In a less than a week, all of the rationalizations used by the desperate, in denial “Never Hillary” and “Never Democrat” voters have crumbled under the crushing weight of Donald Trump’s epic unfitness to lead. In the comment threads on Ethics Alarms and elsewhere, these otherwise sane and rational individuals have insisted that they would either vote for Donald Trump, increasing the chances of him being able to do to the United States—and maybe the world— over four years what he has done to the Republican Party in less than a year, that is, wreck it, or vote for a third party, essentially abdicating responsibility to protect the nation from Trump in order to bleat “Don’t blame me!” when the inevitable awfulness of a Hillary Clinton administration is fouling the air.

This was always an unsupportable position, even as evidence of Clinton’s astounding dishonesty and corruption ( the Jumbo about the FBI verdict on her e-mails; hiring Debbie Wasserman Schultz) has continued to accumulate, and even as President Obama continues to flail (Assad crossed Obama’s “the red line” again to crickets from the White House; Obama secretly paid the equivalent of ransom for hostages).  Trump had already proven beyond the shadow of any doubt that he is too unstable of temperament, diseased of character, deficient of intellect and devoid of judgment to be trusted with national leadership. He had proven this years ago, over his entire career of feuds, lawsuits, public exhibitionism, outrageous statements, crudeness and misogyny. His boorishness, lack of respect for others and incivility alone disqualify him as I explained, correctly, on September 15 of last year.

I keep linking to this article, I know. This has to be the fifth or sixth time. I don’t do this to say “I told you so” or to prove how much smarter I am than a lot of other commentators. I do it 1) because I believe its message is important, and that not enough people consider this aspect of Trump’s leadership to be as critical as it is, and 2) to demonstrate that nothing has changed, except that the excuses for those who have their fingers in their ears,  their eyes closed and are humming have dwindled to the vanishing point. Here’s how the post began:

I have had this essay ready to go for at least a month; I honestly didn’t think it would be necessary to post it. Nonetheless,  I kept in on the bench, just in case. I was confident that the point to be made was too obvious, and that even those bitter, angry, irresponsible, ignorant whateverthehelltheyares who are keeping Trump’s candidacy afloat—and thus making it more difficult to sort out the real candidates—would have figured it out by now. I was wrong.

There are lots of reasons why Donald Trump shouldn’t be anyone’s candidate to be President. He is a narcissist, for one thing, and that is a pathology. Narcissists are dangerous in positions of power. He has no experience in politics, which he appears  to believe, based on his statements, consists primarily of bribing people, since that is what it largely means in his eternally corrupt businesses of construction and gambling, and pitching them things, which is not the same as persuasion.  He seems to think leading a company and leading a nation are similar jobs: they are not, though they involve some common skills. Trump is largely ignorant of most issues facing us, and takes pride in winging it, simply saying the first thing that pops into his mind. What Presidents of the United States say have cascading impact: think about the horrible consequences of Obama’s infamous “red line” statement, which has led to the willingness of despots and terrorists to defy U.S. interests and warnings, confident that nothing would be done by a confrontation-averse President.

Earlier still, I posted this, about the smoking gun evidence of Trump’s deficits in a collection of 199 quotes from various interview and Trump-related publications. I wrote,

“I’m not looking for Samuel Butler here, or even Barack Obama, but for someone who is at least for the nonce a “serious” candidate for the highest office in the land, it would be reassuring to find some evidence of wit, perspective, reflection, or a vocabulary beyond that of a typical 8th grader, and it just isn’t there. Has Trump read any literature? Has he ever seen a play? Is he capable of a relevant famous quote or a cultural reference (saying that Bette Midler is “grotesque” doesn’t count, though “grotesque” may be the most sophisticated word that appears on the list)? If so, there is no hint of it.”

Just a week short of a year ago, I wrote a post,titled “Dear GOP: Throw Out Trump. It’s The Ethical Thing To Do.” Again, I believed then as now that the decision should have been obvious—it still amazes me that the Republican Party was so blind and foolish that they couldn’t see what I saw when I wrote…

It is the right thing to do. I would throw someone who acted like Trump out of my house. Any competent business would fire him. Any club—well, if there’s a club for assholes, maybe not that one— would expel him.  If the Republican Party can’t demonstrate that there is some conduct so low that it will not tolerate it from its Presidential nominee, then the party has no standards, and deserves to lose—yes, even to <gag! ack!> Hillary Clinton.

You can imagine my reaction when reports started surfacing this week that Republican leadership is exploring the possibility of replacing Trump as the nominee. Idiots! Morons! Now, this occurs to you? Now? After the primaries? After the convention? After all of the ways Trump embarrassed the party, its members, and anyone who ever voted for a candidate with an (R) next to his or her name for more than a year, now you decide that maybe nominating this deluded fool is a mistake?

Forget about Trump: why would anyone in their right mind entrust the task of governing to a group of people this pathetic, cowardly and irresponsible?

But I digress.

Back to the Never Hillary bitter-enders…

Look: nobody appreciates how corrupt and untrustworthy Hillary Clinton is more than I do. Just click on the Hillary Clinton tag, the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal tag, or the The Hillary Clinton Presidential Candidacy Ethics Train Wreck tag if you don’t believe me. Similarly, I have no illusions about how incompetent and unethical the Democratic administration of Barack Obama has been and continues to be; you can track the ethics wreckage here, and (I have barely scratched the surface of the policy botches, because this is an ethics and leadership blog) and by accessing the flat learning curve tag, under which the majority of the entries, though not all, involve the President.

The choice we have in November, however is no choice at all. Every responsible citizen regardless of ideology and political affiliation has a duty, a patriotic duty and a duty as a world citizen, to do his or her part to ensure that Trump never gets into the White House except in a visitor’s tour. That demands, sorry, voting for Mrs. Clinton.

I have floated many analogies to explain this: pick one you like. It may be like the US allying itself with Stalin, a monster in his own right, to defeat the Nazis in WWII (voting for Gary Johnson is the equivalent of FDR choosing to ally the US with Tierra Del Fuego instead). My personal favorite is the analogy of having to choose between two airline pilots to fly a jumbo jet on which you and your family are passengers. There is Pilot A, who is untrustworthy, who is demonstrably a poor pilot, who only has the chance to fly the plane because her husband was a better pilot (though he let go of the controls in a storm to get a hummer from a flight attendant), who may take a bribe to land at a different destination than where you want to go, who will call anyone who criticizes her flying a bigot and sexist, who will provide a rough flight that might have you vomiting into the air sickness bag, and who might crash the plane, but probably just bang it up sufficiently to require major repairs until it can fly again, and Pilot B, an 8 year-old incorrigible boy with no flying experience but delusions of grandeur.

Or, if you like, a chimp.

It’s a horrible, scary choice, but it shouldn’t be a hard one. The choice is obvious, and pointing to someone else who can’t possibly get the controls and screaming, “I want him! HIM!” is futile grandstanding.

We should thank Donald Trump, I suppose, for eliminating any doubt about how dangerous he is so quickly, at least for those who hadn’t figured it out yet, why I don’t know. Immediately following an amateurish and ugly Republican convention that nonetheless had Trump even with Hillary Clinton in the polls or ahead of her, he proceeded to shoot himself in the foot, spleen, testicles and head in a foolish confrontation with a Gold Star father who attacked him in a speech during the Democratic convention.

Anyone with the political experience of a 7-11 clerk or the intelligence of a gopher could have advised Trump that engaging in a pissing match with Khizr Khan was not merely unnecessary and foolish but insane. I’m sure many of those “best people” Trump surround himself with did so advise him, since they appear to have the political experience  7-11 clerks and the intelligence of gophers. It was obvious to everyone—George W. Bush didn’t attack Cindy Sheehan; Hillary had the sense not to attack Pat Smith—except Donald Trump. He couldn’t help himself. He just couldn’t do it. He could not exercise the self-control expected of an adult, much less a President, and began a week-long assault on a man of no significance whatsoever, except that he dared to insult Donald Trump. So like the bully he is, Trump had to beat him up.

What resulted from Trump’s various unhinged attacks on Khan and his wife was wide-ranging and well-earned chaos. Several Republican office holders, fund-raisers, leaders, past elected officials and prominent conservatives announced that they would have to vote for Hillary Clinton, since Trump was obviously unhinged. His comments were also repudiated by Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich and John McCain, among others, whereupon Trump vowed vengeance on McCain and Ryan. Trump’s own VP, Gov. Pence, immediately defied Trump and endorsed Ryan. The news media, already openly campaigning for Clinton, pounced on Trump like a horde of zombies on a brainy quadriplegic. So did others: a former lawyer of Trump’s published an article explaining why his experience representing the man had made him a Hillary voter. (More on this later.)

Other disturbing stories emerged, like this one, in which MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough revealed that

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them.”

Never mind, for now, about the issue of why it took Scarborough, a Republican, “several months” to reveal this information. Trump’s alleged questions seem entirely credible coming from a man who in the span of a few days also pledged to defend the Constitution’s “Article XII” and who immediately after being cleared for top security briefings, described to  a rally in Daytona Beach the details from a video he said he had watched during that briefing.

This all occurred in a single week. A week! There was no foreign or domestic crisis Trump was responding to as President; there were no difficult or complex decisions that needed to be made. All Donald Trump needed to do was not to act like an 11-year old brat, and he would have had strong poll numbers and not have forces his supporters who are capable of shame to wear paper bags over their heads in public. Yet he couldn’t do it!

Donald Trump managed to turn a routine partisan convention speech that was critical of him into a multilateral disaster, while more evidence surfaced of his utter ignorance, recklessness, and lack of common sense, self-control, trustworthiness. Can you imagine the damage someone like this could, and would cause given four years—that’s 208 weeks—or in an international setting?

Can you imagine the lack of focus in a Trump White House, with the President engaged in constant feuds and vendettas against citizens, celebrities, journalists, broadcasters and bloggers who dared to displease him? It doesn’t matter if you think Hillary will appoint Noam Chomsky, Bill Clinton and Alec Baldwin to the Supreme Court, nationalize health care, give the Southwest back to Mexico, ban electricity to save the planet, only allow white prisoners to stay in prison, eliminate the Second Amendment, quadruple the deficit and make Swedish the national language. Hillary’s worst case scenario is a Care Bears movie compared to what Trump might bring, not just to the US, but the entire world.

So just snap out of it, Never Hillarys. I’m sympathetic, but you have no rational, patriotic option now but to do whatever you can to protect the nation and the world from  Donald Trump. This isn’t scaremongering: the last week proved it, though it should have been obvious long before. I’m sympathetic, but you have to be a responsible adult, because Donald Trump is not.