Now that I have your attention, let’s talk.
I don’t know any delicate way to say this, but with early voting starting this week, it must be said: A vote for Donald J. Trump is a vote against America. If the unthinkable should happen and this utterly unqualified person becomes our president, the blood of our country will be on the hands of everyone who voted for him. Yes, that’s harsh, but the reality of what would happen to our country under a Trump presidency is even harsher.
Voting is a cherished right, one which many have died to preserve. Each of us owns our vote, and we are bound by conscience and duty to country to use that vote responsibly. Each of us has to search his or her conscience before exercising this most solemn of duties, so here are a few facts for your conscience to chew on before you cast your ballot in the next 7 weeks.
The most important fact that must drive our thinking and our voting in this election is that this is not a normal election. I’m not talking about the drama, the infighting within the Republican Party, and the daily reality-tv-esque antics. I’m talking about the fact that this is not a contest between two equally qualified and prepared candidates, a contest in which we could have robust debates about the two opponents’ policy proposals and positions on important issues. It’s not a contest in which we strongly prefer one candidate, but life will go on and our country will survive with the other one.
This election is a contest between the most highly prepared and experienced candidate in history and a builder of buildings, maker of reality-tv shows who knows nothing whatsoever about government and refuses to be taught. It’s a contest between someone who has made mistakes in a long career of doing good for the world because she has had a long career of doing good for the world, and it would be impossible to have such a career without having made a few bad judgments, and someone whose entire career has consisted of amassing a large personal fortune at the expense of taxpayers and contractors who have been the victims of his greed.
How’s your conscience feeling now?
The most deceptive part of this campaign has been the normalizing of a candidate who is anything but normal and the legitimizing of a claim on the presidency by someone who should never have been allowed to win the nomination. In other words, Donald Trump is a fraud. Oh, I know we can vote for him if we’re foolish enough; but his candidacy is a scam, and the fact that he has been allowed to become the nominee of one of our major political parties is nothing short of a crime against the voters of the United States of America. The media and others who have treated this “candidacy” as normal and legitimate have created a false equivalency which has led to the dangerous dilemma in which we now find ourselves.
A friend of a friend said it this way on Facebook:
But while Trump was hosting a game show, Hillary was in the situation room, watching as Bin Laden was shot. Her record has stains, as does every Republican, Democrat and general who came before her. But she *has* a record, and she has admitted to her failures and shortcomings. She’s still learning and has the humility to admit that. She’s willing to listen, both to her advisers and constituency. Trump won’t even admit that President Obama was born in the United States. (Adam Tendler) [The last statement has changed, sort of, since this was written.]
President Obama said in a recent speech, “We can’t afford to act as if there’s some equivalence here.”
Eric Alterman, in an article titled “’Normalizing’ Trump,” says this:
Every effort by the media to treat Donald Trump as a “normal” presidential candidate brings us closer to the potential destruction of our democracy. And yet we can see it taking place at virtually every level of our media.
The media deserve a good deal of blame here, not only because of the billions of dollars’ worth of free airtime television networks have given to Trump but also because of their insistence — against all evidence — that he is someone other than the person he clearly presents himself to be. (The Nation, 15 Sep 2016)
Nicholas Kristof, in his New York Times op-ed “When a Crackpot Runs for President,” says:
This does raise the thorny issue of false equivalence, which has been hotly debated among journalists this campaign. Here’s the question: Is it journalistic malpractice to quote each side and leave it to readers to reach their own conclusions, even if one side seems to fabricate facts or make ludicrous comments?
There are crackpots who believe that the earth is flat, and they don’t deserve to be quoted without explaining that this is an, er, outlying view, and the same goes for a crackpot who has argued that climate change is a Chinese-made hoax, who has called for barring Muslims and who has said that he will build a border wall and that Mexico will pay for it.
We owe it to our readers to signal when we’re writing about a crackpot. Even if he’s a presidential candidate. No, especially when he’s a presidential candidate. (15 Sep 2016)
Veteran journalist Dan Rather, in a scathing Facebook rant, says this about Trump and the media:
This is not about partisan politics, about who is right on immigration or gun control. This is about the very machinery that has allowed our American experiment to persist and thrive, a machinery which is far more fragile than we would like to believe.
Trump’s relationship with the press is at the heart of so much that is troubling about his candidacy . . .
And yet when presented with this challenge, too much of the press has been cowed into inaction. This is a man who can be fact-checked into obscurity by any second grader with an Internet connection. And yet when he issues a mealy-mouth non-apology about President Obama’s obvious pedigree as an American, here we are with too many in the press not acknowledging his years of lies (check your Twitter feeds about how the New York Times initially covered this event). All of this of course sets the stage for Trump to lie again about somehow birtherism being Clinton’s fault. (“Stop Giving Trump a Free Pass and Do Your Damn Job,” 17 Sep 2016)
Donald Trump is not presidential material, and the press’s and voters’ treatment of him as a normal candidate has placed our country in grave danger.
Adam Tendler, in his Facebook comment, also says:
The danger is that when people view voting as fundamentally a form of self-expression, in a tight race where every vote counts, the reality is that this rugged individualism actually tends to undermine the actual tangible possibility for change in this country, including the change that voter actually believes in. You may *feel* fantastic and totally aligned with your values voting third party, and that’s wonderful for you, but the follow-through is essentially, in this case, one less vote for Clinton and a strengthened chance for a Trump majority.
And here’s the point: There’s a lot more to “voting your conscience” than just casting a ballot for the person you believe would do the best job. Your conscience should also tell you where your vote might do the most harm. You might argue that a vote is never wasted, but the reality is that a vote can be wasted and can lead to unintended results.
In this election, a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for evil and for the destruction of our democracy. A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, because in our system as it exists now, a third-party candidate has no real chance of winning; and the only thing voting for them does is pull votes from someone who does have a chance of winning. A vote for Gary Johnson is also a vote for Donald Trump, for the same reasons, regardless of how pure the motive for which the vote is cast. Abstaining from voting is a vote for Donald Trump because Trump deplorables are the ones most eager to cast their ballots; none of them will be abstaining. The ONLY way to prevent the apocalypse of a Trump presidency is to vote for Hillary Clinton. To do anything else is naïve, idealistic, and misguided.
Will your conscience allow you to contribute to the election of an uninformed con man who has risen to prominence by peddling conspiracy theories, insulting just about every group of people in existence, and—according to fact checkers—lying in 71% of the statements that were checked?
Will your conscience allow you to contribute to the election of a 70-year-old man who speaks and reasons like a 5-year-old? A man who says nice things about a foreign leader hostile to American interests because that leader has said nice things about Trump? Are we in second grade?
But his immaturity, his lack of ethics, his lifestyle that does not mirror the beliefs of the far-right “Christians” who support him have all been hashed over; and his supporters are unmoved. What should be front and center, according to Melissa Bartick, is Trump’s criminal history. Ms. Bartick lists ten criminal charges against the man the Republican Party thinks should be our president:
-Trump and his father were sued by the federal government for housing discrimination in the 1970’s for refusing to rent to blacks.
-He is being charged with fraud in connection with Trump University.
– Trump Tower was built using undocumented Polish laborers to demolish the building that previously stood on the site.
-Trump is alleged to have violated immigration laws in hiring foreign models for Trump Model Management. These models worked illegally, and he failed to pay them fairly.
– Trump’s charitable foundation appears to have repeatedly broken IRS rules, according to the Washington Post.
-His charitable foundation violated tax laws by giving a $25,000 political contribution to a campaign group connected to Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, in 2013.
-Trump is accused of bribing the Attorney General of Florida, Pam Bondi to drop her investigation of Trump University. She successfully solicited a donation from him before the fraud case, and afterward, he held a fundraiser for her at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach.
-In 2007 and in 2012, Trump and his wife bought two gifts for themselves at charity events for his foundation, totaling $32,000, breaking IRS rules. One gift was a $20,000 painting of himself.
-A deposition describes him raping his first wife Ivana, pulling out fistfuls of her hair in a fit of rage, stripping off her clothes, then penetrating her forcefully without her consent, after which she hid in a locked room and cried all night.
-He is currently being charged with child rape in a case for which there is an eyewitness and credible information to support the claim. The woman filing suit in April 2016 claims that as a 13-year-old in 1994, she was enticed to attend parties with the promise of money and modeling jobs at the home of Jeffrey Epstein, a Level 3 registered sex offender (the most dangerous kind), after Epstein was convicted of misconduct with another underage girl.
The woman alleges Trump initiated sexual contact with her on four separate occasions, with the fourth being a “savage sexual attack” in which he tied her to a bed and forcibly raped her while she pleaded with him to stop. He threatened that she and her family would be “physically harmed if not killed” if she ever revealed what was done. (“Trump’s Criminal History Should Be Front and Center,” 14 Sep 2016)
Several of these cases are currently pending, so our president would be the defendant in a series of criminal trials. How does your conscience feel about that?
And if your conscience can swallow ALL of this to avoid voting for someone who was careless with her emails and waited 48 hours to reveal that she was suffering from pneumonia, something is seriously wrong with your conscience. If you can vote for an uninformed conspiracy theorist, alt-right/KKK sympathizer, 71% liar, and rapist to avoid voting for a woman who has lived her entire life by the mantra “Do all the good you can, for all the people you can, in all the ways you can, as long as ever you can,” something is seriously wrong with your conscience. If you can vote for a man who refuses to release the proof of his fraud and dangerous foreign alliances (aka, his tax returns) to avoid voting for a brilliant and gifted woman who is flawed and imperfect but who has lived a life of public service and to whom millions of people in the world are beholden for her goodness and charity, something is seriously wrong with your conscience.
Bernie Sanders says this is not the time for a protest vote:
Sanders continued making the pitch he’s been honing since he returned to the campaign trail: This isn’t a year to vote third party. Mentioning Clinton’s name sparingly, Sanders told several hundred voters — many still wearing gear from the Democratic primary — that their votes could stop the election of a Republican “who thinks climate change is a hoax.”
And finally, here’s the commonsense wisdom of American sage Garrison Keillor, in a September 13, 2016, Facebook post:
Hillary didn’t have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesn’t do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Don’t give up. It’s not about you. Work for the night is coming.
The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.
Wake up, voters! Our only choice is to vote for Hillary Clinton. If your conscience tells you anything else, trade it in and get one that works.