Joel Stein

Because the path from reality star to US president should have at least one step

I have a strong preference for expertise when choosing the person to run the most powerful country on Earth. 

When I interviewed Tucker Carlson during Trump’s presidency, he said, “A healthy country would not even consider electing Donald Trump. There are a lot of people in this country. Why would you pick him? It’s a terrible sign. It’s not an attack on him. If America elected me president, it would be a terrible sign. If you’re electing TV show hosts, something is wrong. The check-engine light has gone on. You ought to pull over immediately.” 

Kamala Harris devoted her life to expertise: district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California, US senator, vice president. Donald Trump’s career was so frivolous, I’ve interviewed him three times: once at his Miss USA Pageant, once at an Apprentice audition, and once about how he was selling trucker hat merch as a long-shot candidate. I have, obviously, never met Kamala Harris.

We have a chance to pull this car over before something truly awful happens. The United States has nuclear weapons. It has an economy that can be destroyed by driving interest rates to zero the way populist leaders did in Venezuela. It has low corruption thanks to the civil service reforms Theodore Roosevelt employed. It has something called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And I feel very sure that one of the two candidates knows what it does. 

Joel Stein, the author of In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book, wrote a column for Time magazine for twenty years. He writes The End of My Career on Substack.