For most of this campaign, your humble writer has been undecided about whether to cast a vote for president at all, given the choices we have. After the past week of seemingly unending revelations about Hillary Clinton’s emails, her abuse of power, and her actions which have compromised our national security, this writer is undecided no longer. Until recently, my beloved Virginia had not been rated as a competitive state at all, but even if Hillary were still up by 10 points in the polls–which she is not, I would still cast the only vote against her which really has any hope of being more than purely symbolic, and that is a vote for Donald Trump.
The things Donald Trump has said in the course of this campaign and indeed, for decades now are mostly terrible and in some cases truly vile. In particular, his comments about women are repugnant and inexcusable. However, he has also given a public apology for his past misdeeds which Hillary Clinton has never done. In his personal life and his business career, Donald Trump has been chastened, and one hopes, become wiser from his many failures, but if he is still up to his old ways, accusers should be lining up to report him not to MSNBC and CNN, but to the NYPD. They have not. Whatever he may have done or said 10, 20, or 30 years ago is unquestionably terrible, but what is at stake in this election is what he will do in the next four years.
On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has never accepted responsibility for her many failures. In her long career, she has always seemed to escape blame for egregious corruption, disastrous policy decisions, and the enabling and cover-up of the sexual transgressions of her own husband which make Donald Trump look like a brown-nosing do-gooder schoolboy. Whatever happens, Hillary Clinton always has somebody ready to blame. This is a far cry from another Democrat, Harry S. Truman, who famously insisted, “The buck stops here.” As President, she would never hold herself responsible and she certainly wouldn’t be held accountable by her own party, much less an impotent Republican caucus in Congress.
Hillary Clinton has been the inevitable candidate from the outset of this entire campaign season. She views the office of the presidency not as a public service or a great honor, but as her entitlement and she has spent the past decade or more trading on the perception of her inevitability for money, power, and influence–even as recently as last year, after she had launched her campaign. To be fair, Donald Trump has been trading on his own undeserved reputation as a winner to fund his business ventures. However, the hype of Donald Trump has never imperiled American interests abroad. The hype of Hillary Clinton left four Americans dead in Benghazi, half a million people dead in the genocide of Syria and Iraq, and untold others in the eruption of chaos and destruction which has been visited upon every corner of the globe since her tenure as Secretary of State.
With each new revelation about Hillary’s many email scandals, it has become clear that these frightening and destabilizing events have been the collateral damage of Hillary Clinton’s personal enrichment. Worst of all, these consequences of her greed now threaten to bring an end to the historically unprecedented seventy-year period of postwar peace and prosperity and to plunge the world into all-out war. Russia and China are engaged in provocations in international waters while our own navy is more concerned with promoting leftist gender ideology. Our hard-won gains in Afghanistan and Iraq have been erased. All the while, Hillary Clinton has been raising enormous sums of money from our enemies to fund her political ambitions.
The great tragedy is that all of this has only been exposed in the eleventh hour because the husband of Hillary Clinton’s closest aide and confidante has a nasty habit of exposing himself to minors. To borrow from Oscar Wilde, to have your political aspirations foiled by one sex fiend may be regarded as a misfortune, but two looks like carelessness. During the final debate, faced with a barrage of accusations that had recently come to light, Hillary Clinton laughed and smirked as she shrugged away a lifetime of corruption which has finally caught up with her. If she wins this election, she will be laughing at all of us–all the way to the bank.
If we still believe the founding premise of this nation that just power derives from the consent of the governed, we must jealously guard our freedoms and take responsibility for the wildly divergent courses that are offered by the two major party candidates. Donald Trump is a populist and a salesman who has only gotten this far because he speaks to the concerns and fears of a large number of people in this country. Hillary Clinton is an aloof and haughty influence peddler who views even the people assigned to protect her with disdain and contempt. For all the dangers of Donald Trump’s demagoguery, I still choose him over the certainty of Hillary Clinton’s corrupt Caesarism.