I'll save you from Trump and Clinton: Evan McMullin

The Monday night presidential debate was one more chapter in what I’m calling our third-world election.

A little over six weeks ago, I launched an independent presidential bid because, like so many others, I found the two major-party candidates terribly unsuited to offer the kind of leadership the people of this great nation need. I saw no candidate standing up for the universal ideals that have made this the greatest country on earth. Instead, I saw Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as third-world candidates who will jeopardize the security, prosperity, and even the survival of our republic.

Both Clinton and Trump promote some of the worst instincts in American political life, and they embody the kind of evils that we decry in other nations which lag behind ours in almost every way by decades or more. Doing what they can to avoid scrutiny of their hollow ideas, both candidates hide from the American media and the people, appearing only in carefully controlled settings and with limited interaction. At the debate, Clinton continued to avoid accountability and Trump avoided even basic civility. He presented ideas that were simply wrong, and while she took the attack to him, she proposed the same kind of top-down, central-government “solutions” we’ve seen too many times in the past.

These two candidates have left America with a campaign that produces more heat than light and more discord than unity. The Clinton and Trump candidacies remind me of the third-world politics I witnessed while serving in post-9/11 war zones and in other undercover assignments with the CIA. As a clandestine services officer in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, I saw exactly the same kind of pay-for-play politics, the corrupt use of national offices for personal gain, and the complete lack of accountability that is a defining characteristic of Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

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With each passing day, we learn of more underhanded, quid-pro-quo stories of the Clinton State Department acting as a one-stop shop for companies and foreign governments seeking to influence American policy through a payoff scheme she controlled. The Clinton Foundation is a uniquely corrupt and corrupting enterprise, unlike anything else in modern political history. It’s not a charity; it’s simply old-fashioned corruption. In my view, the evidence to date should disqualify Clinton from national office.

Against any other candidate than the fragile Trump, Clinton would be nothing more than a poster-child for desperately-needed ethics reform. Only Trump could sustain her campaign, and that’s exactly what he’s beendoing.

Clinton isn’t the only reminder of the third-world politics of this campaign season. After a decade of CIA service, Trump is also a familiar character to me. Blustering, despotic, and fueling racial and ethnic tensions to thrill his followers and intimidate his opponents while empowering himself, Trump’s disdain for America’s character and the values enshrined in our Constitution plays out every day in his attacks on religious minorities, Hispanics, African Americans, the free press, and the rule of law.

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Trump’s adoration of dictatorships and authoritarians was on full display tonight, and flies in the face of every American ideal. He is surrounded by employees of Vladimir Putin, and is openly infatuated with the Russian strongman. His new cabal of advisers would be familiar in the third world; every strongman has a propagandist like Trump’s new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon — a man who happily profits from pushing racial discord, ethnic strife, and overt anti-Semitism.

The debate showed that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two sides of the same ugly coin. The twin demons of corruption and authoritarianism drive many of the security and economic challenges facing our nation in an increasingly unstable world. I’ve seen the results of both, up close and personal, in places no American would recognize as the kind of country ours should be. It is time for a new generation of American leadership that abandons these destructive ideas and practices, puts the interests of the American people first and unifies our blessed nation.

Americans deserved better at the first debate, and they deserve better in November.

Evan McMullin is an independent candidate for President and former operations officer in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.

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