The two most distrusted presidential nominees in polling history have produced a shameful, depressing campaign.

There is the candidate put forth by the party of Lincoln, the bellicose New York developer and celebrity con man Donald Trump, whose reckless ignorance is more informed by disturbing Internet conspiracy theories than evidence, wisdom or reason. His election would be a disaster for our democratic republic.

Then there is the nominee of the party of Jefferson, Hillary Clinton, a savvy career politician whose policies are consistent with the Democrats’ longstanding platform but who suffers from an inflated sense of entitlement and a well-earned lack of trust. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have a 25-year track record of secrecy, self-dealing and ethical shortcuts that all but guarantee an administration shadowed by ever-present clouds of scandal.

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Given the primary importance we place on transparent, honest government — in which elected officials present their positions in civil and open debate, letting the citizens decide — we urge voters, above all else, to ensure that the dangerous demagogue Trump is not elected.

Yet we can’t bring ourselves to give his opponent our support and turn our backs on her secretive and deceitful track record. The news about huge donations by foreign leaders to the Clinton Foundation and the private email server she kept as secretary of state are merely the latest in an exhaustive string dating back to secret “Hillarycare” meetings and backroom get-rich schemes by the former first couple of Arkansas.

We urge all voters who can, in good conscience, support the Democratic Party platform, to recognize what a disaster Trump would be and vote for his opponent.

For those who can’t support Clinton’s policies, we recommend they follow the lead of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who wrote in the name of a mature, conservative leader at the top of his ticket (in his case, Arizona Sen. John McCain).

An emphatic no to Trump

Trump is a liar, a bigot and a gleeful peddler of hate. He has brought out the worst in his supporters, the worst in the nation, through blissful ignorance and reckless proclamations that have coarsened the political debate. PolitiFact reported that of the 297 statements it had checked through Nov. 1, Trump was rated “mostly false,” “false” or “pants on fire” 70% of the time.

Trump is so egotistical and emotionally unsteady that he tweet-storms insults in the middle of the night about a beauty pageant contestant who dared to repeat the degrading things he said about her appearance. This is a 70-year-old man who makes fun of people with disabilities and women because of their looks. A man who in a land founded on religious freedom would impose a religious test on Muslims. A man who boasts about brazenly groping, propositioning and kissing unsuspecting women, and getting away with it, because he’s “a star.”

Trump is so dangerously uninformed on foreign policy that dozens of the nation’s top Republican security experts, including former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and former national director of intelligence John Negroponte, wrote that they could not vote for him because “we are convinced that he would be a dangerous president and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

In a Wall Street Journal commentary, Robert Gates, a former defense secretary who served presidents of both parties, said Trump was “stubbornly uninformed about the world” and “temperamentally unsuited” to be president. If only the Republican Party had recruited and supported a candidate with Gates’ knowledge, experience and integrity for president.

Trump’s calls to “bomb the hell out of ISIS” without regard to civilian deaths and his suggestion that the world would be better off with more — not fewer — nuclear weapons sound like the addled musings of the guy on the next barstool, not the policy positions of a real-world presidential candidate.

Trump has suggested that the international apparatus that has kept the peace in Europe for 71 years — NATO — isn’t worthy of steadfast support. To the horror of Russia’s NATO neighbors, he has cozied up to Russian President Vladmir Putin and he has spoken admiringly of other authoritarians, including former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Trump has dismissed Putin’s aggression in the Ukraine and Syria as byproducts of American weakness, failing to recognize what it really is: the brutal actions of an international thug aiming to revive the Soviet Union he served as KGB chief.

At the same time that Trump falls for Putin’s manipulative flattery abroad, he encourages xenophobia and nativism at home. Until late in the campaign, Trump was a longtime leader of the race-based “birther movement,” a prejudiced fringe group that alleged President Barack Obama wasn’t a native-born American. As Trump launched his campaign in 2015, he blasted undocumented migrants as criminals and rapists and called for mass deportation of 11 million people believed to be living here illegally. Trump attacked federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing fraud litigation against Trump University, as unsuited to hear the case because he’s “Mexican” (Curiel was born in Indiana).

Trump similarly has stoked the fires of resentment against Muslims, calling for all Muslims to be banned from entering the country — a religious test that runs counter to American values that predate the revolution and Constitution. Trump cruelly attacked the parents of a Muslim American soldier who died in the Iraq War after they spoke in support of Clinton. Their son, Capt. Humayun Khan, saw a suspicious car while on patrol in Iraq in 2004 and told his troops to stand back. He went forward to inspect the car and was the only one killed when it exploded.

Trump did not serve in the military, using heel spurs and college deferments to avoid the draft. As the only major party presidential candidate in the last 40 years to not release his tax returns, he has done nothing to counter evidence reported by the New York Times that he may have avoided paying federal income taxes for nearly 20 years due to enormous claimed losses in his casino business and suspect accounting tricks. He has said disdainful things about prisoners of war, about frontline troops suffering battle fatigue. He lives like a king but apparently has not paid anything close to his share of taxes toward our mutual defense. And he claims to be the man to make our military stronger?

Trump also brags he would draw on his vast business experience to set the country right. Born into wealth, his checkered business dealings put the lie to that claim. In 1973, the family business was accused by the Justice Department of discriminating against African-Americans in rentals. Over the years, Trump’s businesses have made liberal use of the nation’s bankruptcy laws — filing at least four times to avoid paying debts. Customers of Trump University have accused the organization of fraud. Earlier this year, an investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that Trump has been accused repeatedly of stiffing numerous contractors. He and his companies are continually involved in thousands of lawsuits.

These are not the marks of a successful businessman; they are the marks of a huckster.

Hillary Clinton’s troubling aversion

to open and honest government

Clinton’s record on open government and transparent dealing is abysmal, and the incestuous mixing of personal with professional matters under the umbrella of the Clinton Foundation likely would bring continuing problems for a second President Clinton.

Secret email server: In July, FBI director James Comey sharply rebuked Clinton and her aides for being “extremely careless” in handling classified information and saying that the nominee should have known better when she had a private email server installed in her home and bypassed the State Department system. Comey said there was no basis for charging her criminally because she said she was not aware she was violating the law.

Then, on Oct. 28, Comey dropped a political bombshell: He informed Congress that the FBI was taking another look at the case after discovering a laptop shared by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband Anthony Weiner. The government was investigating lurid allegations that Weiner, the disgraced congressman, was sexting with a 15-year-old girl. The bureau would take “appropriate investigative steps” to figure out whether any of the emails discovered on that computer contained classified information, Comey said.

Whether this latest dive yields a different result or not, one thing is clear: Clinton made a very big mistake by bypassing government channels. The only believable reason for her private server was to keep her emails out of the public eye. She wanted to make deals and discuss options that she did not want the citizens she served to know anything about. Some officials at the State Department were worried about the server, and as stolen emails published by Wikileaks show, even her closest advisers were aghast when they learned what she had done.

The Clinton Foundation: The foundation has done some good work, including helping women start businesses in impoverished Haiti and reducing the cost of AIDS drugs in Africa. But — and this is a Clinton trademark — it also appears to have been a means to enrich the family. Stolen emails published by Wikileaks (the authenticity of which have not been disputed by the Clintons), show that at the same time a top aide to Bill Clinton was raising money for the foundation, he also was raising money for — you guessed it — Bill Clinton.

Big corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola made sizable donations to the foundation and provided income for the former president in the form of speaking fees or in-kind services such as travel and vacations, the Washington Post reported. The financial firm UBS Global Wealth Management, for example, gave to the foundation and paid Bill Clinton about $2 million in speaking fees over four years.

More damning, in our view, Hillary Clinton was pumping the Moroccan government for a $12 million contribution to the family foundation in exchange for a speaking engagement just as she was about to launch her presidential campaign. She backed out of the speech only after campaign aides raised serious concerns about how it would look, the emails revealed. Instead, Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea, went to Morocco. And the money came through.

While Clinton ran the State Department, it was difficult to know where her official work ended and the foundation’s work began. She was involved in official business associated with donors to the foundation. The newly disclosed emails show that some foundation donors seem to have used those connections to gain lobbying time with Clinton. And her closest aide, Abedin, was paid by the State Department, the foundation and a consulting firm — all at the same time.

The potential conflicts ran deep. But this has been standard practice for the Clintons for years.

In 1992, the Clintons initially released some, but not all, of their tax returns. That may have been because the documents that weren’t immediately released showed that Hillary Clinton had unusual success with her very first high-risk futures trades while her husband was attorney general and later governor of Arkansas. From an initial investment of $1,000 (under the normal minimum) she made nearly $100,000 in short order thanks to the prescient advice of an outside counsel for Tyson Foods Inc., Arkansas’ largest employer.

When Hillary Clinton ran a task force on remaking the nation’s health care system in 1993, the group held its meetings behind closed doors. The next year, investigators subpoenaed billing records from her years at the Rose Firm in Little Rock, Ark., but the billings for Clinton’s work for a failing savings and loan weren’t found. It wasn’t until much later that an assistant found them in the White House residence. Clinton said she had no idea how they got there.

The Democrats chose Clinton because she was best-funded and next in line. The thinking seemed to be that somehow she was entitled to the job. But the most compelling reason the party and its nominee have made to vote for Clinton is to defeat Donald Trump.

This is not a normal election year. If it were, it’s likely that neither Clinton nor Trump would have been nominated for president given their huge weaknesses and unpopularity.

But the Republicans went one big step worse. They allowed their party to be devoured by an authoritarian demagogue who may actually believe, as he claimed in his convention acceptance speech, that he is “the only one” who can “make America great again.” That’s dangerous talk.

America will be great for as long as it elects government officials who realize their job is to serve the citizens and the Constitution — not the other way around.

The voters have an important job to do this year, including making choices in races for Congress and the state Legislature.

But Job One: Reject Trump.