For "Never Trump" conservatives, it isn't just Donald Trump's vulgar personality and outlandish behavior that renders him unfit; it's also the way in which he undermines our constitutional order and the democratic principles upon which it is constructed.
Two recent examples best reflect this tendency, and thereby also best explain why he is about to lose an election to an opponent that most Americans loathe.
First is the promise to put Hillary Clinton "in prison." Throwing the losers of elections in the pokey to rot away is a central feature of the kind of banana republic that Trump, the would-be caudillo, apparently thinks America is. That the promise has been greeted with raucous applause on the campaign trail tells us something not particularly flattering about a good slice of the electorate.
Along with the violation of longstanding rules of political etiquette is obliviousness regarding the (necessarily limited) powers associated with the office that Trump seeks--just as judges don't sign bills, presidents don't prosecute people; such decisions, at least in the case of possible violations of federal law, are made by the Department of Justice overseen by the attorney general.
The crucial point about the president's role is that there isn't one. By promising to put his vanquished opponent in jail, Trump thus promises precisely that which the principle of disinterested justice for all is designed to prevent.
The problem goes further in that his intended use of the presidency to pursue personal vendettas actually distracts attention from and produces greater outrage than the possibility that Clinton violated federal laws on the handling of classified material and that the FBI investigation thereof was intentionally less than thorough; that political considerations (of the kind Trump, typically unwittingly, endorses) produced a predetermined outcome of no indictment.
The defense that Hillary's ever-sycophantic supporters have put forth on these counts has been embarrassing: The claim that she shouldn't be prosecuted because there is no evidence that she intended to violate the law or harm the nation's security deliberately ignores the fact that considerations of "intent" are entirely irrelevant to the relevant statutes.
Few intend to handle classified material with negligence; indeed, it is precisely the purpose of our laws in that area to ensure that people are deterred from doing so by threats of legal prosecution and punishments.
But if there are sufficient reasons to further investigate Hillary's actions and the possibility of inappropriate political interference in the decision to not prosecute, Trump's promises ironically make it all pointless: Any defense attorney with minimal competence would be able to quickly have any indictment coming from a Trump Department of Justice squashed for having been prejudiced from the start.
By promising to put that "nasty woman" in jail, Trump has made sure she will never end up there.
Of comparable nature in terms of damage flowing from self-serving recklessness is Trump's accusation that the election is possibly rigged, or at least rigged if he loses it.
That the media is biased against Republicans has long been obvious, that it went completely in the tank for Hillary in recent weeks even more so. But such bias, however real, doesn't equate to a rigged election, with its whiff of orchestrated, conspiratorial ballot-stuffing and voter fraud.
Trump's wounds weren't manufactured by the media, they were self-inflicted, and would have rendered him just as visibly unfit if the media had been punctiliously impartial; the worst damage came from his own mouth, over and over again.
Voter fraud is apparently easy to commit and potentially subversive of our electoral process. There is also little doubt that it flows overwhelmingly from Democrat-controlled inner-city precincts and thereby pads the Democratic rather than Republican ballot count.
But, again, there is a difference between warning of and taking reasonable steps to prevent voter fraud and claiming beforehand that your defeat will have been the result of it, and thus an illegitimate outcome. Evidence of fraud can bring the results of a close election into question; charges of rigged elections sans evidence undermine faith in democracy itself.
A parallel comes to mind here: of how in the early years of the Cold War, Sen. Joseph McCarthy became (in)famous for reckless charges of communist infiltration in high places. We now know (in part through the release of the NSA's Venona transcripts) that there were indeed lots of Soviet spies and that they did considerable damage.
But McCarthy didn't find any of the real ones and his demagoguery made it more difficult for others to do so; outrage over "Tail-Gunner" Joe's tactics effectively insulated Soviet agents from serious efforts to find them out.
Hillary's email scandal, liberal media bias, and voter fraud are serious issues, to be sure. But Trump's clumsy and self-serving efforts to exploit them let all the culprits off the hook.
Just as charges of treason in high places would be dismissed as "McCarthyism" and not taken seriously after McCarthy's well-deserved demise, complaining about voter fraud or media bias will be dismissed as merely unsavory manifestations of "Trumpism" after Nov. 8.
Joseph Stalin probably never had a better friend than Joe McCarthy. Hillary and the Democrats have likely never had a better friend than Donald Trump.
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 10/31/2016