My favorite presidential endorsement editorial this year is also the shortest, just a single sentence. In Portland, Oregon, the Willamette Week endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris said (in total): "On the whole, we’d rather this not be America’s last election."
The point was valid, and surely one of the better reasons, but it highlights the sad aspect of this year's presidential campaign: One of the candidates, Republican Donald Trump, is so astoundingly awful in so many ways, ways that would take a library of books to compile, that the reasons to vote for Harris - and there are good reasons - tend to migrate to the back burner. And that's unfair to us as well as to Harris.
But it can hardly be helped, because Trump really is that bad.
Eight years ago I easily compiled a list of 100 reasons not to vote for Trump; overwhelmingly, those reasons still hold up, and the four years of his presidency and the years of his post-presidency have only reinforced most of them and caused the number of additional reasons to explode. And that's even counting as a single reason things like the more than 30,000 lies he told just during his time in office.
He cannot be trusted to put the nation above himself (or his personal enrichment), nor can he be trusted with the nation's security, or the security of the people within our country. He has no respect for our military or anyone else in our government or even, for that matter, his own supporters. (Try searching his recent comments about "fat pig" in one of his recent speeches.) His mind, such as it ever was, is cratering, to the point that we seem to be watching a daily slow-motion collapse. Anyone concerned earlier this year about the age of President Joe Biden ought to remember that Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president.
He appears to have more loyalty to the nations and dictators who would do us harm, than he does to us. When he talks about "us," he talks about building mass concentration camps ("detention centers" - and not just for people here illegally, since the forces he would employ are unlikely to be very precise) and using the nation's military against our people, meaning against anyone critical of him. All of this would demolish our free speech, and press, and right to association, personal security and privacy. Many of his most vigorous supporters are eagerly working on imposing a state religion, with the effective result of an end to true freedom of religion as well. If he is elected and does half of what he says he plans to do (not to mention what's in Project 2025, which was compiled by the people who would lead and develop policy for his new administration), your freedoms are gone. None of us will be safe.
He is an active, imminent and crisis-level threat to the United States of America - to you. Al Qaeda was never such a threat as he is.
The final evidence of that - which ought to be irrefutable to anyone with a fair mind - should come from all those people who worked with him while he was in office, and now either disown him or outright endorse Harris. The number of people involved in security and foreign policy concerns is disproportionately high among that group. The list of hundreds of prominent Republicans, a list far longer than any comparable collection of party rebels from the past, is far too long for this column; but it can be found easily enough online. No president has ever been so disowned by the people who worked in his administration.
Just one example: John F. Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff, remarked of Trump (among other things) "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”
(Memo to J.D. Vance: Maybe you should have checked, before accepting Trump's Veep offer, into what almost happened to the last guy, who was almost hanged by a mob, which outcome Trump remarked would be perfectly fine.)
Or you could ask any of the many Republicans who have turned against their own party because of him, many saying that Trump must be defeated for the Republican Party to regain a sense of decency. Charlie Sykes was a long-time Republican radio talk show host in Wisconsin, but he could not stomach what he sees from Trump. From one of his recent comments:
Leave aside for a moment Trump’s serial lying, fraud, grifts, alleged sexual assaults, criminal indictments and one very public attempt to overthrow an election. Set aside his abandonment of free trade and fiscal restraint. This is a man who has called for terminating “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; who promises a presidency built around retribution; whose campaign has become a bullhorn for bigotry; who is increasingly leaning into fascist rhetoric, and who leads his rally crowds in cheering for Russian President Vladimir Putin and booing Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky. And who now threatens to use the military against political protesters and the so-called “enemy within.”
There's a big and growing crowd of thoughtful Republicans who in no way are thrilled by the idea of voting for Democrat Harris but find they must do what they can to block Trump - to protect the country.
Bret Stephens in the New York Times, a staunchly conservative columnist, said on Monday that though he was "dragged kicking and screaming," he would vote for Harris because "I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest."
Or, to balance that a bit with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, "Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball fighting to end: The global economy that has made us prosperous; the Western alliance that has kept us safe; American democracy that has keep us free. We cannot let this deranged, traitorous old man win."
Well. What is there left to say about Harris?
She is, for one thing, a safe choice. Put aside for the moment anything else about her, but just imagine a candidate whose career has been that of a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and vice president, gaining the approval of her constituency (in the most recent case, her party's nomination) to move steadily up through the ranks. That's not the portrait of a radical or of an incompetent.
Her ability in this campaign to build, rapidly, a strong organization, unite a vast array of interests and make regular necessary and sometimes difficult decisions on the fly speaks well of the capability she would bring as president.
She has the strong potential to be a very good president, and no major red flags to the contrary are apparent.
None of the negatives - the legitimate, as opposed to the phony - I have seen about her come close to the downsides of Trump. These are two different universes.
She is clearly strong and intelligent, could represent the United States well on the world stage and at home.
Would she be the perfect solution to all our problems? No. But no president ever is.
I expect she is honest enough, even in the heat of campaign season, to acknowledge that. Her opponent obviously never would.
Eight years ago, I quoted Trump as saying at the 2016 Republican convention, "I alone can fix it." That, I said, is the statement of a man who never should be entrusted with the presidency.
But in this year, if he said "I alone can break it" - break America, shatter our nation into pieces and into a shadow of what it has always been - he might be right. There are people among us, some of whom insist they are patriots, who are fine with that.
It's on the rest of us, now in these days leading up to the election, to make sure that does not happen.
Some of you might have been wondering where I’ve been. That’s a common question posed about us Idaho Democrats.