I’m not going to vote for Donald Trump. I don’t want Donald Trump to be president. Hillary Clinton has an 89 percent chance of beating Donald Trump in the election this November, according to a current forecast by The New York Times. Voting for Hillary Clinton further decreases the likelihood that Donald Trump will be elected president; therefore, I’m voting for Hillary Clinton. This doesn’t mean that I want Hillary Clinton to be president; to put it another way, #ImAgainstHim.
It’s not that I think Hillary Clinton is unfit to hold office, not by any means. She is an experienced politician with vast foreign policy and legislative experience. She is the only first lady to have ever sought elected office, and she became a New York State senator while her husband was still the sitting president. She held this position until 2009 and was a strong contender for the Democratic nomination in 2008.
After losing the presidential contest to Barack Obama in 2008, she joined his administration as secretary of state in 2009, holding that office until 2013. There are few people to have ever possessed such a resume when seeking the presidency, and to her credit, she’s the first woman to win the nomination by a major party in America for a reason.
The problem I have with Clinton is one shared by so many supporters of her belligerent and politically inexperienced opponent — Clinton is a career politician. She has been in the public eye for so long it sometimes seems that she acquired the nomination out of sheer inevitability. Clinton appeals to moderates because when everything else is taken away, she’s capable, reasonable and doesn’t say something revolting every time she opens her mouth. Then there’s her opponent.
Donald Trump relies on an extremely vocal minority of people who truly don’t care what he says or does. The modern Trump supporter is a passenger on a sinking ship, one that seems to blow another leak each time he says or does anything. Take a look at the raw footage piece done by The New York Times chronicling the language and behavior that is commonplace at his rallies. It’s obvious that Trump’s most ardent supporters are people who can’t, or won’t, use reason. More often than not however, when I hear apologists excusing his behavior and calling him “better than the alternative,” their primary fallback argument is some variant of the phrase, he’s not a politician. Well, he’s not. He’s a fascist sympathizer, a racist, out of touch and a compulsive liar, but he’s not a politician, and that at the very least, I can see the appeal in.
Think to yourself, did you ever really believe that Bernie Sanders, regardless of your personal feelings towards him, could conceivably win the nomination? Even before the DNC scandal that showed the deck was stacked from the start, I didn’t, and I voted for him in the primary. I did so knowing full well that it was unlikely to mean much in the grand scheme of things and even believing myself that he wasn’t as viable a candidate to defeat Trump as Clinton was.
Change is something that I wanted too, but that time has passed. Now it’s time we make sure we have a career politician in office, instead of a man who has founded his platform on saying and doing things that should spell death for a political career.
