Why support a candidate who rejects your preferences and offends your opinions? Don’t do it for her—do it for the republic, and the Constitution.
.. Yes, I fear Clinton’s grudge-holding. Should I fear it so much that I rally to a candidate who has already explicitly promised to deploy antitrust and libel law against his critics and opponents? Who incited violence at his rallies? Who ejects reporters from his events if he objects to their coverage? Who told a huge audience in Australia that his top life advice was: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it”? Who idealizes Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and the butchers of Tiananmen as strong leaders to be admired and emulated?
Should I be so appalled by the Clinton family’s access-selling that I prefer instead a president who boasts of a lifetime of bribing politicians to further his business career? Who defaults on debts and contracts as an ordinary business method, and who avoids taxes by deducting the losses he inflicted on others as if he had suffered them himself? Who cheated the illegal laborers he employed at Trump Tower out of their humble hourly wage? Who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bank of China? Who refuses to disclose his tax returns, perhaps to conceal his business dealings with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle?
.. I’m invited to recoil from supposedly fawning media (media, in fact, which have devoted more minutes of network television airtime to Clinton’s email misjudgment than to all policy topics combined)
To vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe; cutting one’s throat to lower one’s blood pressure.
.. If we arrive at the bizarre endpoint where such seemingly closed questions are open to debate, partisan rancor has overwhelmed and overpowered the reasoning functions of our brains. America’s first president cautioned his posterity against succumbing to such internecine hatreds: “The spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” George Washington’s farewell warning resounds with reverberating relevance in this election year.
.. We don’t have to analogize Donald Trump to any of the lurid tyrants of world history to recognize in him the most anti-constitutional personality ever to gain a major-party nomination for the U.S. presidency.
.. What we should all foresee is that a President Trump will certainly try to realize Washington’s nightmare. He must not be allowed to try.
.. What we should all foresee is that a President Trump will certainly try to realize Washington’s nightmare. He must not be allowed to try.
.. But she is a patriot. She will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States. She will defend allies. She will execute the laws with reasonable impartiality. She may bend some rules for her own and her supporters’ advantage. She will not outright defy legality altogether. Above all, she can govern herself; the first indispensable qualification for governing others.
.. Previous generations accepted infinitely heavier sacrifices and more dangerous duties to defend democracy. I’ll miss the tax cut I’d get from united Republican government. But there will be other elections, other chances to vote for what I regard as more sensible policies.
.. This November, however, I am voting not to advance my wish-list on taxes, entitlements, regulation, and judicial appointments. I am voting to defend Americans’ profoundest shared commitment: a commitment to norms and rules
.. Trump’s main interest has been and will continue to be self-enrichment by any means, no matter how crooked. His next interest after that is never to be criticized by anybody for any reason, no matter how justified—maybe most especially when justified. Yet Trump does not need to achieve a dictatorship to subvert democracy.
.. Your hand may hesitate to put a mark beside the name, Hillary Clinton. You’re not doing it for her. The vote you cast is for the republic and the Constitution.
Alec Baldwin is a Perfect Donald Trump
Her Clinton projects an almost demonic competence and an undisguised contempt for a public that has consistently underestimated or rejected her. Yet the character is also madly cheerful
.. Beyond capturing the low-hanging Trumpisms, Baldwin conveyed the pathetic smallness of Trump’s cruelty, the pithy meanness with which he attacks anyone who irritates him (be they babies, political opponents, or beauty queens)—a meanness that Trump cannot seem to control.
The Madness Of King Donald
This Solzhenitsyn quote Jonah cites resonates with me: “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” Trump will carry my state, Louisiana, comfortably, and a Hillary vote from me almost certainly won’t matter. That said, whatever I decide to do with my vote, I know for whom I will not cast it, and will never cast it.
.. What tipped me is contemplating the fact that this man, Trump, six weeks before the presidential election, found himself awake in the middle of the night and decided to tweet this:
Given all the outrages from Donald Trump, this is a tiny thing, but I can’t stop thinking about it. Here is a man six weeks away from the election that could make him President of the United States. He is surrounded by advisers who are trying to convince him to rein in his self-destructive impulses. And yet, he wakes up in the middle of the night, because Hillary Clinton has gotten inside his head, and sends out picayune tweets, including one encouraging the American people, the people whose leader he seeks to be, to look into a supposed sex tape from a beauty pageant contestant.
Think about that. Think about what it says about the man’s worthlessness of character, his total lack of self-discipline, his boundless vanity — so much that he would put his presidential campaign at risk to engage in an extremely petty spat over a beauty queen. Imagine him in the White House, having to make spot decisions about matters of national security. Imagine some foreign leader having taunted him publicly, and him waking up in the middle of the night, grabbing a phone, and tweeting a response that risks starting a war. Don’t think it will happen? How does one tell the President of the United States what he can and cannot do? Don’t you think that all his campaign advisers have told him to lay off of Twitter, because he can’t handle it? Don’t you think common sense would tell any of us that?
Yet he persists. He is controlled by his passions. Electing him would be like handing the keys to a Lamborghini to a drunken teenage boy.
.. So we’re going to make the 2016 campaign about Bill Clinton’s adultery in the 1990s? Really? Aside from the world-historical stupidity of doing that (instead of focusing on trade, immigration, and the economy, which is why GOP primary voters went for him in the first place), consider: how well did making a martyr of Bill Clinton work out for Republicans back then?
.. Trump is lying. He’s baldly, boldly lying. He has bragged about his infidelities before. He’s counting on the fact that his supporters will not care that he’s lying, and lying about a matter on which he intends to fault Hillary Clinton — who, despite being cheated on by her dirtbag husband, remained faithful to her vows.
.. “She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be,” Mr. Trump said.
Well, there you have it. He’s bragging about his cruelty and viciousness — “viciousness” in the ordinary sense, and in the sense of being the opposite of virtuous. Is this the kind of man you want in the White House? Let me put this directly to my fellow orthodox Christians: do you really want to associate yourself with a presidential candidate who says these things?
.. a Clinton presidency would be a disaster for us on this front. But Clinton’s faults, deep as they are, are the faults of a normal politician.
.. Because Congress has been so deferential over the past decades to the president in matters of war, we could easily face a situation in which President Trump decides unilaterally to send American troops into combat because he has decided that his dignity has been offended by some foreigner, or for some other petty reason. If it came to that, I would hope that the military brass would refuse the orders. But if that happened — if we got into a situation in which the US military refused a lawful order from the Commander in Chief — we would face a constitutional crisis, and a simultaneous crisis of world stability, as America’s enemies would know that the Commander in Chief did not have the confidence of and control over his military forces.
.. Again, this is a man who no master of his passions, but rather is mastered by them. When you get to the age of 70 and you cannot keep yourself from behaving like a tabloid clown, even when the US presidency is within your grasp, you are damn close to being a madman.
.. The Trump campaign built a large policy shop in Washington that has now largely melted away because of neglect, mismanagement and promises of pay that were never honored. Many of the team’s former members say the campaign leadership never took the Washington office seriously and let it wither away after squeezing it dry.
.. They put in long hours before and during the Republican National Convention to help the campaign look like a professional operation.
But in August, shortly after the convention, most of the policy shop’s most active staffers quit. Although they signed non-disclosure agreements, several of them told me on background that the Trump policy effort has been a mess from start to finish.
“It’s a complete disaster,” one disgruntled former adviser told me. “They use and abuse people. The policy office fell apart in August when the promised checks weren’t delivered.”
.. Aside from the immorality of not paying people for work done — something Trump is accustomed to doing — consider what letting your policy shop go to hell says about the attention you will pay to governing.
So much for the idea that Trump surrounds himself with smart people and listens to them. I think Trump figures he will be able to rule by decree. He won’t be able to, obviously, but he’ll smash up a lot of things in the attempt. As much as I think the GOP richly deserves the pain Trump has inflicted on them — Tucker Carlson’s jeremiad from the beginning of the year remains unsurpassed — by the time we get to the end of the Trump administration, the conservative party will likely be so discredited it may never recover.
.. What the church in America suffers from, and indeed the general moral and spiritual crisis in this nation, is not political. Our politics are a manifestation of it, not the cause of it. Donald Trump is not a solution to the problem, he’s a symptom of it. Politics will not fix what is broken within us.
Trump’s Temperament
Such is Donald Trump’s vanity and sense of grievance that he cannot help himself, even when his actions are demonstrably damaging his campaign — and even when the people closest to him are warning him to knock it off and get back on course criticizing Hillary. If he can’t stifle it for the sake of advancing his own political interests, how is he going to control himself when the national interests are at stake?
The other night, I had to have a talk with my 12-year-old son about not letting his emotions get the best of him when somebody or something makes him angry. He’s struggling with this, as adolescents do. I hope that by the time he’s 70, he’s mastered his passions — especially if he runs for president.
.. A man with this kind of temperament in charge of the world’s biggest and most advanced fighting force is terrifying. If Khizr Khan and John McCain can get under his skin and into his head like that, how in the heck would he manage Hassan Rouhani and Kim Jong Un — to say nothing of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping?