This election season just won’t stop reminding us that both candidates are awful for the country. Examples abound, but in both candidates’ cases the ways they have willfully worked to undermine their supporters’ and the broader public’s basic faith in our public institutions have been among the most painful reminders of all.
The behavior of Team Clinton and its enablers this weekend was both an awful preview of what a Clinton Administration would be like and a warning about the sheer contempt so many in our politics have for the institutions that enforce and carry out our laws. Giving vent to that contempt seems always to be their first instinct, and it doesn’t exactly make you want to put them in charge of those institutions.
Trump has demonstrated the very same instinct for months too, of course–with regard to the same institutions and many others. This weekend doesn’t mitigate his patent unfitness for the presidency. It just reminds us that at the presidential level this is a lose-lose election for the country so that we must at least try to elect a Congress inclined to restrain the executive, and when it comes to presidential candidates we absolutely have to do better than this next time.
It really shouldn’t be hard to clear a bar that low.