People who are only now, reluctantly, boarding the Trump Train are apt to blush a little, cross their fingers and hope their candidate wouldn't be quite so shamelessly undisciplined or juvenile as president.

And it's at least possible that Donald Trump won't be as bad as he has been. It is not completely unreasonable to hope that the dignity and gravity of the office might straighten him up a little. Who's to say that after a mere 69 years spent becoming the loutish loudmouth he is today, a fellow can't change and suddenly live up to the calling of high office?

The people who endorse Hillary Clinton for president are denied the luxury of even such a slim hope. There is no reason whatsoever to believe Inauguration Day would transform her into a woman of honesty and trustworthiness.

Americans have already seen Clinton in high office. If her progression through public life -- from policy dabbler with no constitutional or statutory role (first lady) to one policymaker among many (senator) to an exalted title and great individual responsibility (secretary of state) -- were going to make her a better person, we would have seen it by now.

We have seen quite the opposite.

As secretary of state, Clinton proved to be secretive, self-serving and dishonest. She was also horribly -- fatally -- incompetent, but we'll leave qualifications aside for now to concentrate on the character side of the candidate.

The experience of high office did to Hillary Clinton what it most often does to people: It made her more sharply herself. It intensified her dominant traits, including paranoia, rather than unlocking some new quality.

This week's report of the State Department inspector general to Congress confirms that Clinton's primary interest as secretary of state was keeping secrets -- not the nation's, but her own.

Despite repeated warnings that her use of a personal email account maintained on a private server for the transmission of sensitive or classified information violated State Department rules, Clinton did so consciously, willfully, routinely and systematically.

One staff member who raised the issue was told "never to speak of the secretary's personal email system again," the inspector general reported.

That hushing was in keeping with the IG's finding that Clinton and her inner circle were diligent about keeping her secrets secret. Investigators' questions to the State Department undersecretary for management and the Office of the Legal Adviser about Clinton's private email activities drew shrugs. They didn't know.

Clinton's unmistakable intent was to keep communications in her official capacity as a Cabinet officer out of the sight of anyone who might question her actions or her thinking. Her unambiguous goal was to subvert the State Department's legally mandated record-keeping system.

In the bargain, she put national security at risk. If she didn't understand that risk at the time, she had no business being secretary of state.

The inspector general's findings should put to rest the argument from Clinton die-hards that previous secretaries of state used private email for some official business.

One difference is that other secretaries of state weren't striving to avoid the record-keeping system. As far as is known, they saved privately sent and received official emails to the federal records system, as the law requires. Another difference is that previous secretaries' use of private email was an exception to their usual practice, whereas Clinton purposefully avoided the State Department's official system entirely.

Those actions, as well as the existence of work-related emails known to exist but not preserved on her server, put Clinton in violation of the Federal Records Act.

Repeated attempts to get at Clinton's emails through the Freedom of Information Act -- especially after her fecklessness in the Benghazi crisis contributed to the deaths of four Americans, including an ambassador -- turned up repeated responses that there were none.

An inspector general's report released earlier this year showed that top Clinton aides, well aware of the secretary's off-the-books email system, routinely answered -- either falsely or after no attempt to find out the truth -- that no Clinton emails fit the descriptions listed in FOIA requests.

Willful concealment of public records is a felony under the FOIA, as is a lack of diligence in searching for them. Clinton and her inner circle are well and truly implicated.

She won't be indicted, though. Not by this Justice Department. Not if she wins in November and chooses the next attorney general. Not even if Trump does, because that would be piling on someone who has suffered enough as a twice-rejected presidential candidate.

So all she has to do is lie, just as she's been doing since the emails story broke.

She didn't want the inconvenience of two devices to keep work and private emails separate. All of her emails were automatically saved by the State Department. She handed over all work-related emails. The private email system was set up for her husband. She never sent or received classified information on the private system. The private system was secure from hackers. The State Department approved her use of the private system.

One demonstrably false claim after another.

And here's one more: Clinton has said all along that she and her staff have cooperated with investigators.

Yet they refused to so much as be interviewed by the State Department inspector general. The latest spin on that one is that "there were hints of an anti-Clinton bias inside that office."

Poor Hillary. Nothing is ever her fault.

The inspector general's office has an anti-Clinton bias in the same way a cop investigating a bank robbery has an anti-Mugsy bias.

O'Brien is The Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor.