In response to my recent blog posts, which expressed views that are entirely boring and middle-of-the-road for Americans as a whole, American Jews, and Israelis (“yes, war to destroy Hamas is basically morally justified, even if there are innocent casualties, as the only possible way to a future of coexistence and peace”)—many people declared that I was a raving genocidal maniac who wants to see all Palestinian children murdered out of sheer hatred, and who had destroyed his career and should never show his face in public again.

Others, however, called me something even worse than a genocidal maniac. They called me a Republican!

So I’d like to state for the record:

(1) In my opinion, Trump II remains by far the worst president in American history—beating out the second-worst, either Trump I or Andrew Jackson. Trump is destroying vaccines and science and universities and renewable energy and sane AI policy and international trade and cheap, lifesaving foreign aid and the rule of law and everything else that’s good, and he’s destroying them because they’re good—because even if destroying them hurts his own voters and America’s standing in the world, it might hurt the educated elites even more. It’s almost superfluous to mention that, while Trump himself is neither of these things, the MAGA movement that will anoint his successor now teems with antisemites and Holocaust “revisionists.”

(2) Thus, I’ll continue to vote straight-ticket Democrat, and donate money to Democrats, so long as the Democrats in question are seriously competing for Zionist Jewish votes at all—as, for example, has every Democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime so far.

(3) If it came down to an Israel-hating Squad Democrat versus a MAGA Republican, I’m not sure what I’d do, but I’d plausibly sit out the election or lodge a protest vote.

(4) In the extremely unlikely event that I had to choose between an Israel-hating Squad Democrat and some principled anti-MAGA Republican like Romney or Liz Cheney—then and only then do I expect that I’d vote Republican, for the first time in my life, a new and unfamiliar experience.