This is a Boston Globe editorial by Charles Fried, who was Reagan’s Solicitor General from 1985 to 1989. Please click the title to read his entire cogent argument for opposing Trump and voting for Hillary.
INCREASING NUMBERS of registered Republicans, and former and present Republican officials like myself, will not support Donald Trump for president. That’s the easy part.
He has shown us that he is a mean and vindictive bully, striking out in the crudest ways (e.g., his sexist ripostes against Carly Fiorina and Megan Kelly) against anyone who attacks him, and then extending his vile remarks even to their relatives (Heidi and Rafael Cruz, Ghazala Khan). Indeed it is hard to think of any person in recent public life who has displayed a more repellent personality.
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As I say, to keep one’s distance from this malignant buffoon is the easy part. Now for the hard part. [...] He has said that if he loses this would be the result of a “rigged” election, riddled with fraud, people voting “ten times” over — fraud which in court proceeding after proceeding has been found to be a pure bogeyman, a fiction used to justify transparent racially, ethnically, and politically motivated maneuvers to deny the ballot to whole classes of persons.
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Respect for our country, its Constitution, its history and traditions, just a sense of common decency, require that we not allow this man to be elected president of the United States. To invoke party loyalty, to dwell on one’s reservations about Hillary Clinton, to contemplate not voting at all, or the silly and self-defeating gesture of voting for the Libertarian or Green Party candidate, would be a frivolous failure of the most urgent present duty of patriotism. I support and shall vote for Hillary Clinton. Any other course risks complicity in a national catastrophe.