Imagine you’re the scion of a family that is part of the twentieth-century American elite. You were born into wealth and privilege, but raised to personify modesty, rectitude, and noblesse oblige. You were a war hero. You graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in only two and a half years.

Your career was one of the most accomplished in American history: representative in Congress; ambassador to the United Nations; chairman of the Republican National Committee, where you were forced to ask your party’s president to resign; envoy to China, where you nurtured the relationship between what are today the world’s two largest economies; director of the CIA, where you gave intelligence briefings to the other party’s nominee; vice president; and president.

Your presidency was largely defined by foreign policy. The Warsaw Pact collapsed while you were in office, and you successfully facilitated the removal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and the unification of Germany. You got a major nuclear arms deal with the USSR ratified, and as the USSR collapsed, you helped extract the Baltic republics from Russia. You also led a winning war in the Middle East, notable for the broad international coalition you put together.

You lost reelection, but two terms later your son became president. You developed a warm relationship with the Democrat who defeated you. And you show respect to and receive respect from the current president.

Would you want Donald Trump—whose personality and relationship to wealth and fame are the polar opposites of yours, and whose sense of duty and commitment to American security and power within a framework of international institutions are in doubt—to become president?