Although tech website The Verge isn't typically known for its political views, its editor-in-chief has nonetheless decided to write an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Verge's Nillay Patel highlights a number of reasons why Trump will not be a good president should he get a second term in office, and he uses his own knowledge of the tech industry to argue that Trump is uniquely unqualified to handle what he deems "collective action problems."
"Collective action problem is the term political scientists use to describe any situation where a large group of people would do better for themselves if they worked together, but it’s easier for everyone to pursue their own interests," he explains.
"Every Verge reader is intimately familiar with collective action problems because they’re everywhere in tech. We cover them all the time: making everything charge via USB-C was a collective action problem that took European regulation to finally resolve, just as getting EV makers to adopt the NACS charging standard took regulatory effort from the Biden administration."
Solving these kinds of problems, Patel continues, is difficult even with the wisest and most skillful leaders — but is impossible with someone like Donald Trump.
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"Trump doesn’t give a s--t about any of this because he only cares about himself," Patel writes. "He generally does not care to solve problems unless it benefits him personally, and the intellectual foundation of the MAGA movement that’s built up around him is the complete denial that collective action problems exist at all."
To illustrate this, he looks at the dangers of Trump allying with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom he believes would pose a real danger to public health in a second Trump White House.
In fact, Patel goes so far as to say a vote for Trump is "a vote for measles."
"When everyone cooperates and gets vaccinated, our vaccines can be highly effective: the measles were effectively eradicated in this country nearly a quarter-century ago," he writes.
"Then presumptive Trump health secretary RFK Jr. hit the scene to spew his dangerous anti-vax bulls--t, convinced enough people to stop getting vaccinated, and the f---ing measles came back. When this man visited Samoa in 2019, he contributed to a measles outbreak so bad that 83 people died, almost all of them children.
"But to see this failure of collective action would require a break with the MAGA worldview, so these dummies have fallen back to saying getting measles is actually good."