A Terrible Choice: Hillary or Trump?

A terrible choice: Hillary or Trump?

By Jay Ambrose
Tribune News Service
Charlotte Observer
2016 May 6

Donald Trump is a shallow, uninformed, narcissistic, immature man who could be catastrophic as president.

But Hillary is an awful choice, too.

We’re looking at a presidential race that doesn’t seem as if it can possibly turn out right.

The GOP presidential primary campaign in Indiana was winding down. Donald Trump was way ahead in the polls and had nothing much to worry about. But that did not stop him from hinting something more outrageous than we have ever heard from any presidential candidate besides himself – that Ted Cruz’s father may have had something to do with John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

This is horrible. It is maniacal. It is stupid. It hints at dementia, or, worse than that, at a moral grounding as flimsy as feathers. If this had been Trump’s only excursion of that kind, one might hope it meant nothing substantial.

But it does, and it is not enough to say that he is a marketing genius who tricks media into paying excess attention to him. Or to say that he just says what he thinks, political correctness be hanged. Or to say he is taking on an abusive establishment. Or to say he is teaching elites a lesson. What needs to be said is that he is a shallow, uninformed, narcissistic, immature man without a hint of reliable judgment and someone who could be catastrophic as president.

The horror is that his victory in Indiana and Cruz’s dropping out of the race set him up to be the Republican nominee and that his general election opponent is also frightening in different ways. If he should, then, make it to the White House, what would we get?

People say he is unpredictable, which is to say, it is predictable he will remain a scatterbrain. He is capable of just about anything.

It is hard to imagine him ever settling down into a state of enduring reasonableness.

How did we get here? Part of it was media run amuck, but that is at least to some degree understandable. If you had someone in a marathon race who was running on his hands, wouldn’t cameras focus on him? More culpability resides with the media for incessant attention on the horse race and too little on the issues.

The bigger matter is all that is going wrong in our society. Here is an incomplete list: distrust of everyone and everything; elitist disdain for the common people; economic policies creating working class misery; craziness in our universities; judges shoving aside law to reconfigure society to their liking; divisiveness and stalemate between Democrats and Republicans; supercilious leftism that doesn’t know what it’s talking about; a diminishment of civic associations and self-reliance; the dissolution of family and the social disintegration that ensues.

Now we’re looking at a presidential race that doesn’t seem as if it can possibly turn out right. Hillary Clinton and her husband have played let’s-get-rich games at the expense of integrity, and on issue after issue she is off track. A real dread is what she would do with Supreme Court nominees.

Is the least of all evils not to vote?