If you are a Democrat, it’s easy to see the danger posed by former President Donald Trump, who refuses to accept that he lost in 2020 and who openly threatens to prosecute his political opponents. Having a president like that undermines our tradition and norms around the use and transfer of power, and in particular, electing a candidate after such a performance is corrosive.

If you are a Republican, it’s easy to see the danger posed by Vice President Kamala Harris, whose administration actually has prosecuted Trump for political gain and who promises to unleash lawfare on religious conservatives.

But ambitious, power-hungry politicians with little regard for the rule of law are neither new nor unexpected. What America has relied on for nearly 250 years is a system of checks and balances to restrain the bold plans of the ambitious. So when considering which of the two candidates is more dangerous, we should ask which of the two will be most effectively checked by various institutions and which will have the most license to carry out his or her ambition.

The answer is that it depends on what institutional checks you’re considering.

Trump, in his first term, faced relentless opposition from governmental and nongovernmental forces. Many states and localities passed sanctuary laws, barring their police from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. The House of Representatives impeached him twice. Federal courts regularly blocked his executive actions. The bureaucracy blocked him consistently. Most visibly, media, Big Tech, and much corporate America joined the #resistance.

Often, these anti-Trump actions were abuses of power, but they were also proper actions that protected American democracy and the rule of law. Trump, by all accounts, is fond of strongmen, disdainful of checks on his power, and vengeful towards his opponents. Trump unfettered would be truly dangerous, and so it’s good he was kept contained.

Harris would be contained by other forces.

Conservatives have a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, and Republicans are likely to control the Senate next year.

This is good, because Harris, like Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, has been quick to prosecute the culture war using government power. When Harris was California’s attorney general, Planned Parenthood sicced her on activist filmmaker David Daleiden because he exposed the abortion giant’s trade in fresh human body parts.

The Biden-Harris administration created a special Justice Department task force to prosecute pro-lifers, and its first case was an obviously frivolous persecution of pro-life activist Mark Houck. He won in court.

The Obama administration tried to force nuns to provide contraception to their staff.

The cultural Left increasingly argues, out loud, that conservative and religious institutions have no right to operate under their own beliefs, but most adopt the morality of the Left — embracing gender ideology, rejecting traditional religious teachings on marriage and sexuality, and adopting DEI.

When some small rural Christian school in Florida refuses to treat boys as girls, the national media descend on them. When a Catholic hospital refuses to abort the unborn babies who come in through their doors, the American Civil Liberties Union sues them — and Harris has indicated that she sides with the ACLU. Colorado has spent a decade persecuting baker Jack Phillips for bringing his Christian conscience into his own business — and the Obama administration argued that people lose their freedom to exercise their religion the moment they enter into business.

The major media not only side with the cultural Left but also advance the idea that conservative opinions are legitimately dangerous. The New York Times editorial board, for instance, accused Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) of “stochastic terrorism” for an ad saying “The radical left … indoctrinate children and try to turn boys into girls.”

The New York Times implied that Rubio was guilty of incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment. If assailing the transgender agenda in schools is “incitement,” then conservative religious views are illegal.

So who might see Harris as “dangerous”? Homeschoolers, Catholic schools, churches, Muslim parents, Christian bakers, and the Knights of Columbus, whom she has branded an extremist group.

The saving grace for these religious folks may be the Supreme Court, which has rejected the Left’s narrow view of religious liberty.

But Harris has endorsed packing the court in one way or another — simply adding enough justices to give liberals a majority, or term-limiting the conservative justices off the court. Such a court could strip religious people of their free-exercise protections.

Of course, Harris couldn’t do this without Democratic control of Congress, and the odds are in favor of the GOP controlling at least one chamber next year. But the 2026 elections are likely to see Democratic gains in the Senate, simply because Republicans will likely be defending 21 seats, including one in Maine, to Democrats’ 13 seats.

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So here’s a real threat: In Harris’s third year, Democrats control the House and Senate. Academia and the news media, angry at some recent conservative decision, push Harris to appoint four new justices. Liberals would now control the executive branch, including the permanent bureaucracy, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, the news media, academia, and all of Big Tech besides X.

That would be Kamala Harris unchecked — and that would be dangerous.