Trump vs Hillary: Who Deserves Your Vote on Election Day?
November 7, 2016
With the election only a day away, tensions are running high, especially between supporters of the two major party candidates. Two Round Table Staff members go head to head in demonstrating why the other candiate does not deserve your vote.
Hillary Must Lose
Hillary Clinton is a pathological liar, a corrupt politician and a constant flip-flopper who will do anything to get into, and stay, in office.
Clinton has a plethora of proven lies. For example, in a story by Michael Walsh titled “Hillary Clinton’s Million Little Lies,” Clinton claimed “we landed under sniper fire…we ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get into our base,” when talking about her trip to Bosnia. The CBS News report of the landing showed her walking out of the airplane to a greeting ceremony. There was no sniper fire when she visited two outposts in the area and no sniper fire at the base. The story is packed with other small lies like this one. Why make up a claim that makes you look better for a moment, but when anyone does a shred of research, they find you to be a compulsive liar?
Furthermore, we arrive at the Podesta emails. These WikiLeaks-released emails are from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta— so if he knew about them, you can be sure she knew of them as well. One of these emails states “bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” The campaign knows who is supporting ISIS, and yet it does nothing about it.
The Clinton Foundation is a nonprofit organization that accepts donations for charity. At first glance, nothing seems wrong with this. But when you look at who donates the most for this foundation, you find that the Qatar, Saudi, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and other foreign governments donate tens of millions of dollars to this foundation. This explains the fact that the campaign does nothing about the funding of ISIS because those nations are also funding the Clintons. Foreign donors and governments cannot participate in the American political process. But, by using the foundation, these foreign governments can donate money for political power in the US. While Clinton was Secretary of State more than half of all her private meetings were held with major donors of the Clinton Foundation. Only 5.7 percent of all Clinton Foundation grants went to charity.
Now let’s look at the media bias towards Clinton. Hillary seems to have incorporated the media into her campaign. She flies journalists with her on a private plane, and pampers them with food, drinks and other small luxuries. When she is questioned, she constantly compliments these reporters. You cannot expect these unethical journalists to be even vaguely adversarial to Clinton, even when their questions are pertinent. They just allow her to get away with her standardized, canned rhetoric without challenging it in any way. Additionally, Bill O’Reilly has accused at least three unnamed news organizations of having ordered their employees to destroy Trump. On a live broadcast he stated “but I am 100 percent convinced, and these media organizations have actually put out, ‘If you support Trump, your career is done done here.’”
The Democratic National Convention has also been accused of rigging the election system within its own party. Alan Schulkin, the Commissioner of the Board of Elections for New York City claims “[for] certain neighborhoods in particular, they [DNC] bus people around to vote… They [DNC] put them in a bus and go poll site to poll site.” This is all done in an effort to gain more votes for DNC candidates. While Alan’s claims are only allegations, there is evidence that the DNC deliberately sought to destroy Bernie Sanders’ campaign. In a recent WikiLeaks release of 20,000 emails from the DNC, staff members discussed how to deal with Bernie Sanders’ popularity as a challenge to Clinton’s candidacy. Instead of treating him as a viable candidate for the Democratic ticket, the DNC worked against him and his campaign to ensure Clinton received the nomination.
Hillary seems to be happy with rigging elections. When discussing elections in Palestinian territories, she stated “if we were gonna push for an election, then we should’ve made sure that we did something to determine who was gonna win it.” Clinton is okay with rigging foreign elections and completely disregarding democratic values.
Project Veritas Action investigated the Clinton campaign, the DNC and Democracy Partners in a recently released set of videos. PVA secretly filmed many top players, like Robert Creamer, the founder of Democracy Partners. Creamer stated, “In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground.” He then said “don’t repeat that to anybody.” The “ducks on the ground” are in reference to protesters that invaded Trump rallies with Donald Duck signs who were used to incite violence at these rallies. PVA also filmed Scott Foval, who was hired by Democracy Partners to organize most of the violence at Trump rallies and to create the image that Trump incites violence and that his rallies are full of violent people.
With Hillary Clinton, all of the worst parts of the American political system come into alignment. She represents a single interest that foreign governments, large media organizations, and the Democratic political party are supporting. She is happy to rig elections in foreign countries, happy to incite violence at Trump rallies, and is happy to lie under oath. Hillary must lose this election.
Hillary Clinton is the Lesser of Two Evils…and it’s Not Close
This election is quite possibly the most unique ever. On one side, there’s a man running who has absolutely no political experience whatsoever. On the other side, we have the wife of a former president. It is a first to have both a woman and a true outsider running in the same election. However, there are some other aspects about the candidates that make this election different.
Let’s start off with the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. Those who are not red with anger at the very mention of her name are most likely left supporting her because they couldn’t bear to see Donald Trump as president. She does have her flaws, but most politicians do. The biggest thing lots of people don’t understand is that she is not truly “crooked.”
This whole issue of the Democratic National Committee being rigged should not be held against her. The party is the real one to blame. She should not be held accountable for the DNC being swayed in favor of her. She has done some shady things involving her emails while Secretary of State and she has told some white lies. In addition, the emails in question are currently under investigation. They may turn up as something, or they may turn up as absolutely nothing of concern. In regards to her financial practices, she has taken money to finance campaigns and she charges speaking fees. This does not make her a criminal. All former presidents and first ladies charge for speaking engagements; all campaigns need to be financed. Between her and her husband, there have been four presidential campaigns. That requires a lot of money. However, there is no evidence even suggesting that she has accepted any bribes. Hillary Clinton has done some shady stuff, but she has admitted to it, apologized for it, and gave us her word that she will not do anything like that as president.
Now, on to Donald Trump. To start off, Russia is often viewed as the greatest potential enemy to the US today. Russia’s head of state, Vladimir Putin, has said that Trump is “a really brilliant and talented person, without any doubt.” (To read more click here.)
The only thing I have to say about that is the saying goes “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” not “my enemy is my friend.” We have a man who is friends with our enemy as the Republican candiate for president.
I’m not going to stop there. Donald Trump’s campaign says that his net worth is in excess of $10 billion. Forbes has his net worth at approximately $3.7 billion. This confusion would all be clarified if he released his tax returns. Not only is he expecting the American people to believe him with no proof whatsoever, but also the facts that we do have suggest that he is lying. To make things worse, he expects the American people to believe him without providing factual evidence. What happens if he authorized military action against China and then goes and says he didn’t? Foreign entities will not believe him when he is lacking evidence.
If you think I’m wrong, imagine this hypothetical situation:
A Russian submarine sinks an American patrol boat in the Arctic Ocean. Vladimir Putin releases a statement saying that there was a malfunction in the submarine, and there were never any orders given from the Kremlin to fire at the boat. Then, we find out that American intelligence intercepted a message to the submarine with orders to fire. The American public becomes outraged, as Vladimir Putin says that the US has some of the worst intelligence in the world, and that American can’t trust its own intelligence. What would you think of that?
If that’s still not enough for you, let’s try this. Those of you who think Trump is a brilliant business man and would be a great president because of that—“wrong.” First off, a country is not a corporation. They cannot and should not be handled the same way. In addition, Trump really isn’t that great of a businessman. He started from the top, and never really went anywhere. He is very wealthy no matter which source you believe.
Let’s take the average of his two reported net worths. We get $6.85 billion. That’s very high, and very impressive. However, there are two things to consider. One, we do not know for sure what his net worth is— he never released his tax returns! For all we know, he’s broke! Two, he came from a very wealthy family. He is absolutely not a self-made billionaire. Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, has a net worth of approximately $40 billion, just to put Trump’s wealth into perspective. This shows that there are people out there who are better businessmen, and are proven to be better politicians, like Bloomberg. Last, but most importantly, he has had to file for bankruptcy four times. A disturbing note to go along with it is that he has not rejected this statistic, so this may mean that the number is wrong, and there could have been more times we do not know about. To me, Trump’s silence says more than his words. Bankrupt means a company has run out of money. A good businessman would not let a business run out of money, much less do so four times.
If you’re still holding onto your “Make America Great Again” hat, I’ve still got more to say. If you’re a straight, white, Christian male of European descent, congratulations. You make up a ridiculously small minority of people not insulted in one way or another by Donald Trump. While Trump has not said anything that we know of concerning homosexuals, his running mate, Mike Pence, passed a law in Indiana legalizing anti-gay discrimination if it is justified by religion. Same ticket, so he is guilty by association. Trump has most famously stereotyped all Mexicans as rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. He has also said that he will round up all immigrants, and send them back to their countries of origin. This doesn’t really sound like “the land of opportunity” to me. We are a melting pot. We are all immigrants.
To go further, his proposed ban on Muslims goes against the very ideals this nation was founded on. The ban itself is not realistic, but the very idea goes against the fabrics of this nation. America only exists today because the Puritans were tired of religious persecution. This nation was founded with the sole principle of religious freedom. A religious ban is horribly un-American, and would make the Founding Fathers turn over in their graves.
Let’s move on from there, Trump treats women like garbage. Well, maybe not, I doubt he would sexually assault a pile of garbage. But by the way he talks about women, you couldn’t tell. I could go on, and talk about how he waited to refute the support from former KKK leader, David Duke, or how he incites violence at his rallies against African Americans, but I’ll leave it at that. I could also go on about how he clearly and almost proudly admitted that he does not treat women with respect, but this article is starting to get long. Is your hat starting to feel a little too tight?
Let’s go back over the facts. Hillary Clinton hid her emails from Congress. She may only be running because her party is swayed in her direction. She has attacked women who have accused her husband of sexual assault, but so has Melania Trump. Hillary Clinton has made some poor decisions, and is running for president. She is not the perfect candidate, but she is qualified to say the least. She is a lawyer who fought for the rights of children, went on to become the First Lady, and then served as a Senator in New York. After that, she served as Secretary of State. Say all you want about her time as Secretary of State, but she helped end the war in Iraq. Yes, a war she voted for, but she made up for it by helping bring it to an end. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was ripping off contractors and students of Trump University, harassing, insulting, and supposedly assaulting many women, filing for bankruptcy, and making up rumors about President Obama’s citizenship. Hillary Clinton has done some bad things as a politician, but Donald Trump has done and said awful, horrendous things as a human being. Hillary Clinton is not the optimal candidate, but she is significantly better than Donald Trump. He is a threat to the values that have made America great. So yes, Hillary Clinton is the lesser of two evils. It’s like comparing a pitbull to Jeffrey Dahmer.