I don't know many Dumpster supporters. The folks I hang with tend, like me, to ask each other how any sane and marginally intelligent person could support him. His approval rating is what these days? 35%.¹ And that still has so many of us scratching our heads.

So many of us fear for our country and the world at large. So I would plead with any DJT supporter who may happen to be reading this to at very least not vote for anyone who will aid and abet him.

If you are still inclined to vote for his people, I would ask you to stop and look at what you would be voting for. The evidence is a mountain: a self-serving conman who respects no law and no boundary. A list of his crimes, his lies, his corruption and the damage he has done to our institutions and to the general welfare would require an encyclopedia. So I will not ask you to read an encyclopedia. I implore you to do a deep dive on just these topics, and to start with the primary documents, not with anyone's commentary, mine included.²

Corruption. Crypto and business income. Gifts for tariff relief. Stock trading. Pardon-for-payment. Cabinet conflicts. Nepotism. Start with his own financial disclosure, which reports more than $1.4 billion in crypto income in one year.³ Look up the dates on the Swiss gold bar and the Swiss tariff cut.⁴ Open the ethics filings and count the trades.⁵ Then read about the Binance founder's pardon, and ask who else was lobbying for it and who they were paying.⁶ This week a shareholder sued, alleging that the president is taking money from a foreign government through his family's crypto firm. That is an allegation. The disclosure is not.⁷

Institutional damage. Start with the Justice Department. More than 3,300 of its attorneys have left since January 2025 and about 800 have been hired. The Civil Rights Division has nearly collapsed and the Tax Division has been dissolved.⁸ Then listen to the people who left. A former Civil Rights prosecutor said he saw "decisions being made within the Civil Rights Division for political reasons." A former prosecutor who left after the Attorney General's memos said "we were expected to be the president's lawyers and do whatever he asked of us." A former January 6 prosecutor called the damage "generational."⁹ The department's answer is that "those who were fired were fired for a reason." Read both and ask which of them has a record to lose. Then read what the Attorney General said when asked whether prosecutions would be independent of the White House.¹⁰ And read the Brennan Center's count of court rulings against the administration's attempts to take over elections. If you think thirty-four rulings, eight of them by Trump's own appointees, are all part of the conspiracy, I would like to hear how that works.¹¹

Environment. Read the February 2026 repeal of the endangerment finding, the legal basis for every federal climate rule on vehicles, and read who sued.¹² Then follow the money away from renewables: stop-work orders on offshore wind that courts struck down, more than $2.5 billion paid to companies to abandon offshore wind leases, more than 200 clean energy projects cancelled in one announcement, with a federal judge ruling the cancellation of seven of them unconstitutional, and a tax-credit window shortened to a deadline this past July.¹³ Then look at what China built in the same year. In 2025 it added 315 gigawatts of solar and 119 of wind. The entire American fleet of wind and solar was about 275 gigawatts at the end of 2024.¹⁴ You may think renewables are a scam. Explain why the country that is winning does not.

Science. Look up the NIH and NSF grants that were terminated, the judge who called the NIH terminations illegal, and the PhD classes that shrank.¹⁵ Then ask what we will not discover.

Foreign policy. Count the dead from the boat strikes, and read what a Republican senator and a Democratic congressman each said after watching the second strike on survivors.¹⁶ Look up the president of Venezuela, carried off to New York.¹⁷ Look at the Iran war, now eight months old, and the promise that it "will end immediately after our election."¹⁸ Then look at who he treats as friends and who he treats as a problem. Most Canadians, 58 percent in one February poll, no longer call the United States a reliable ally.¹⁹ He once said "there's nobody that's better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán" and called Xi "central casting, brilliant guy."²⁰ This month, with Ukraine under missile fire, he eased sanctions on Russian diesel, waived new sanctions under a Russia sanctions act, told Ukraine to hold elections it cannot legally hold and find "someone else" to negotiate, and told the world "I don't care how it's done." His envoy called Putin a "humanitarian," and hours later Russia fired 21 ballistic missiles at Kyiv. A European official called it "terrifying."²¹

Health. Look up why every member of the vaccine advisory committee was removed in one stroke.²² Then check the CDC's measles count, now 4,410 cases and 451 hospitalizations, and ask why the federal death count and Pennsylvania's disagree.²³

Empowering dangerous people, and the merely inept. Read the Pentagon inspector general's report on Pete Hegseth.²⁴ Read what Haberman and Swan report about Stephen Miller's quotas and his wish to suspend habeas corpus.²⁵ Read Kash Patel's own hearings.²⁶ And when the people are not dangerous, they are astonishingly unqualified. Last week he put a new press secretary at the podium. In her first briefing she called her husband "my president," described the Venezuela operation as a "historic one-day war" followed by "a great relationship with Venezuela," and had told reporters she passed the bar exam in China, where foreigners cannot sit for it, before admitting she was never a licensed attorney. Three days later she was reported out.²⁷ I am not asking you to laugh. I am asking who vetted her, and who picked the vetting.

Character. It is not ad hominem to look at a record. Look at the lies. The Washington Post's Fact Checker counted 30,573 false or misleading claims in his first term, about twenty-one a day, 503 on the day before the 2020 election.²⁸ After he posted that Ukraine had shown "zero gratitude," a CNN fact-checker listed 78 times Zelenskyy had thanked him.²⁹ CNN counted at least 38 times between late March and early June that he said a deal with Iran was close.³⁰

Disregard for the rule of law. Read the four indictments, ninety-one counts in all, and then read how each one ended.³¹ One jury convicted him, on all 34 counts, and the judge sentenced him to an unconditional discharge: no prison, no probation, no fine. A civil jury found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll and defaming her, and the Supreme Court has now let that verdict stand.³²³³ An appeals court upheld the finding that he padded his wealth to lenders and insurers, though it threw out the $515 million penalty as excessive.³² The other cases never reached a jury. The Justice Department does not prosecute a sitting president, and the Supreme Court had already ruled him absolutely immune for his conversations with the Justice Department. The Georgia case was dismissed in November after the prosecutor declined to continue it.³¹³² The special counsel wrote that the admissible evidence "was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial" in the January 6 case, but for the election.³⁴ Then, on his first day back, he pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in that attack.³⁵ He has never been tried for any of it. I am not asking you to call him a convicted man in cases where he was not convicted. I am asking you to say, out loud, what you would call it if it had been anyone else, and then to tell me why he is the exception.

Before you say it: Biden. I will save you the typing, and I will save myself the time. First, it is the wrong comparison. Biden is not the president. He is on no ballot. Nobody is asking whether to keep him in office. The only man whose conduct is in question is the man holding the office now. And the comparison does not survive a close look. A special counsel found that Biden willfully kept classified documents and declined to charge him; Trump was charged with forty counts over documents and, as PBS noted, had repeatedly refused to return them.³⁶ Biden pardoned his son and members of his family, and said in writing why.³⁷ The Justice Department has been reviewing his pardons for more than a year and has announced no findings and no charges.³⁸ None of that is nothing, and I will not pretend it is. Second, and this is the part that matters: even if every accusation ever made against Biden were true, it would excuse not one item on this list. That is not an argument. It is a change of subject. Two wrongs have never made a right, in a courtroom or on a playground. If you think Biden did wrong, say so, and I will agree wherever the facts agree. Then come back and defend the item you picked.

Pick any one and defend it by name, without the word "but," and without the word "Biden."