Opinion | A Conservative Case Against Trump

With a week to go before the election, Kamala Harris has yet to come up with a compelling rationale for her candidacy, other than to accuse her opponent of being a fascist.Ask her a question to which she doesn’t have a canned answer and she struggles for a coherent response.

The most notable difference between her current presidential bid and her previous one in 2019 is that she has repudiated many of her past views.Is it because she’s hiding her real convictions — or because she has few real convictions at all?Yet I’m going to vote for her.

Other conservatives should, too.Why? Because Donald Trump is worse.He isn’t worse because he’s a fascist: If he were, his outspoken opponents would have wound up in prison, not on MSNBC.

He isn’t worse because his presidency was an unremitting failure: The (prepandemic) economy thrived, Operation Warp Speed was a triumph, the world was more at peace than it is today and there were important diplomatic achievements such as the Abraham Accords.Nor is he the only one who can disrespect political norms: It’s Harris, not Trump, who is campaigning on ending the Senate filibuster and perhaps packing the Supreme Court.But Trump is worse in ways that matter profoundly to the rule of law, the health of capitalism and the future of freedom at home and abroad.

Conservatives who claim to care about these things should also care about what Trump may do to each of them — and, crucially, do so in the name of conservatism.Consider:Law.

Conservatives are indignant about the flimsy civil and criminal cases progressive prosecutors have brought against Trump — cases they almost certainly wouldn’t have brought against anyone else.But politicizing justice is exactly what Trump sought to do during his presidency.He tried to strong-arm Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, into participating in a dirt-digging expedition against Joe and Hunter Biden.

His Justice Department tried to block a merger between AT&T and Ti...