Pros:
- Might be willing to work with Republicans across the aisle.
- Has shown more respect for America's role in maintaining global order than Trump has.
- Is more hawkish than Obama.
- Would continue President Obama's "progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state" (higher taxes, entitlement spending, subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, regulations on businesses, enforcement of "liberal cultural values on schools and churches").
- Result of this approach is more years of slow economic growth.
- Less restrained by the courts and more progressive judicial domination for years.
- Foreign policy failures include misjudging Putin ("reset"), support for the nuclear deal with Iran, withdrawal from Iraq, abandonment of Libya.
- More entitlement spending means less spending on military and defense.
- Has a "penchant for secrecy and political paranoia," evidenced most recently in her decision to use a private email server for official business and her subsequent refusal to release records.
- Scandals past and current, including pay-to-play structure via the Clinton Foundation, reflects the problem she has with "blending public office with private gains."
- If elected, she would likely be investigated by Congress for these scandals, so her administration would be hamstrung from the outset.
Pros:
- Political disruption ("a broken Washington needs to be shaken up").
- His policy impulses are geared to liberate the U.S. economy to faster growth.
- Trump could get a faster start on governing by adopting economic reforms that the GOP-led house has already drafted.
- Trump could fill the Supreme Court seat with a conservative justice.
- Trump is committed to rebuilding U.S. defenses.
- He is more "aggressive against the Islamic terror threat" than Obama has been.
- Checks and balances in Washington would constrain any "authoritarian" tendencies some fear in a President Trump.
- Likewise, an "awakened" media would "dog his Administration with a vengeance."
- Trump does not have a "coherent and firmly held word view formed by decades of reading and experience."
- It's hard to predict how Trump would respond to "shocks and surprises" that all presidents face.
- Trump's position on trade ("a zero-sum game" that America is losing) could cause a recession.
- His politics are "almost entirely personal, not ideological."
- Trump's behavior during the campaign has been characterized by "harsh rhetoric" that has alienated and offended women, minorities, and younger voters.
- There's no assurance Trump will keep his promises to change Washington. Angry or disappointed voters could end up repudiating the GOP in 2018 and return us to an "all-progressive government" in 2020.
- The populist impulses that have emerged from Trump's candidacy can be dangerous when "rooted too much in ethnicity or class."
- Despite his assurances that he wants to build U.S. defenses, he is a "rookie" in world affairs and would be "unusually dependent on his advisers--if he listened to them."
- His "bromance" with Putin is troubling, and Trump's "instincts to retreat to a Fortress America could invite more aggression," not only from Russia, but from China and Iran, as well.
Conclusions
"The case for Mrs. Clinton over Donald Trump is that she is a familiar member of the elite and thus less of a jump into the unknown, especially on foreign policy. The case against her is everything we know about her political history.
"The Wall Street Journal hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and if we didn't endorse Ronald Reagan we aren't about to revive the practice for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. Yet one of them will be the next president. The choice comes down to the very high if relatively predictable costs of four more years of brute progressive government under Hillary Clinton versus a gamble on the political unknown of Donald Trump."
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