The many reasons not to vote for Trump

Leon Wolf:

I don’t think I’m breaking any sort of suspenseful silence here when I say, here and now, that I will never vote for Donald Trump. I will not vote for him in the general election against Hillary, and I would not vote for him in a race for dogcatcher. Heck, I would not even vote for him on a reality television show.

It’s not the complete lack of ideological compass that does it for me. I’ve happily voted for candidates who showed virtually infinite malleability on the issues – Mitt Romney comes to mind – because I believed they’d stay relatively bought once they got into office. I am a pragmatist with my vote even if I have strong ideological beliefs and high expectations.

It isn’t the fact that the guy was an activist liberal Democrat (and repeat donor to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton) until about five minutes ago when he decided to run for President. Definitely, that plays a large part in it, but if I believed his conversion was sincere, I could get over it and pull the lever in the end – if, again, I believed that he would remain reasonably true to conservative principles once he was in office.

It isn’t the fact that, after running for President for nine months, he still demonstrates a startling lack of knowledge about basic policy issues, particularly foreign policy issues. That’s obviously concerning and by this point is illustrative of the fact that he is either uninterested in preparing for himself for the job he seeks to hold or (as I suspect) is incapable of ever becoming prepared.

It isn’t the fact that he is obviously temperamentally unfit for the job and, if elected, would be an embarrassment to the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and the country as a whole. It isn’t even just the fact that I have real, live concerns that electing Trump would get the United States military involved in multiple completely unnecessary international conflagrations.

His messy personal life is barely even relevant to me; many or even most of history’s highest functioning leaders had personal lives that bordered on continual disaster. If I thought Trump were capable of doing the job, I would overlook it.

No, the thing that makes me unwilling to vote for Trump under any circumstances is that the man is rather obviously a genuine authoritarian at heart, based on a lengthy record of public rhetoric dating back to before the Tiananmen Square massacre and continuing through his recent and completely unveiled threats against the press for daring to report the truth about him and his political enemies for daring to disagree with him.
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There is much more.

My own reasons for opposing him is that he is a pig in a poke.  There is little you can depend on him to do from one day to the next beyond make incoherent statements.  There is maybe a 20 percent chance he would appoint a real conservative to the Supreme Court,  Of course there is a 100 percent chance that Hillary Clinton will not appoint a conservative, so there is that.  Then you would still have to live with all the drama and daily BS from the guy.  I have never understood the Trump voter and still do not. I don't understand the politicians who seem to think they can live with him.

Anger is no excuse for foolishness.  Sometimes sports teams can rally when they get angry, but when they just lash out and lose their composure the game gets further out of control and that is the situation the Trump voter is putting the country in.