This year’s presidential race could come down to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Both are despicable and horrifying choices to lead this country. To vote between them is to play the worst game of “eenie, meenie, minie, moe” imaginable.
It is to choose between the third or fifth circle in Dante’s inferno, between Applebee’s and Chili’s, between socialism and communism—choose your own painful analogy, but you get the point. You will pick the less painful of two poisons. But that might occur, and if you take your civic duty to vote seriously and believe it’s unethical not to vote, or eschew the idea of writing in a third-party candidate—which may constitute a vote for Clinton—you should choose Trump over Clinton. Here’s why.
Clinton Has a Terrible Track Record
To make a case for Trump, painful though it feels, one must first make a case against Hillary Clinton. This is easy. Hillary Clinton has been straightforward about what she believes, what she’s done as secretary of State, and what she’ll do as president. None of those are things we want in the leader of the free world. Should Clinton be voted president, our nation’s global standing, already dreadful after two terms of Barack Obama, will only worsen.
Clinton was a terrible secretary of State. In that position, she lied about some of the most important issues this country has faced. How’d that reset with Russia pan out? I don’t mean this in an ad hominen sense, but because she’s a proven liar.
She has lied about everything from the events surrounding Benghazi, which resulted in the deaths of four brave Americans, to her vote in favor of the Iraq war, to—most importantly and perhaps damning—why and how she was illegally using a personal email server to communicate classified information, including top secret intelligence.
Not only did Clinton wind up with classified intel on her private email, it included top secret intel via her fax machine after said documents’ classified markings were removed—a federal offense. As John R. Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst, reported, “The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee termed that July 2011 incident ‘disturbing,’ and so it is to anyone acquainted with U.S. government laws and regulations regarding the handling of classified material.”
In a column, Schindler wrote, “Any foreign intelligence service reading Ms. Clinton’s emails would know a great deal they’re not supposed to about American diplomacy, including classified information: readouts from sensitive meetings, secret U.S. positions on high-stakes negotiations, details of interaction between the State Department and other U.S. agencies including the White House. This would be a veritable intelligence goldmine to our enemies. Worse, access to Ms. Clinton’s personal email likely gave foreign spy agencies hints on how to crack into more sensitive information systems.”
Whether at the time Clinton was unable or unwilling to grasp the importance of her devastating handling of the emails remains unclear, but either way: Do you want someone who doesn’t know (or care) how to keep classified intel under lock and key running national security?
Hillary’s Policies Would Be (More) Devastating
Clinton is running for office not only as a liar but from several other false premises, many of which underlay her terrible economic, foreign, and security policies. For example, remember when Bill Clinton was president? How great was that? Clinton, on top of steadily parlaying her husband’s career into her own, plays the gender card frequently and without any qualms. The only thing worse than voting for a person because of his or her gender is one running for president because of it.
According to this piece Michael Tan wrote in National Review, Clinton’s domestic spending, or in her words, “jobs” proposals, “would cost at least $350 billion over a decade.” These are in addition to “a $75 billion proposal for increased spending on clean energy.” Other proposals include government support for child care, ($200 billion or more over ten years), and another “$10 billion for subsidizing home care for the elderly.”
Clinton is also not just pro-choice but a fanatical supporter of Planned Parenthood and a proponent of partial-birth abortion. She only supports restrictions on abortion “in the very end of the third trimester”—which is also, to most mothers, fathers, babies and OB-GYNs, known as birth.
Donald Trump Won’t Be as Bad as Clinton
Admittedly, it’s impossible to make a resounding case for Trump as a GOP candidate. He’s proven himself to be anything but a conservative and due to that I have never and will never make the case to vote for him above all candidates on the basis of merit. He’s a progressive liberal masquerading as a conservative. He calls people names, he threatens donors, he’s immature and narcissistic, he’s inconsistent and reactive. The list goes on.
That said, again, in a Trump versus Clinton standoff at the polls, Trump would be a better bet against Clinton, especially in the three areas she remains the weakest: national security, spending, and life issues.
If Trump actually wins the presidency, one would hope he would remember lessons from being a business tycoon and hire people who are strong where he is weak. You know, like he suggests on “The Apprentice”? He’s made only vague suggestions on the military and national security, but if that’s the case, neither is likely to worsen, but either remain just as precarious as they are now or improve.
Trump’s budget plan isn’t exactly a fiscal conservative’s dream. He’s “planning” on spending less than Clinton, but that’s not saying much. According to this, his suggested cuts are around $86 billion. That hardly makes a dent in the projected annual federal deficit ($544 billion) but at least he wants to cut something, somewhere, unlike Clinton who, like most liberals, wants to increase spending.
Trump used to be pro-choice and supported Planned Parenthood. He’s recently renounced that position and declared himself to be pro-life, a decision that has made him popular with some “evangelicals.” Many like Erick Erickson claim they won’t vote for him because his conversion story is phony. It may be; it may not be. But even a converted, possibly insincere pro-lifer is better than a candidate who directly advocates partial-birth abortions.
The Trump Effect Could Rebuild the GOP
There’s a final “strategy” to voting for Trump, more along the lines of overthrowing the popularity of populism and getting the GOP on the right track. That is this: Since we know exactly who and what she is, we know another Clinton presidency will be an extension of an Obama presidency. That’s the equivalent of a frog in a pot about to meet his maker due to the gradual temperature increase.
With Clinton, it may be hard for many to tell the country is heading in a terrible direction, because her presidency will seem so much like her predecessor’s, but decline it will. A Trump presidency, since his personality and policies are unstable, could be a slight, surprising improvement, in which case that’s better than nothing.
Or it will be so obviously worse than anything anyone could have predicted that it will spur a revolution among up-and-coming politicians to rebrand and revitalize the GOP into something that will finally conserve the things our Founding Fathers intended, recovering what’s been lost.
I hope none of us face this choice, but failing to cast a vote shrugs off civic responsibilities men and women have died to protect. Writing in a third-party candidate is essentially a vote for the Democrat nominee. If it comes down to it, it’s more likely Trump would be a better president than Clinton.
