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The Trump Apocalypse Watch is a subjective daily estimate, using a scale of one to four horsemen, of how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering an apocalypse in which we all die.
There are so, so many reasons for moderate and liberal Americans to vote against Donald Trump. But what about Republicans who can be somewhat certain that a Trump presidency, for all its obvious horrors, would involve some of the things Republicans like, such as lower taxes and conservative justices on the Supreme Court? Both data and my anecdotal experience suggest that many of the Republicans who are leaning toward Trump aren’t necessarily doing so because they like him or even think he’s a good person; they’re doing it because he’s Not Hillary, because business background means he might be good for the economy, or simply because he’s the Republican nominee.
Here, for your social media-argument-starting pleasure, are some reasons why these Republicans and/or conservatives should consider abstaining from a Trump vote even when public policy and his offputting personality are left completely aside.
1. His campaign has pursued relationships with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. These are the kinds of people who refer to black Americans as “chimps”, celebrate “white culture,” and deny that the Sandy Hook massacre took place, just to delve into the work of three individuals whose support the Trump campaign has sought or promoted via retweets or media appearances. These sewer views do not deserve representation in the highest office of the greatest country on Earth!
2. His own companies are notorious for ripping off customers, investors, and small businesses that they work with. The record shows that, rather than being an admirable entrepreneur, Trump is someone who inherited a bunch of money, squandered it, and has crawled out of the hole by taking advantage of loopholes available only to the rich and by perpetrating the kind of infomercial-level scams that would get less-well-connected individuals jailed or banned from doing business. He doesn’t represent the American work ethic; he’s the antithesis of it.
3. The foreign leaders he’s praised have been notorious human-rights criminals who govern by having their adversaries murdered—Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Saddam Hussein. This should be concerning to anyone who is against murder.
4. There’s no evidence that he would run a cleaner government than Hillary Clinton, and lots of evidence that he wouldn’t. It’s entirely true that Clinton shouldn’t have kept her government correspondence on a private server, and she hasn’t been honest about why she did it. But what she was engaged in was a commonplace circumvention of public-records laws, something that’s (unfortunately) done often by public figures of both parties. (As this Fox News report notes, one of the people who gave Clinton ideas about how to keep her correspondence private was Republican secretary of state Colin Powell.) Clinton wasn’t engaged in “corruption” or the exposure of American secrets; extensive investigation has found no evidence that she damaged American interests or that the emails she kept private involved criminal activity. Meanwhile, many of Donald Trump’s associates and partners, from the beginning of his career to the present, have documented histories of corrupt and criminal behavior. Chris Christie—the New Jersey traffic jam guy—is planning his White House transition. Do you really trust someone whose right-hand man is from New Jersey to clean up the government?
That’s all I’ve got. Have fun with this stuff on Facebook, everyone!
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
