If the polls are correct, many disaffected Republicans are making their peace with Donald Trump in the final hours of the 2016 campaign. The usual term for this process is “returning home.” This time, we need a new phrase. The familiar Republican home has been bulldozed and replaced by a Trump-branded edifice. It will require long and hard work to restore and rebuild what has been lost.

Between now and then, however, there is a ballot to face. Last week, I advanced the best case I could for each of the available options. Now, however, comes the time for choosing—and for explicating the reasons for that choice.

Those attempting to rally reluctant Republicans to Trump seldom waste words on the affirmative case for the blowhard businessman. What is there to say in favor of a candidate who would lie even about his (non) support for a charity for children with AIDS?

Instead, the case for Trump swiftly shifts to a fervid case against Hillary Clinton. Here for example are some lines from an op-ed coauthored by Bill Bennett, a high conservative eminence and former secretary of education, and F.H. Buckley, a law professor, Trump supporter, and sometime speechwriter.

Consider, then, what would happen were the “Clinton Cash” machine to move into the White House. We’d have a government with the morals of a banana republic; and crony capitalism, the silent killer of the American economy, would increasingly burden entrepreneurs. Wasteful regulations, drafted to benefit the clients of K Street lobbyists, would transfer wealth from dispersed lower and middle-class Americans to the rich and well-connected. The courtier class of Clinton donors would flourish, but woe to those who would fail to partner with the government. It might not be a kleptocracy, but it would be a huge move in that direction. Worse still, all the powers of the state would be unleashed against political enemies, with tax audits, EPA investigations, and charges brought under one of the numberless and technical federal public welfare offences. Montesquieu defined political liberty as the “tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security,” and a Clinton administration would see to it that its political opponents would never know such tranquility. We saw a bit of this during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and (whatever else might be said about him) he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. With Mrs. Clinton it would be far worse. She is a very different sort of person from her spouse, and much more closely resembles a Richard Nixon, a Nixon without his accomplishments and with a fawning media that could be relied upon to defend her when it counted, as well as a corrupt administration that would back her to the hilt.

The conclusion that follows from such sizzling philippics is that anybody, literally anybody, wearing an “R” by his name should be preferred to the demonic Clinton. “Everybody on this stage is better than Hillary Clinton,” argued former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the sixth Republican debate, January 2016. Bush surely did not believe that, but in the moment, it must have seemed a forgivable fib. Hillary Clinton would have paid a similar compliment to Bernie Sanders on a Democratic debate stage, but who doubts that privately she would have preferred Jeb Bush to the cranky Vermont socialist?