It was a tough choice, but I finally ended up selecting ten items that make me absolutely despise the man.
My wife, who is a minority with immigrant family members, is actually terrified about Trump becoming president. I do my best to reassure her, but there’s only so much I can do.
Crap, I only picked one because the “most disqualifies him” made be believe one only.
In any case, I picked the NATO one, because that kind of talk would encourage Putin to invade to get the Baltic states back - and we might then get into a shooting war.
I voted, “Something (you) didn’t think of”, namely, his contempt for free speech, by:
There’s no shortage of disgusting things about Trump. But if he gets his hands on government power, quashing discussion about his abuses would push us into banana republic territory.
[sup]1[/sup]I know that libel laws exist at the state (not federal) level, but Trump gives every indication of testing the limits of what the executive branch could do.
I limited myself to three which I find particularly gruesome.
“Petulant, thin-skinned overreaction to criticism.”
This is something that a person in a position of legal power and authority cannot have. It’s bad enough if it’s just a sheriff willing to bend the rules to make life hard for his political opponents - and it’s pretty bad there. But this sort of attitude is fundamentally not okay for the guy holding the Nuclear Football. It’s terrifying to think how irrationally Trump might react to any number of different pressures. This is not okay.
“Advocacy of defaulting on some U.S. debts, personal disinterest in paying his own bills.”
It’s actually not that easy to make a threat that you can’t make good on and still have it have a major negative impact. Giving US treasury bonds a haircut is one such threat. You don’t threaten to jeapordize the cornerstone of international banking to save on your national debt. You just don’t.
“Pattern of making frequent false statements.”
It’s not just that he lies a lot. That’s bad, don’t get me wrong, but all politicians lie. No, the problem here is that he cannot ever be relied upon to tell the truth. He is a post-truth candidate, and people lap his shit up. This is the danger of Trump’s success - that someone will take these lessons, not make all the ridiculous unforced errors Trump made, and win on a platform of “fuck the truth, we don’t need no stinking experts.”
Tip of the hat to you Mr. Knorf. That is a very comprehensive list. I’d like to copy and paste that to my Facebook page for all my Republican friends. 
(I live in Texas. I can’t help it.)
I chose the NATO thing.
It’s the pervasive buffoonery (and all of the above).
Washington was raised in one of the 13 colonies that all supported slavery. But he progressed in his thoughts. As commander of the Continentals, he didn’t want blacks to serve; by the end of the Revolution, we had a more integrated army (& navy) than any until Vietnam.
Alas, Washington waited to free his slaves in his will; although he only had a few short years of retirement after leaving the Presidency & had been looking for a way out of slavery. None of the other slaveholding presidents did so; and because of the 3/5 rule, there were plenty of slaveholding presidents.
I’ll call out Jefferson–a pioneer in scientific racism. And he wasted the money his slaves earned on his rich-guy hobbies so the Monticello slaves had to be auctioned to pay his debts. (Except for some of the Hemingses.)
(Sorry, you hit a nerve. Quite a few earlier Presidents* did* have opinions we now find objectionable. Trump has opinions that many Americans now find objectionable–but he speaks out to encourage His Base.)
All of these are bad, but only #1 could start a nuclear war and kill three billion people. To my mind it’s an obvious choice. It’s bad that he’s a racist, or that he supports torture, or that he doesn’t read books, but none of those things will incinerate most of the northern hemisphere.
I only picked one “Disinterest in becoming or staying well-informed on foreign and domestic policy.” The guy has no idea about the job he is campaigning to get, the jobs of the people he’ll be working with, the jobs of the people who he has to convince to get anything done that requires the approval of the senate/congress.
And this one then leads into all the other policy-based objections, including the ignoring of NATO. His attitude that he doesn’t need to know what’s what, that he can just bluster his way through as he has done with his entire life and the only point is to* look* like the stronger guy.
So hard to choose which ones not to click … but just clicking them all would be lame. 
Trump is a poster boy for "fractal wrongness’.
By all means. Thanks for your kind words!
It was quite something to work on that list. I started out thinking 12 options would do. HAH. And I still missed some good ones, like his anti-China rhetoric, ludicrously protectionist trade policies, and general business bullying (thank you, WillFarnaby).
There has never been a major party candidate like Trump. He really is quite extraordinary.
The man, and a good lot of his followers, seems to genuinely believe the President of the United States is a cross between a King and a wizard, and all he needs to do to fix everything is wave his magic POTUS wand and sprinkle magic POTUS dust around. Also explains why they hate Obama so much: he’s had the magic POTUS wand for 8 years and flat-out refused to use it to fix all their problems.
Thanks to the mods for fixing my mistake on the closing date for the poll!
Also, I assume Trump isn’t going to start behaving in a Presidential way anytime soon, so the list would need to keep growing. We’ll just have to add in new ones in the body of the thread.
the poll should’ve included the option “Is friendly with Putin,” which is the main reason why I can’t consider him any longer.
His fundamental lack of seriousness in the idea of governing.
Sort of covered under his approval of dictators. But I quite agree; it’s appalling, Trump’s dissembling about this.
No kidding!
While Trump is unusually ignorant on this one, I’m willing to give him a pass. It’s practically a requirement for candidates of every party to make promises that can only be accomplished by other branches/levels of government. Especially when it comes to issues of budgets and taxes, the impression you’d get from Presidential campaigns is that they just write whatever they like and sign it themselves.
I agree to a point, but don’t you think Trump has taking this sort of thing much further than average?
All of them. I also think he’s a Russian sleeper agent. Let’s see if that one can get some traction.
I voted for “Something I didn’t think of.” His most unforgivable political sin, one that should prevent him from holding any higher office in this country, is that he’s Republican. 