Counting down the days until November 3. For each day, one good reason is provided to vote for the other guy, the non-incumbent, the one without narcissistic-cum-sociopathic tendencies. The one who isn’t up all night tweeting his tantrums out to the world. Note: DT = the one who IS up all night tweeting his tantrums out to the world. His name shall not be spelled out here.

1. He is rotten to the core

In the nearly two and a half centuries of its existence, the United States has faced down untold threats and always prevailed. We have survived a civil war, two world wars, and a cold war; red scares and McCarthyism; Watergate; the September 11 attacks; the Great Depression. We have confronted and vanquished the internal evils of slavery and formalized segregation. Although much remained to be done, we had at least begun to acknowledge our role in the two greatest global existential threats: nuclear weapons and climate change. Amid all these tribulations, who could have predicted that the greatest threat to our stable continuance as a nation would be appear in the form of a brutish, tawdry little man?

DT has so many faults that trying to enumerate more than a small fraction of them can prove to be a wearisome exercise. Long before one has reached fifty, it becomes clear that fifty won’t be nearly enough. That isn’t exactly a problem when a single one of those faults is serious enough to disqualify him for the presidency, but it is frustrating because all of them are important. Far from existing in a theoretical vacuum, each fault has real consequences for real people, and so it is important to list them. At the same time, there is something dispiriting about the whole process: seven weeks of cataloguing the actions of the most dangerous man on the planet cannot help leave a writer feeling sullied solely by virtue of delving into such consistently disturbing subject matter.

Hopelessly corrupt, DT operates as if in a vacuum, caring only about gaining power and wealth for himself, never for the power or wealth of the nation or the health of its people. Among the faults of his left unaddressed in this series are his pardoning of war criminals, which undermined military justice; his expressed intent to disenfranchise American military personnel serving overseas; his ridiculing of people with disabilities; his unprecedented attempt to politicize the civil service; his acceptance of his campaign being bankrolled by avowed white supremacists; his philistinism; his utter lack of decorum; his pretending to be religious; and his ordering assaults on peaceful demonstrators. Deeply un-American, he is not only the worst president in U.S. history but seems very much like the worst president imaginable. Historians, regardless of their individual ideologies, will not be kind to him. He is awful by any measure. It would be no exaggeration to say that he is evil.

It is no fluke that an unprecedented number of well-known Republicans are publicly opposing the reelection of a Republican president this year. Among them are longtime GOP operatives and party cognoscenti; they know what’s at stake, and they are risking their reputations, in some cases their livelihoods, and perhaps even their personal safety to speak out against someone who is destroying both their party and their nation. One can only hope that a sizable number of rank-and-file Republicans will do the same in the privacy of voting booths across America tomorrow.

Now is the time to stand up and be counted. Those who love this country or this planet or both will not vote for DT. Nor will they sit out the election or write in a candidate or vote for someone representing a third party. Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green—all will cast their vote for Joe Biden because to do anything else is unthinkable.

A final word

For the benefit of future cyberarchaeologists, curious space aliens monitoring the terrestrial interwebs, and anyone else who may care, a word now from the blogger. I have avoided (perhaps not completely) use of the first-person in this series because it is not about me but rather about my country. Because I prefer to take the high ground, in order to avoid namecalling I have used adjectives instead of nouns for titles, except where doing the opposite would be awkward. Although the conclusions I have reached in each post reflect my opinion, my recounting of what DT has done (and failed to do) was based on reliable, nonpartisan sources—more than one of them, in most cases. I have no affiliation with Joe Biden or Kamala Harris and did not support either one in the Democratic primaries.