![the world after hillary destroys america the world after hillary destroys america](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/video_previews/h/s/hsdmrynje6xgforaforwgaxwgoqbh-bh.jpg)
In every other sense, however, Mrs Clinton is a self-confessed incrementalist. This is not a clinching reason to vote for her. She would be America’s first female president in the 240 years since independence. In one sense Mrs Clinton is revolutionary. In Britain her ideological home would be the mainstream of the Conservative Party in Germany she would be a Christian Democrat. She wants to continue Barack Obama’s efforts to slow global warming. She wants to lock up fewer non-violent offenders, expand the provision of early education and introduce paid parental leave. On plenty of other questions her policies are those of the pragmatic centre of the Democratic Party. The scale of these defects, though, is measured in tiny increments compared with what Mr Trump proposes. Her opposition to the trade deal with Asia that she once championed is disheartening. Like Mr Trump, Mrs Clinton has ideas we disagree with. She also deserves to prevail on her own merits. Mrs Clinton is a better candidate than she seems and better suited to cope with the awful, broken state of Washington politics than her critics will admit. Although, by itself, that is not much of an endorsement, we go further. Those who reject her simply because she is a Clinton, and because they detest the Clinton machine, are not paying attention to the turpitude of the alternative. We would sooner have endorsed Richard Nixon-even had we known how he would later come to grief. His ideas on revenue and spending are an affront to statistics. We disagree with him on the environment, immigration, America’s role in the world and other things besides. A Trump government would cut taxes for the richest while imposing trade protection that would raise prices for the poorest. As it happens, he has a set of policies to go with his personality. That alone would stop us from casting a vote, if we had one, for Mr Trump. His experience, temperament and character make him horribly unsuited to being the head of state of the nation that the rest of the democratic world looks to for leadership, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful armed forces and the person who controls America’s nuclear deterrent. He has exploited America’s simmering racial tensions (see article). The campaign has provided daily evidence that Mr Trump would be a terrible president. Of course that is not on offer: the next president will be either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. The vote, on November 8th, is now in sight, yet many Americans would willingly undergo the exercise all over again-with two new candidates. If the two main parties had set about designing a contest to feed the doubts of young voters, they could not have done better than this year’s presidential campaign. A QUARTER of Americans born since 1980 believe that democracy is a bad form of government, many more than did so 20 years ago.