You knew this had to be coming. You knew I’d have to write about it sooner or later. I procrastinated as long as I possibly could, but here we are.

I’m going to just cut to the chase right up front and tell you that you should vote for Hillary. Your vote is your vote, and you can cast it for whomever you want — Jill Stein, your cat, Zombie Paul Wellstone. But here in the universe where we’re all actually living, there are exactly two people who might become president next January 20th. One of them is Hillary Clinton, and the other is Donald Trump.

Hillary is a smart, hardworking, imperfect Democratic politician. There are loads of perfectly legitimate critiques of her, many of which were made by Bernie Sanders during the primary season. She’s too hawkish, too cozy with the banks, not aggressive enough on global warming. She’s very willing to play politics, to take stands only when they become politically expedient. (“I could have backed gay marriage sooner,” the Kate McKinnon Hillary says to “Val,” played by Hillary, in an SNL skit from a year ago. “Fair,” Val/Hillary says.)

But anyone who makes it this far in politics is going to be imperfect and she’s also smart, capable, and (as anyone who watched the three debates can testify) made of fucking steel. (AMERICAN fucking steel.)

Also, she’s running against Donald Trump.

I am going to restrain myself from recapping all the things that are horrifying about Donald Trump, though it’s hard, and stick with the fact that he’s an existential threat to our democracy. I like having elections. I like having peaceful transitions of power. Even when my candidate lost, in 2000, in a genuinely sketchy recount, I remember thinking, “in some countries this sort of thing results in soldiers in the streets, and I am glad that we can argue over this without me having to worry about a literal civil war breaking out.”

Trump said in the debate last night that he wasn’t necessarily going to concede if he lost the election. Now, just to be clear about this, the whole “concession speech” routine is a tradition, and a ritual, and a courtesy, but it is not necessary. The person with the majority of electoral votes wins the election.  (If no one gets a majority it goes to the House, and hopefully this won’t happen because we haven’t done it in a while and no one really knows how that would shake out. It’ll be a mess. But it’s a mess that is provided for in our Constitution, we don’t decide this with a dick-waving contest.) But Trump has spent months whipping up his base. He’s repeatedly told his supporters that if he loses, this will mean the Democrats rigged the election. He has encouraged violence. He has re-tweeted stuff from literal neo-Nazis and has refused to disavow his literal neo-Nazi supporters and has blown anti-Semitic dogwhistles loudly enough to wake the dead.

And it’s not just liberals seeing this.

During the Republican primaries, I said repeatedly that I’d take Ted Cruz as the nominee over Donald Trump, because once someone becomes a major party nominee there’s a chance they’ll win, and while I found the idea of President Cruz absolutely appalling, I also believed that Cruz and I shared respect for certain bedrock American values. By which I did not mean things like Freedom of Religion or Freedom of Speech, but by which I meant, “ELECTIONS: HAVING THEM.” I trusted that Ted, if elected, would stand for election in four years and leave the White House if defeated. I did not have anything remotely close to that sort of faith in Trump.

If I had to vote for Ted Cruz to stop Trump, I would. So yeah, Republicans: you can vote for Hillary Clinton, because you have seen who this guy is. You have seen that he is dumb, first of all. He is ignorant and arrogant. He is short-tempered. You can bait him with a Tweet. You can bait him by mentioning the Emmys, during a presidential debate! He will shriek about how short-tempered his smiling opponent is and bellow about temperament and call her ugly names in front of a national TV audience. He has bragged about groping women (and over a dozen women have now come forward to vouch for his truthfulness there) and has made creepy, sexual comments about his own daughter. He lies constantly. He lies about things we all heard him say or do. He brags about not paying taxes, about not paying his bills. He is a bully, a cheat, a serial adulterer, and these are all things that are on the record in every possible way.

He cannot be trusted with any of the responsibilities of the U.S. Presidency, from the nuclear codes on down. Even if you actively loathe Hillary and everything she stands for, you risk losing everything this country even is if Donald Trump takes the presidency.

Anyway, I’ll be back in a separate post to write about the third-party candidates. My writeup will be heavily oriented towards Republicans and conservative voters who are appalled by Trump but cannot make themselves vote for Hillary. I’m pretty sure my fanbase is mostly liberal (with a few conservatives who read me because I round up a lot of info and that’s convenient) but hey, maybe some of you can use this information to try to pull a family member from Trump.