When the Clintons left the White House in 2001, pilfering over $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, and furniture as they cleared out, they claimed they were flat broke. Their net worth today is now in excess of $150 million, accumulated not by traditional means of work and investment, but rather by pay-for-play influence peddling through speeches and Clinton Foundation fundraising -- with the tacit understanding that the Clintons would be in a position to return favors to donors after Hillary won the 2016 presidential election.

As presidential campaigns go, the 2016 election will be remembered as one the filthiest and coarsest ever. Donald Trump’s direct and unrestrained manner of speaking has brought on sharp criticism by the establishment and its surrogates in the media. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s judgment and actions as Secretary of State involving national security matters while also working hand-in-glove with Clinton Foundation were breathtakingly reckless -- violating over a dozen laws that would have put anyone else in jail.

The Clintons symbolize the institutionalization of corruption in Washington, which now permeates almost all the government agencies. Even the so-called independent Federal Reserve has been corrupted by politicians whose profligate deficit spending puts pressure on the Fed to maintain a zero-interest policy that artificially masks the real cost and risk of a growing unsustainable level of debt.

For the better part of eight years of the Obama administration, polls have consistently shown that nearly 70% of Americans believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Separately, a recent MSNBC poll shows “liar” is the most common word that comes to mind when voters think of Hillary Clinton. Another recent NBC poll shows that only 11% think of Hillary as honest and trustworthy. Even if one doubts the accuracy of these polls, how is it possible for a majority to think the country can get on a better track by electing as the next U.S. President a liar who embodies the corrupt status quo?

When Donald Trump raised the issue of federal government corruption in his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican National Committee convention he was tapping into what most intuitively understand -- that political corruption may be the single-most important factor in causing the decline of the United States.

In his Farewell Address of 1796, George Washington laid out the essentials for the rise and prosperity of America:

Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

What has distinguished America from other nations has been its Christian moral foundation of limited Constitutional government designed to protect the inalienable rights of its citizenry -- a rule of law that provides for both equal opportunity and equal accountability. That foundation, which checked government corruption, catapulted Americans from what was little more than a state of nature with minimal wealth in the 1700s at the time of the nation’s founding to the most prosperous and free people the world had ever seen by the early 20th century. Historically, that is like going from 0 to 60 in three seconds.

Echoing Washington’s views in his survey of the vast scope of the rise and fall of nations, historian Will Durant concludes: “There is no significant example, in history before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”

It seems increasingly apparent that the dominance of moral relativism and secular progressivism in the Democrat Party is related to the rotting of its core in Washington. To his credit Donald Trump has made government corruption a central campaign issue in this presidential election year, with his opponent being Exhibit A.

This was also confirmed by a bipartisan focus group whose participants watched all the proceedings and speeches of the RNC convention. The needle measuring Republican, Democrat, and Independent audience response to every speaker of the four-day convention went off the chart in all three party affiliation categories when, in his acceptance speech on the last night, Trump specifically spoke about political corruption being the most critical issue in America, asserting that:

When the Secretary of State illegally stores her emails on a private server, and deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, then lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence, I know that corruption has reached a level like never ever before in our country.

One should never discount or doubt the hidden hand of Providence at work in human affairs. It is perhaps a grand irony that the Hillary Clinton candidacy that had previously skated by the private email server scandal that violated numerous national security laws appears now ensnared at the eleventh hour by a source entrapped by sex-related sins that the Clinton campaign has relied on to smear the Trump campaign.

Within two weeks of election day while working on separate and unrelated investigations, the FBI has uncovered a treasure trove of incriminating evidence residing in the laptop computer shared by top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged sex deviate husband, Anthony Weiner. In this time of crisis, Americans need to vote their conscience and also find reassurance in the transcendent insight of Deuteronomy 32:35, wherein God says, “Vengeance is Mine, and retribution, In due time their foot will slip; for the day of their calamity is near, And the impending things are hastening upon them.”

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org