Why Utahns Should and Should Not Vote for Donald Trump

WHY UTAHNS SHOULD VOTE FOR TRUMP
1. He would bring change.
2. His list of Supreme Court nominees is pretty good.
3. He's the Republican nominee, and as such, the GOP-led House and Senate might be able to get more legislation passed.
4. He's not Hillary Clinton.

WHY UTAHNS SHOULD NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP
1. In many ways, he's worse than Hillary Clinton, and she's going to win the election anyway.
2. He's a textbook narcissist and arguably the worst candidate for president in history.
3. It would send a message that Utah puts principle above party.
4. He's not really a Republican. He's a populist nationalist that encourages violence, prejudice, and paranoia.
5. He craves power so he can use and abuse it, and that's not a good attribute in a vindictive man who can be baited with a tweet.
6. He's wildly, flamboyantly dishonest.
a. He said Bush knew about the 9/11 attack beforehand.
b. He said he was always against the war in Iraq when everyone's heard him tell Howard Stern in 2002 otherwise.
c. He tried pushing stories like Ted Cruz's father was behind the JFK assassination and that Cruz is a serial adulterer.
7. He surrounds himself with thugs and bullies.
8. His man-crush on Putin.
9. David Duke and the Alt-Right Nazi fanboys love him.
10. The Access Hollywood tape reveals his mindset when he thinks he's having a private, unrecorded conversation.
11. He advocated for war crimes, like bringing back torture and ordering troops to kill the families of suspected terrorists.
12. The bigger the landslide loss for Trump, the easier it will be for normal Republicans to shoo the Alt-Reich out.
13. The bigger the landslide loss for Trump, the easier it will be to diminish the influence of the conservative entertainment wing (Hannity, Limbaugh, etc.) on the party.
14. If Clinton's as bad a president as some people think she will be, it should be easy for a normal Republican to beat her in 2020. A normal Republican that the party can be proud of.

Politically Speaking - 10/12/16

1. "LOCKER-ROOM TALK" - I believe I have heard similar braggadocious talk in the locker-room along the lines of what Donald Trump and Billy Bush were saying, but everyone in that locker-room were teenagers in the 1980's. (I'm not saying I remember specifics, but it is plausible to me that it happened.)

Trump was 59 and Bush was 33 when that conversation took place.

All of the grown men who are still justifying the 2005 Access Hollywood tape as locker-room talk are saying a lot about themselves. I've never heard that kind of talk as an adult in a locker-room. Many men haven't. Why? Because another guy would only talk like that if that's the type of guy he is, and he feels comfortable sharing it with his audience. So yeah, millions of men don't hear this talk in locker-rooms or elsewhere because they don't associate with men who talk like that, or they carry themselves in a way that guys that talk like that don't feel like they're sharing that they feel entitled to grab women's sexual parts. ("Diagram that sentence, Abbott!")

2. A VOTE FOR 3RD PARTY IS A VOTE FOR (WHICHEVER OF THE BIG TWO I DON'T LIKE) - No it isn't. A vote for who you vote for is a vote for who you vote for. Wouldn't it be nice to not have George Wallace not be the most recent third-party candidate in presidential election history to win a state? Now unlike any year before, this year I live in a state where my vote will matter. I knew as soon as Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination that the next president would be Hillary Clinton. I can dream about how much hay Marco Rubio would be making with all of the FOIA and WikiLeaks revelations coming out, but since Clinton's opponent is Trump, it all doesn't matter. Trump is that much worse.

So my current stance is that whichever third-party candidate is polling higher in Utah on election day, I will vote for that person. If Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin are statistically tied, I'd still go with Gary Johnson. Then once the election is over, I'll walk back into the Republican den and engage in the unavoidable civil war and hopefully the Alt-Reich will be purged.

3. #NEVERTRUMP - Feels great to have been Never Trump, but it would have felt better to have a candidate I could believe in. Donald Trump signed up a few years ago as a Republican, and he's behaved like every caricature a New York liberal might have of a Republican. Normal Republicans can say "No, we're not racists" and then some Alt-Reichers pop up right behind them to say "Sure we are, cucks!"

(SideNote: Not looking forward to the next four years of every criticism of Pres. Clinton being labelled as "sexist." It is what it is.)

4. REPUBLICANS IN 2020 - South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is looking pretty good to me right now. Marco Rubio, Susana Martinez, people I'm not thinking of... The ones who should not run in 2020?

Mike Pence - I know he's the VP but he is way too stained from the justifications he's had to make and the lies he's had to tell to stay on Trump's ticket.

Ted Cruz - There's a reason Ted was one of the Pied Piper dreams candidates of the DNC in 2015. They knew they could beat him. He's exposed as a calculating self-server that nobody in Washington likes.

Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson - Anyone who's already run and embraced Trump when there was a chance someone else could win.

5. 2017: THE DE-THUGGING - Hopefully next year, media outlets will be a little more discretionary with who they let on the airwaves. No more Corey Lewandowski, no more Roger Stone, no more of the "Says who?" guy, and it'd be nice if Fox News released Alt-Right entertainers like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to go join their own, more extreme, less relevant channel. And I imagine guys like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich will crawl away, and ratings for Rush Limbaugh will shrink. (It's a dream; don't take this from me!)

6. 2017: THE DE-SMUGGING - I know. I just basically got smug being a NeverTrumper from the beginning, but here's a real pipe-dream for this post-election America. Amplified by social media, people are less "We disagree" and aren't more "I'm right, you're wrong" so much as "I'm right, you're wrong and stupid and evil." Let's all just try to be less smug.