For the better part of a year, when Trump supporters have asked me whether I support him, my answer has been a carefully worded, “I’m more like a Never Trump guy,” and as the campaign has drawn on, I’ve been open about my feeling that much would hinge on how well the candidates managed to avoid disgusting us.  Well, barring more (and more-amplified) unprecedented revelations between now and Tuesday, Donald Trump has won that contest.

Of course, just as we’ve known that Trump is a cad and a con artist, we’ve known about Clinton’s corruption.  But to see it all come out so clearly and from so many sources (from Wikileaks to the FBI to FOIA releases to Project Veritas and more), to see the Obama administration’s efforts at cover-up laid bare, and to see the news media continue to play the role of errand runners, rather than truth-to-power journalists, has persuaded me.  As Sarah Hoyt puts it:

Having decided I needed to vote against Hillary: no, it’s not her corruption. … It’s the press. The moment the sluice gates opened. The moment it became obvious that she has, at the very least, committed serious security breaches, if not sold our secrets to the highest bidder, the press started a drumbeat of “Donald Trump’s tax returns for 1990 MIGHT have used a shady dodge to avoid taxes.” …

It was that, the chorus of coordinated deflection, the drumbeat of covering up for a woman who, frankly, has nothing to recommend her, that pushed me over.

To hear of the deliberate intimidation and violence-stoking tactics of Clinton partisans, and to see videos like this one, in which an angry California mob harasses a woman who is (or has the accoutrements of) a homeless person to the point that she winds up on the ground for the sin of holding pro-Trump signs has persuaded me.  These are the shock troops being fomented for Clinton’s election, and they’re not going to evaporate once she needs muscle for some other reason.

By necessity, among Clinton’s first orders of business as president will be to exacerbate the corruption of the rule of law to which Obama has subjected the nation and to institutionalize the shadowy networks that support her in an attempt to keep the stench of her pre-election corruption from preventing post-election corruption.  Whatever the chances that Donald Trump will attempt things as bad or worse, the great masses of American institutions and even the American people will simply not let him accomplish such goals.  He will be thwarted at every turn, in contrast to Clinton, whose campaign has proven that just about everything conservatives have fretted over with her, the news media, progressive activists, bureaucrats, the Obama administration, and all the rest has been absolutely true.

To be sure, I have it easy in that my Rhode Island vote almost definitely won’t make a difference to the electoral college. But whatever I can contribute to the popular vote and the sense that Hillary Clinton is simply not accepted by a large number of the American people, I think it is my duty to send that message.  And lamentably, it has to be a vote for Trump because it has to be a repudiation of Hillary Clinton of herself, not as one half of “the two unpopular major party candidates,” which will be the message of large third-party votes.

Shame on those on Clinton’s side of the aisle who have proven their lack of integrity.  And shame on all of us for allowing the country to come to this.