Back in May shortly after the GOP race was decided, I did this piece which came to the following conclusion.
Thus, my informed reaction would be to get a clothes pin, stick it over my nose, and vote for the skunky GOP nominee as a modest improvement over the alternative. Trump would seem poised to do less damage than Clinton when the system as a whole is taken into account.
With 20/20 hindsight, I should have let my gut take the lead over a realpolitik head. This was the opener of said post-
OK. The Donald is an uncouth bully with the morals of an alley cat with a platform more flexible than Betty Spaghetti. What else am I leaving out? Oh, an unhealthy dose of nativism and a bad authoritarian streak.
Anything else? OK, that will do for now.
Turns out I defamed alley cats.
Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it,” according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.
Jonah Goldberg, an early #NeverTrump guy, had this close to his piece on the issue-
Either way, this video is not an aberration. It is not a special circumstance. It’s him. There’s no pivot in him. There’s no “presidential” switch to flip. He’s Donald Trump all the way down. And he will humiliate and debase his defenders so long as they feel the need to defend this indefensible man.
I hope I haven't been defending him per se, but I have seen him as the lesser of two political evils. Even though he might be slightly better on policy than Clinton, he is too evil to be trusted with the White House or my vote.
A thought came to me just now. We have women as heads-of-government in both German and the UK. Would either PM May or Chancellor Merkel want to be in the same city, let alone the same room, with him at this point?
Erick Erickson, of Red State fame, had an interesting piece in the Washington Post a week or two ago. He's another NeverTrump guy and devout evangelical (even going to seminary as of late), and made the case that Trump would do more damage to the Church from within by having believers making common cause with his toxic morality than Clinton would do from without via using governmental powers to punish taking orthodox theological stands on a number of issues.
When I see Christians defining deviancy down to justify a political decision, I see a real problem for the church. When I see Christians saying we have license to choose bad men because God chose bad men, I see the sparks of apostasy. Many of my friends have turned themselves over to the anger Trump displays. I see friends on Twitter in meltdown, tweeting profanity at others, spending their time on radio attacking friends by name for refusing to yield. That is not healthy. But not only is it not healthy, it reeks of desperation.
That essay has been on my mind since reading it last month. This weekend news was the tipping point that put me in the #NeverTrump camp. We still have a month to the election and Trump might go against type, show some wisdom and drop out of the race, allowing a wiser and better person to have the Republican party banner.
Even though ballots have already been sent out and some people (including my folks) have already voted absentee, the ballot is for Electoral College electors rather than the nominees directly, so a change at the top is still feasible if novel. May that be so.
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