Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. How do you feel about price controls?

Gail Collins: Bret, we’ve spent a long time agreeing about stuff, thanks to our shared loathing of Donald Trump. But now we’re back to our great divide: economics. And just at the end of summer vacation!

Bret: No better way to enliven an August afternoon than to summon the ghost of Richard Milhous Nixon — probably not your favorite president.

Gail: You’re talking about a piece of Kamala Harris’s big economic speech on Friday. Well, I admit price controls would be a tough plan to get through, politically speaking.

But Harris is trying to lay some of the groundwork for her overall agenda, which on the fiscal side includes redistributing some of the mega-wealth of the upper class to folks who are struggling to reach the middle. I do like that scenario.

Bret: The best thing that can be said about her promise to go after price “gouging” is that she knows it has no hope of passing and that she understands that every serious economist on the planet will warn her that the consequences of price controls would be shortages, hoarding and, soon enough, black markets. In fact, my only hope for Harris is that her agenda is for campaign purposes only and that she’ll become a normal Democrat once in office.

Gail: Well, you have hope.

Bret: On the other hand, as Catherine Rampell of The Washington Post pointed out last week, if your opponent is going to call you a “communist,” it might be wiser not to propose legislation worthy of Venezuela. Or is there some political logic at work here that I’m missing?

Gail: Sorry, I can’t get all worked up about a presidential candidate who wants to redistribute some of the wealth from the overly wealthy class. Not sure that I care if price controls are part of it.

Bret, I promise I’m not going to ask you this every single week, but have you come around to the idea of holding your economic nose and voting for Harris as the lesser of two evils?

Bret: At the risk of losing several friendships and not speaking to close family members for a number of years: no.

Gail: Wow. So you’d prefer Trump? Somebody’s got to win. If you don’t vote, you’re basically saying it makes no difference to you whether it’s a woman whose economic policies you disagree with or a man who is perfectly capable of trying to dismantle our democracy. And is an appalling sexist.

Bret: If I preferred Trump, I’d vote for him. I won’t. Ever.

I just think that a vote needs to be earned, and so far Harris — unlike Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden — has done absolutely nothing to earn mine. She hasn’t won a primary. She hasn’t had a major legislative achievement of her own. She hasn’t had a distinguished vice presidency. Instead of moving to the center with her veep pick, she moved further to the left with Tim Walz. Her signature economic proposal isn’t liberal; it’s lunatic. I have no idea who she might pick as a secretary of state or treasury or whether she still means to slash the defense budget — as she said she wanted to do as a senator. I have zero confidence that she could wisely handle the proverbial 3 a.m. call about, say, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a warning that Iran is about to test a nuclear weapon.

So, as a voter, I’m like Bartleby, the Scrivener: I would prefer not to. And no, I don’t think that a second Trump term is the end of democracy. It’ll just be another lousy presidency in a stalemated and angry country.

Gail: A guy who has already shown he has no respect for the Constitution, who’s capable of deciding to try to stay in power forever?

We worried a lot about Biden’s age, but an 82-year-old President Trump — which is what he would be by the end of his second term — is genuinely scary. This is a guy whose entire political career has been constructed around his entertainment-industry past, in which the person who gets the most attention wins.

He’s never had a disciplined mind, but I don’t even want to imagine what it’d be like if his crazy side took complete control during a second term.

Bret: We’re in agreement about Trump’s awfulness; we may be in disagreement about the strength of our institutions in containing his awfulness. What I saw at the end of Trump’s term was a crazy president who was impotent in the face of the courts, the military, state officials, most of the news media and a majority of the Congress and his own vice president. If Trump has somehow become smarter and savvier in the intervening years, he isn’t showing it.

Gail: We haven’t had a chance to really talk about the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate. Harris reportedly liked Tim Walz a whole lot more than Josh Shapiro when she spent time with the two men. I find it very troubling to turn this into an argument about antisemitism. Perfectly reasonable to prefer the cheerful guy who’d be a happy second-in-command to a very, very ambitious pol who must have believed his swing-state status made him the obvious choice.

Bret: I’m sure Harris doesn’t have an ounce of antisemitism in her — her husband, after all, is proudly Jewish — and it’s fair to say she had better personal chemistry with Walz than with Shapiro. But as Jamie Kirchick pointed out in a terrific Times guest essay, it’s also fair to note that the anti-Israel far left singled out Shapiro because of his Jewishness and that the threat they posed to “party unity” was a consideration in not choosing him. If Harris gave a speech that clearly and convincingly denounced those “river to the sea” voices in a way that Trump could never do against the far right, it would bring me a lot closer to voting for her.

But hey, we’ve got a Democratic convention this week. Anything you’re particularly worried about?

Gail: Well, disaster is always possible, but I guess my biggest worry would be that people might get bored and stop paying attention because there’s no big fight. The Democrats are gathering, after all, to nominate a candidate who may very well be the nation’s first female president.

You’re a better worrier than me, though — what are you fretting over?

Bret: Well, Chicago ’68 is the ultimate worry, but unlikely unless the protests are much larger than I think they will be and the cops much tougher — unlikely when the name of the mayor isn’t Richard Daley.

Gail: Ever since ’68, mayors have been pretty well prepared on that front. The cops know they’re being watched by the national media.

Bret: The larger question is whether Harris will make a convincing case for herself in her acceptance speech. Will she sound like a commander in chief? Will she reach out to unconvinced but persuadable voters? Will she present herself as someone who can be president for all Americans, instead of just the people who vote for her?

Gail: She’s been pretty darned inclusive so far. True, she has an economic agenda you don’t like, but she does happen to be a Democrat.

Bret: Not something Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would ever have dreamed of proposing, but OK.

Gail: So far, I can’t think of any moment when Harris has suggested that disagreeing with her agenda automatically made you an enemy of the people. Like some former presidents I could name.

Bret: I can’t imagine who.

Gail: Hey, on the economic agenda front — the one thing the two sides sorta kinda agree on a tad seems to be the importance of early child care for families that need it. Different reasons, of course, and there’ll undoubtedly be big fights about measuring quality, but it’s still a move in a direction Trump has never been interested in pursuing.

You’re … reserved on that subject, too, right?

Bret: It would definitely be a good thing to find more ways to make raising a child in the United States more affordable, starting with lowering the cost of housing by expanding supply and improving the quality of schools by providing parents with better options. Early child care is obviously a part of the mix, but the question is always about how you do it. What would you propose?

Gail: Well, it should be a national system — right now the availability and quality depends a lot on which state you live in. It should be affordable — say, no more than 7 percent of a family income. Obviously, the federal government would have to cough up a lot of funding, but that’s fine by me.

Bret: Whereas I, of course, think that any time the federal government shovels money at a problem, it usually gets much worse.

Gail, before we go I wanted to mention the resignation of Minouche Shafik as Columbia University’s president. Back in late June, I wrote a pretty tough column about the treatment of Jewish students on campus, and I singled out an incident of antisemitism on her campus. It prompted her to invite me to her office. Our conversation was off the record, so I won’t mention particulars. But the woman I met with was open-minded, thoughtful, forthright, curious and witty — a champion of honest inquiry and an enemy of bigots. I don’t blame her for wanting out of her no-win job, but I wish her fair winds and following seas. She deserved better than she got.