If a president Trump does the right thing, I will say he did the right thing — because that’s my job. But I will never look at that fleshy pile of vanity, crudity, and deceit and say, “There’s a good and honest man.” Yes, yes, we all believe in redemption, so maybe he could have some Oval Office conversion, find a God that doesn’t consider profit maximization to be the key measure of a man’s soul, and become a good and honest man. Maybe the sudden bowel-stewing realization that he’s wildly unqualified for the job of commander-in-chief will arouse in him a humility never displayed in his gaudy romp across our airwaves…

I concede that for conservatives living in swing states, this is a legitimately painful decision. Clinton and Sanders alike would be horror shows. But my answer is simple: I will never vote for Trump and I will never vote for Hillary or Bernie. Period.

It’s easy for me to say that because I live in Washington, D.C. Indeed, I’ve never lived anywhere where my vote hasn’t been canceled out at least 7 to 1. The important question for me is, how will I write and speak about this stuff professionally? Counting this “news”letter, I write about 14 columns a month. Throw in blog posts, magazine articles, spoken work poetry, Fox News hits and all of my mime work and suffice it to say, I can’t exactly hide from my opinions. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t defend, broadly speaking, the Republican nominee or president. I’ve criticized them all, but in the fundamental arguments of the day, I’ve always sided with the more conservative party, which has been the GOP. There’s nothing Trump can do that would make me vote for Hillary Clinton. But if Trump is the nominee or the president, I will for the first time be working outside the familiar binaries of the two-party system. I guess I should ask the guys at Reason magazine or Cato how they cope.