Before we get to the shysters at the Ayn Rand Institute first consider a creepy organization called the Transition Integrity Project.  From their working paper titled  “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition”: [1]

These are the sort of people we are up against. The best defense is for Trump to win by a landslide that overwhelms vote fraud and that cannot be spun into a loss by lying propaganda.

However the folks at the Ayn Rand Institute take a rather different position.

Yaron Brook is chairman of the board of the Ayn Rand Institute. He has said in so many words that Biden is our only hope. On his podcast of 7 September 2020  he again spoke about the election.  Reading a question from the chat (he substitutes “I” for “you”): [3]

Mr. Brook begins his reply by criticizing Trump’s first term.

Rand spoke of the conflict in the Q&A after her Ford Hall Forum talk in 1970. Her remarks are transcribed here from a recording. Someone in the audience asks a question and the moderator speaks:  “Could this gentleman have your opinion of the Nixon administration in general and Spiro Agnew in particular?”  Here is Rand’s complete reply (a “liberal” back then would be better known as a “leftist” today): [5]

Mr. Brook, by criticizing Trump in this manner, insinuates that Biden, a better man than Trump, if president will respect Separation of Powers and Free Speech.

Mr. Brook goes on to say that Trump has  “completely corrupted the Republican Party” – what an amazingly powerful man – “and moved it away from even its weak ... defense of capitalism to becoming a completely statist ... political party.”  He gives as an example: the moratorium (or postponement) of rents. He neglects to mention that it applied only to property owners who took out government-insured loans. Insofar as this is statist (marginally statist at worst), still it is nothing compared to what Nixon did before his first term was up (wage-price controls). And yet come the next election in 1972 Rand supported Nixon against the leftist Democrat.

That last should be emphasized.  Rand urged people to vote for Nixon even though in his first term he had mandated a freeze on all wages, salaries, and prices. It makes any statist thing Trump has done look trivial. She supported Nixon despite his flaws because his opponent was a flaming statist far worse than he was. There was none of this  “vote Democrat so the Republicans can reform themselves”  that Mr. Brook is handing us.

Mr. Brook speaks of a corrupt Republican Party.  Yet which of the following is a greater threat to America?  Quoting Mike Whitney: [6]

Trump is far from “completely statist” – another of Mr. Brook’s absurd exaggerations. Biden is much further in the direction of statism than Trump is or ever will be, a comparison Mr. Brook doesn’t want us to make.

He always trashes Trump in absolute terms, never comparing Trump’s position on an issue with Biden’s, which is invariably worse.

Then Mr. Brook tells us that Trump has  “moved the Republican Party dramatically away from any kind of free market.”  Any kind?  Again an over-the-top pronouncement. Who, for example, would have a problem with regulating trade with the likes of China? We should engage in free trade only with free countries.

Mr. Brook’s objectivity can be judged from something he said the very day Trump won the election of 2016, before he had done anything as president:  “Trump is a villain, the villain of our time.” [7]  Habitual exaggeration shows contempt for objectivity.  Mr. Brook does not base his claims on Trump’s actual actions.

After a few more spasms of Trump Derangement Syndrome Mr. Brook finally gets to the chat question,  “Why do you want Biden to win?”  He replies with a straight face (indeed he looks rather miserable):

Mr. Brook sounds like a man trying to promote Biden without appearing to. He says one thing, then its opposite, and leaves you to untangle the meaning.  If Biden wins, after America’s ensuing nosedive Mr. Brook can say:  “Don’t look at me, I didn’t support Biden, I wanted him to lose ! ”

Mr. Brook is proud of his mealy-mouthed,  have-your-cake-and-eat-it,  “loses more” formulation.  When someone quoted it on Facebook (9 September 2020) prefaced with “I couldn’t have said it better,” Mr. Brook “liked” the comment, making it appear on his own Facebook page.

Mr. Brook goes on to say that he doesn’t believe Biden would improve America – not realizing the absurd level of the understatement – but that America would have an opportunity to ultimately improve if Trump loses.  “Which,” he says, “are two different things.”  Understand that the double negative is subtle stuff, intended only for refined intellects.  Here is the full transcript of Mr. Brook’s rationalistic logic-chopping:

After more in the same vein, including trashing Tucker Carlson, Mr. Brook concludes:

Somehow, he doesn’t give the details, Biden winning the presidency might, ultimately, help the Republican Party become less statist even though the government would become more statist first. Seeing Biden win will encourage Republicans to abandon statism, or something. We are to believe that Republicans seeing statism win will make them less statist.

Yaron Brook doesn’t realize – or doesn’t want you to realize – that  a Biden presidency could very likely be a trapdoor.  Think amnesty and citizenship for 20 million illegal aliens 80% of whom will vote Democrat.  Think open borders.  Think appointing a Supreme Court judge.  Think expanding (“packing”) the Supreme Court to a leftist majority.  Making D.C. a state and creating two more leftist senators.  Ending the Senate filibuster while majority Democrat.  Critical Race Theory drilled into every federal bureaucrat.  Censorship in the name of “fighting racism.”  Forcing low-income housing on suburbs.  Cracking down on dissident political assembly.

Trump’s first term threw a monkey wrench in the works.  The “powers that be” don’t want it to happen again.

Obleftivists rarely commit their thoughts to print, preferring to hold forth on podcasts, which makes their foolishness less evident. Here we review an exception, an article that Peter Schwartz, distinguished fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute and former board chairman, posted on his Facebook page, visible only to Facebook friends:  “The Presidential Election” (12 September 2020). [10]  Mr. Schwartz begins:

Then a new paragraph.  The naive reader might expect Mr. Schwartz to say that this development is good reason to vote for Trump against Biden.  Poor innocent!  We know Obleftivists better than that.  The paragraph consists of one  intended-to-be-shocking  sentence:

The Democratic Party, he says, is a party of bad ideas. The Republican Party used to be a party of better ideas but since Trump took over and  “stripped it of all vestiges of ideology” – how these Obleftivists can lay on the superlatives – it can no longer oppose anything.

We will let Mr. Schwartz continue his argument but first:  just the opposite is true. Before Trump the Republican Party was becoming more and more like the Democratic Party. It is Trump who made the Republican Party in many respects different and better. I am thinking particularly of immigration policy, an extraordinarily important and long-range issue, which the mainstream media – and ARI – wouldn’t even be talking about were it not for Trump.

Mr. Schwartz says that though the Republican Party had been going downhill for years it  “still retained some semblance of an ideology”:  it more or less stood for smaller government, free trade, open immigration, less regulation, less involvement in medicine. We would agree that, except for open immigration and free trade with non-Western countries, those are good positions.  Mr. Schwartz continues speaking of the Republican Party:

No matter what individual, concrete things Trump says or does that are good,

Biden is absent from Mr. Schwartz’s essay, literally he is never mentioned, but every reader sees him floating in the background. Mr. Schwartz’s argument is becoming clear now. Biden is consistently bad whereas Trump is randomly good and bad. We need to elect Biden to teach the Republicans a lesson. The Republicans, seeing how their random-good-and-bad lost them the presidency while the Democrats’ consistent-bad (except their immigration policy, of which Mr. Schwartz approves) won it, will turn to consistent-good. If you find that hard to follow, your mind needs to be pickled some more in ARI courses.

“Authoritarian” is ARI’s favorite epithet for Trump, as if he were more authoritarian than any leftist could be.

Trump has a redneck way of shooting off his mouth. Mr. Schwartz quotes some of his extemporaneous remarks. Some are stupid, some are tasteless jokes that go over his head, like the one (mentioned by others at ARI) that Trump made at a campaign rally on 23 January 2016, trying to illustrate his popularity in the face of the media saying he will never win the nomination:  “... I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters ... [Extended laughter from audience.]”  Both Harry Binswanger [12]  and Yaron Brook [7 again]  took this seriously and made self-righteous noises about what a monster Trump must be.

From Mr. Schwartz’s article:  “About China’s dictator Xi Jinping, [13]  Trump said: ‘He’s now president for life. President for life! ... I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.’ ”  Who would take that seriously?  Trump at a campaign rally on October 3rd 2019 as the crowd chants “four more years” (my external quote marks omitted, emphasis his):

When speaking of Trump Misters Schwartz and Brook examine him with a critical eye and over-generalize his faults. When it comes to Biden all we get are vague negatives such as “Biden’s an idiot, Biden stands for nothing” – quoting Mr. Brook [9 again]  – insinuating that Biden is harmless.  Mr. Schwartz, as we pointed out, does not mention him at all.  They don’t give Biden anywhere near the same treatment they give Trump.

They complain about Trump’s schmoozing flattery of foreign leaders yet don’t give him credit when he criticizes them, for example calling North Korea’s leader a madman. They never mention that Trump has said a lot of good things about the Founders and other admirable people.  A few of Trump’s extemporaneous remarks are indeed cringe-worthy, but if we can overlook Rand’s occasional gaffes [15]  why hold Trump to a higher standard?

Mr. Schwartz:

Mr. Schwartz sums up.  Today, he says, the political battle is between a group with an ideology, the Democrats, and a group without one, the Republicans.  Of these “which will prevail?”

Two other shysters (besides that indefatigable chatterbox Yaron Brook) began softening up ARI followers a year before when the party nomination process was just beginning and Trump was being impeached. They did the softening in “New Ideal” articles published on ARI’s website. I won’t review them, just provide a few quotes that give their flavor. Both shysters try to shoehorn Trump into one of Rand’s fictional villains, using her novels to promote the Obleftivist agenda.

Despite not being a U.S. citizen Mr. Ghate lectures us on U.S. politics.  He thinks it highly probable that

Considering intellectuals these days, thank God Trump isn’t one of them.  Mr. Ghate twists the fact that Trump is not an intellectual into:  Trump’s stand-out characteristic is “anti-intellectuality,” and what Rand called “the anti-conceptual mentality.”

Mr. Ghate refers to  “the vitriol directed by the presidential candidates ... at large segments of the public” and that Trump  “excelled at this.”  It turns out Trump excelled in Mr. Ghate’s mind because he  “demonized Hispanics, immigrants, journalists, free traders and elites.”  Apparently not just some but every last one of them!  What a nasty man.

Mr. Ghate compares Trump to the  Atlas Shrugged  character Cuffy Meigs:

Mr. Bayer calls Mr. Ghate’s article above “incisive,” opens  The Fountainhead  instead of  Atlas Shrugged,  and compares Trump to Peter Keating.

Trump is no Howard Roark but Peter Keating?  It’s doubtful a Keating could have won the Republican nomination and then become president of the United States, or for that matter have managed the creation of Trump Tower.

Elan Journo is a director and senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. Robert Mayhew is on the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute as well as the Anthem Foundation.  On 24 September 2020 those two and Yaron Brook conducted an ARI webinar, originally billed as “ARI and elections and today’s political scene.” The video recording has since been renamed “Thinking about the U.S. Presidential Elections.” [17]  Mr. Journo is an Israeli. Mr. Brook is an Israeli as well and became a U.S. citizen, retaining his Israeli citizenship. He recently moved to Puerto Rico – to avoid taxes, apparently giving up his acquired U.S. citizenship – and can no longer vote. Fitting men to lecture us about who should be president of our country!

We focus on the parts of the webinar about the 2020 election.

After Mr. Mayhew discusses what Rand said about the 1968 election, he admits:  “I don’t know what she would say about this one.”  Mr. Brook immediately interrupts,  “I think I know.”  He doesn’t say what he thinks he knows, he leaves it to the audience to conclude that she would prefer Biden to Trump.

Later Mr. Brook expresses his low opinion of the American public. They are ripe for a Hitler, a frequent theme of his since 2016:

It looks like Mr. Mayhew wanted Hillary to win in 2016 too (he abbreviates his obscenity, an improvement over Mr. Brook’s expanded style):

Mr. Brook says that after four years of Trump, Republican senators and representatives are “lockstep behind him.”  Yes, that is what he said.  He continues:

Will Mr. Brook give credit to Trump for nominating an orginalist?  Forget it.  Any good thing Trump does should be discounted.  Mr. Brook continues:

Mr. Journo paraphrases a question from the chat:  “... in the short term won’t a Biden presidency give us Obamacare and universal healthcare and ... steps towards the Green New Deal. Meanwhile, though Trump hasn’t done much good, in the short term is it [a second term of Trump] going to be as bad?”  Mr. Brook replies:

Now imagine Mr. Mayhew sitting there, worrying that he might have gone too far with his  “Not being Trump isn’t enough”  remark when obviously it is quite enough for his boss.  After Mr. Brook winds down he says – perhaps thinking of the chat question’s  “though Trump hasn’t done much good”  which implies that Trump has done a little good:

Mr. Journo is verbose but doesn’t say much. He monitors the chat and agrees with, elaborates, or summarizes what the other two say. [18]

On 10 October 2020 STRIVE (Students for Reason, Individualism, Value pursuit, and Enterprise – run by ARI) hosted a Zoom online event titled “Q&A on the State of the Culture and the US Election with Dr. Gregory Salmieri.”  Mr. Salmieri is an Anthem Foundation Fellow.  From STRIVE’s Facebook blurb for the event:

Later an acquaintance told me that he asked Mr. Salmieri about crime in Mexico coming to the U.S along with its migrants, pointing out that Mexico has a high rate of sexual assault and a murder rate five times that of the U.S.  Salmieri replied in so many words:  So what if we have a few extra muggings, that’s the price we pay for a vibrant society.

Mr. Schwartz’s essay of 28 October 2020, “Why to Vote Against Trump,” is more of the same. “Trump is the most anti-ideological, anti-conceptual president in memory.” etc. etc.

It’s true that Trump is not an intellectual. Winning elections requires different skills and a different personality from those of a typical intellectual. No president since perhaps Woodrow Wilson (in his early days) has been much of an intellectual. In lieu of a philosopher-statesman we must be satisfied with someone whose positions on many issues are what the better American public wants.

That’s not good enough for Mr. Schwartz. We are to vote for Biden (whom again he doesn’t mention by name), the wannabe wholesale destroyer of capitalism, instead of Trump, who isn’t intellectual enough.

One issue especially concerns Mr. Schwartz: immigration restriction. He laments that “Trump elicits passionate responses from [his followers] ... when he declares that he will ‘build the wall.’ ”  He calls this “Mindless, xenophobic nationalism.”  Like Mr. Brook, Mr. Schwartz trashes both Trump and the American public.

Some of what ARI thinks are Trump’s flaws are virtues but not all of them. Trump is a flawed candidate to be sure. He should be analyzed critically then praised for what is good and condemned for what is bad. Obleftivists do not analyze, they invent an unjust caricature: “Trump is a villain, the villain of our time,” and condemn him for his virtues and vices alike. [20]