To begin the comparison I invite readers to delve deeper into the new Clinton email information.

The best explainer I’ve encountered comes from Julian Sanchez, a journalist with expertise in the Espionage Act, who reads deep into that statute to explain why the decision against charging Clinton was almost certainly correct, based on all the information we possess. It really does appear that she did not violate that oft-abused statute’s provisions, even though using a private email server did show poor judgment and was almost certainly designed to thwart Freedom of Information Act requests. Voters ought to punish that poor judgment when evaluating Clinton. But if their vote flows from a cumulative comparison of both candidate’s flaws, rather than reflexive disgust at the one that they read about most recently, Trump would easily lose to Clinton even if her emails did violate the law.

And it isn’t even a close call.

It isn’t just that Trump has a staggering record of deliberate cruelty toward strangers and even family members; that he unlawfully used the Trump Foundation to funnel money to an elected official while she was deciding whether to charge him with fraud; or that he deliberately does the most dangerous thing a politician can do in a diverse country, willfully stoking ethnic tensions and anxieties against minority groups in hopes that it will increase his chances of gaining power.

Those things alone would be enough to make him the inferior choice. But they don’t come close to exhausting his flaws. NATO is a lynchpin of global stability. Trump suggested ending NATO as we know it. Trump suggested seizing foreign oil fields. Trump said he would order U.S. troops to perpetrate torture and to kill innocents. Trump spoke chillingly about using nuclear weapons. An erratic, easily baited quasi-authoritarian obsessed with projecting strength cannot be trusted with nukes.

To elect him would immediately crash markets as panicked investors braced for instability. And it would immediately harm America’s global standing, not in a wishy-washy way where Europeans make fun of us, but in concrete ways that court danger. Ross Douthat sums up the stakes in a column about the most likely risks of a Trump presidency, where he charitably assumes that Trump won’t misuse nukes. Still, he writes, a “highly-plausible peril, and by far the most serious, is a rapid escalation of risk in every geopolitical theater.” He goes on to give examples:

It’s probably true that Trump, given his pro-Russia line, would be somewhat less likely than Clinton to immediately stumble into confrontation with Vladimir Putin over Syria. But it’s silly to imagine Moscow slipping into a comfortable détente with a President Trump; Putin is more likely to pocket concessions and keep pushing, testing the orange-haired dealmaker at every opportunity and leaving Trump poised, very dangerously, between overreaction and his least-favorite position — looking weak. That’s just Russia. From the Pacific Rim to the Middle East, revisionist powers will set out to test Trump’s capacity to handle surprise, hostile actors will seek to exploit the undoubted chaos of his White House, and our allies will build American fecklessness into their strategic plans. And again, all of this is likely to happen without Trump doing the wilder things he’s kind-of sort-of pledged to do — demanding tribute from allies, trying to “take the oil,” etc. He need only be himself in order to bring an extended period of risk upon the world. The history of geopolitics prior to the Pax Americana is rife with examples of why this sort of testing should be feared. Overall, Trump’s foreign policy hazing, his rough introduction to machtpolitik, promises more danger for global stability — still a real and valuable thing, recent crises notwithstanding — than the risks incurred by George W. Bush’s interventionism, Barack Obama’s attempt at offshore balancing, or (yes) Hillary Clinton’s possible exposure of classified material to the Chinese, the Russians and Anthony Weiner’s sexting partners.

There is so much more.