The two main choices for president this year are remarkably unappealing. Donald Trump represents a vote for misogyny, racism, xenophobia and ignorance. I never considered voting for Trump. Like many people based in Washington, I had no idea Trump would get the traction that he’s gotten. I had no idea one of our country’s two major parties was even capable of nominating someone as categorically unqualified and as irrefutably preposterous as Trump.
The man remains profoundly uninformed about policy and doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with that. His views on immigration, trade and alliances — to name just a few issues — are beyond alarming. Perhaps more troubling is his mean-spirited pettiness coupled with his tantrums and near total lack of self-control.
Realizing that he’s down in the polls and unlikely to recover, he’s been talking more and more about how the system is “rigged” while making utterly baseless claims about an electoral victory being stolen from him. The bottom line is that Trump is dangerous charlatan masquerading as an agent of change who is promulgating ideas that are fundamentally un-American.
Several months ago, I was — in hindsight, incredibly — thinking of voting for Hillary Clinton. Yet I’ve never, to put it mildly, been a fan of the Clintons. And do we really need another Clinton presidency?
Nonetheless, Clinton would almost certainly be a better president than Trump. She has a nuanced understanding of world affairs, though she now carries the indelible stain of Obama from her time as secretary of state. She’s backtracked on trade, yet that looks more like a campaign ploy than anything else. More broadly, her ideas about the role of government are predictably appalling, but at least she wouldn’t be an embarrassment to the country the way Trump would be.
On the other hand, let’s get real. Clinton definitely doesn’t deserve to be president either. I understand that a person with her background — decades in public life — is going to have some baggage, but she has way too much. There are the scandals we know about: Whitewater, the Clinton Foundation, that shady email business and much more.
What about the scandals we may not know about? Frankly, it’s hard to believe — in light everything that’s already in the public domain — that the Clintons aren’t hiding a lot more.
Evan McMullin has been a bright spot during these dark times. He’s running a respectable race — one that looks far better and more professional than the deeply unserious campaigns of both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.
I hear people in Washington — including Republicans — say that voting for anyone except Clinton would mean that I’m “wasting” my vote.
“You know that (voting for McMullin) would be a vote for Trump,” I was recently told.
Whether it’s Clinton or Trump, there’s nothing wrong with choosing not to vote for people who are manifestly unfit to serve. Rebuilding America’s democracy after this election is a process that will take years. Until that process begins, I just know that Election Day can’t get here soon enough, and that I’ll be voting my conscience on November 8.
