Raleigh News & Observer: "Let’s stop pretending Donald Trump is a reasonable choice "...

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article106974777.html

EDITORIALS
OCTOBER 8, 2016 4:58 PM
For president: Hillary Clinton

Let’s stop pretending Donald Trump is a reasonable choice in this presidential election. He has disqualified himself by his broken contracts and his sealed taxes, his pouting and his tantrums, his midday statements and his midnight tweets.

That verdict is clear and not worth restating point by point. Trump is an embarrassment to his party, the electorate and the multitude of brave and selfless people, past and present, who have served and preserved America. His election would not make America great again, it would put its greatness in jeopardy.

The polls suggest that Americans in their wisdom are not likely to elect this bombastic, alleged billionaire to the highest office in the land. That is cause for relief, but that he was ever in contention is cause for worry. Trump improbably became a major party’s nominee and, if he had shown a bit more restraint, might now be favored to win the presidency.

What has brought us to this juncture in which this dangerous fool has the support of nearly half the nation’s voters? The fault is not with Trump. He has hardly crept up on us. We’ve known him for a long time, first as a fixture of the New York tabloids and later a star of reality TV. He doesn’t want to tell us what he pays in taxes, but he has never been shy about who he is.

Now he has made us consider who we are. Are we a nation soaked in the culture of entertainment and so moved by personal grievance and political partisanship that we would gamble our nation’s future on a man who lost a fortune in his own casinos? Are so many so gullible that they can hear him promise the impossible and accept it because he says, “believe me”?

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Their discontent is not something Trump created. It is something Democrats have ignored and Republicans have exploited. And so it and Trump are with us now.

The election of Hillary Clinton will begin to close this divide. The election of Donald Trump will make it wider. His victory would give license to the worst instincts of the disaffected, turn Americans against one another by race and religion and deny the embracing and revolutionary credo of our nation, “Out of many, one.”

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