Are we there yet?

It was a very busy weekend in the presidential election, and I’m finding it harder and harder to keep up with the developments.  But when the New York Times details how Donald Trump probably (we don’t know for sure—still no tax returns!) managed to legally avoid a big income tax bill on money his investors lost in his casinos (still wondering, how do you lose a bundle on a freaking casino?) and that fails to register as the top story because the director of the FBI pops off to let the nation know that there might (or might not) be some new email evidence that’s pertinent to the Hillary Clinton private email server case, evidence found while investigating an unrelated case (although that case is related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s top aide’s estranged husband), at the same time that there are new and dubious stories alleging Trump’s connection to top levels of Vladimir Putin’s government, then I’ve about reached my limit of good news.

It’s only a week until the election and I need some help synthesizing.  That’s the point of commentary, and today in The Atlantic Conor Friedersdorf made a nice contribution in reminding that an apples-to-apples comparison of the faults of Clinton and Trump doesn’t do enough.  The FBI/email news is big big big right now mostly because it is new; we’ve all seen how developments that seemed insurmountable have dwindled to near nothingness as this campaign has dragged on and on and on.

It is proper for journalists to keep informing the public about [Clinton’s] misdeeds as new information becomes available, whether it concerns her emails or her family’s nonprofit foundation and its donors. There are so many politicians, many Republicans among them, that I would rather have as America’s president. If not for Trump, I would not even consider voting for her.  And yet, strikingly, Clinton’s behavior doesn’t come close to the depths of awfulness displayed by her opponent. He isn’t just a little bit worse. He is orders of magnitude worse, and would do irrevocable damage to the country in ways totally unrelated to his preferred policies.

You can get a good reminder of the details in this May story from David Frum that finds seven “guardrails” in American political life that Trump plowed through to bring us to this point; things like, our presumption of restraint and honesty in a candidate, and even a basic knowledge of public affairs.

But the most moving thing I found today was in a clip trending on YouTube from Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” in which John Oliver sums up my feelings nicely: