish. Trump invents enemies if none appear in front of him.

It can happen here. Elected Republicans are supine. The Supreme Court is amenable. Business leaders are meeting with him, wanting to stay on his good side in a toss-up election.

Suppose he wins. What happens to our government?

Because I’m a policy nerd, the Trump agenda item that worries me the most is his plan to revive “Schedule F,” an executive order he signed one week before the 2020 election. The order allowed the president to fire civil servants without existing procedures protecting them (and us) from vendettas or retaliation from superiors, and hire replacements without existing merit-based criteria. These jobs would include those of a “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character and that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition.” In other words, civil servants would serve at the pleasure of the president, like a White House assistant. Presidents generally have the authority to replace about 4,000 civil servants. Schedule F could apply to 50,000 employees. (Biden repealed the order on his third day in office.)

The effect, for those who understand power in the executive branch, would be profound: ignore the law and procedures that have guided you throughout your career; simply implement as your superior directs. For those outside Schedule F, the message would be just as clear: toe the White House line.

That’s why Congress created the civil service in 1883: to end the “spoils system” of a growing bureaucracy and replace it with merit—qualifications measured by testing—as the basis of hiring (and firing) decisions. One may argue that performance standards need tinkering. When I covered the civil service as a reporter during the George H.W. Bush administration, Congress and the executive continually engaged the question. But that’s not what Trump’s people are talking about.

My signal example of the destruction Trump wreaked during his term—I could choose from dozens—was of two agencies in the Agriculture Department, the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Together they collect and analyze data on everything about food production. They provide the “perfect market” information that allows commodity markets to function efficiently. They study crop yields, soil conditions, weather patterns, market flows, labor flows. They help farmers respond to changing conditions, year over year. Think climate change: how does that affect what farmers produce where? How will it alter yields?

Trump officials didn’t like this science, so they asked Congress to defund it. When it refused, they moved the agencies from Maryland to Kansas City in 2019. The argument was that agencies should be closer to the people they serve—even though the Agriculture Department (like nearly every other agency) has extension services all over the country. Two-thirds of the agencies’ 400 employees declined to uproot their families.

It would be like if KPMG, the “Big Four” accounting and tax firm that employed me as a policy analyst and lobbyist for the last third of my career, moved its Washington National Tax office—filled with experts who formerly worked at Treasury, the IRS and in Congress and serve as the brains of the national network serving our clients—to Minneapolis.

Now imagine that kind of move combined with Schedule F: Trump’s deputies could replace experts with hacks producing reports consistent with administration ideology—like that climate change is a hoax.

This is what Project 2025 is about. In 2016 Steve Bannon called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Similar to Grover Norquist, who a generation ago said, “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Norquist isn’t thinking about agricultural production. Neither are you unless you’re a farmer—or maybe if you eat.

Finally, my friend, let’s review what’s important to our portfolios: economic policy.

Trump’s is simple and has two points (besides more tax cuts with borrowed revenue). First, round up all the immigrants, including the ones who pack our produce and work in our slaughterhouses, and deport them. As Trump advisor Stephen Miller explained: deportation camps will be erected and planes will be waiting on the tarmac. Second, impose tariffs. Trump tells us that they will be paid by foreign countries, especially China. But tariffs are paid not by countries but by importers, who pass the cost—effectively a tax—onto consumers. Tariffs are inflationary. They are the only area where the president has sole authority to influence the economy. In 1930, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan never tired of explaining, they wrecked the economy for a decade. As fairly wealthy guys in our golden years, we’d like stability, I’d think.

If all this is what you support, by all means, vote for Trump. Or stay home.

If you favor a government engaged abroad and at home, building alliances along shared values, whose purposes remain to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” then the choice is easy. With or without a clothespin on your nose, you must vote for Harris.