Blow’s column for today’s New York TImes is titled Trump is an Existential Threat.
After some introductory material, including that there is a plausible albeit very unlikely path for Trump given current public polling, Blow puts it very simply:
I leave it to others to make predictions about how all this will play out, but I feel that I must say again, and until the last minute and with my last breath: America, are you (expletive) kidding?
He tries to find the logic, but cannot wrap his head around it.
He then lists a series of points, to each of which he responds with details to the contrary, then asks if we are kidding him. For example, the first such paragraph:
I try to view it through the lens of economic anxiety, diminished economic mobility and global pressure. It all seems understandable, but then I’m reminded of Donald Trump, a billionaire whose businesses have on more than one occasion gone bankrupt, who stiffed contractors, who outsources the making of many of his products and who brags about not paying federal income taxes. All of which brings me back to: Are you kidding me?
Here are the other lenses he uses:
- purely ideological
- family values voters
- a strict constitutionalist’s perspective
- “in terms of weariness with Washington and with D.C. insiders, the Clintons in particular, and dynastic democracy in general.”
At the end of this, Blow writes
There is no way to make this make sense. Believe me, I’ve tried.
He then lists a series of things, each of which begins with the words “Donald Trump is a” and here is that list
- bigot
- demagogue
- sexist, misogynist, chauvinist pig
- bully
- cheat
- pathological liar
- nativist
Blow writes of Trump’s appeal to anti-Semites, and an apparent willingness to court them.
There is one more point, emphasized with the women who have come forward, that Trump is “an unrepetentant predator.”
This section he concludes by writing
To put it more succinctly, Donald Trump is a lowlife degenerate with the temperament of a 10-year-old and the moral compass of a severely wayward teen.
There are four more paragraphs. Were I to quote all of them I would be in violation of fair use.
Here is the first of these four:
There is no way to make a vote for him feel like an act of principle or responsibility. You can’t make it right. You can’t say yes to Trump and yes to common decency. Those two things do not together abide.
The next two are just as blunt, and I am going to request that you go read them as they are written, and not depend upon my summarizing them.
That will then lead you to this concluding paragraph, short and to the point:
Donald Trump is America’s existential threat. On Tuesday, America has an opportunity to defend itself.
That is the only point Blow offers with which I disagree, because it is not that we have an opportunity, but rather an obligation, to defend America from what Trump is.