Will Leitch, writing at his Medium site, politely asks us all to not vote for Donald Trump.

I look at Trump and see the worst of humanity, and the worst of America, a man with no redeeming qualities, who cares about nothing other than his own aggrandizement and personal wealth, who has so many aggrievements, so much rage, that his core is simply an empty maw that can never be filled. But 46 percent of the voters of this country, this country I love, many of them my neighbors, some of them beloved family members, have looked at that very same man, and the way he acts, the vindictiveness, the threats, the cruelty, the ridiculousness, the fundamental unseriousness, the way he treats people, the example he sets for my children and their children and all children … after all that they have seen, or all that they have chosen not to, and they have said, “Yes, this is what I want. Give me more of this.”

This is not an easy circle for me to square.

Originally, I had planned for this newsletter to be a plain-spoken, earnest, good-faith attempt to address arguments that people, including many people I know, make for voting for Trump. I was going to attempt to rebut them. If you think Trump is going to make your taxes lower, well, unless you are among the top 0.1 percent of richest Americans, he won’t. If you think he’s going to keep bad people out of the country, well, immigrants actually commit crimes at a far lower rate than the rest of the population (also, not for nothing, but thinking they don’t is, uh, the textbook definition of what racism is?) and, more to the point, Trump early this year himself blocked a tougher border bill that was the sort of bipartisan tough immigration agreement that everyone claims they want. If you think he will bring inflation down (which is already happening), his plan on massive tariffs on imports (Thursday, he called “tariff” a “more beautiful word than love”) is universally expected by economists to “lead to higher costs, stock market volatility and feuds with the rest of the world.” If you think Trump will promote Christian values … I’m sorry, I couldn’t actually finish that one with a straight face.

I could sit here all day and try and throw a bunch of facts at people. I could try to appeal to their emotions, to a sense of decency, to look at sort of world they want for children that I know they love deeply. I could talk about Trump’s threats to democracy, about how much he could, and even desires to, dismantle the sorts of foundational tenets that both my grandfathers fought for, that millions of American soldiers died for. (Soldiers Trump himself has no respect for.) I could make the argument that even a dedicated Republican who isn’t all-in on Trump but voted for Reagan and Bush and McCain and Romney and wants the party to return shouldn’t vote for Trump, that if you consider yourself a Nikki Haley Republican, the best thing that could happen for Nikki Haley and the rest of the party (and the rest of the country) would be for Trump to lose. I could direct you to this terrific Jonathan V. Last piece, which, in ways smarter than I can muster, digs into every rationale for voting for Trump and why each one is either irrational or based on presumptions that are simply not true. (Damon Linker has a great piece making the case for “normie” Republicans to vote for Harris so they can go back to being normal Republicans again as well.) I could go on and on. I suppose I sort of already have.

I’ll link his next one too, “Please vote for Kamala Harris.”