I

had an epiphany recently as Donald Trump carried on a five-day Twitter attack against the mother and father of a US Muslim serviceman killed in combat: The election is over; Trump has lost; no need to read any more prognosticators. Not only am I liberated but so dear reader are you from any more election articles after this one.

Following the Republican convention FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver gave Trump a 55 percent chance of winning. Had Trump gone on a two-week vacation afterClevelandand shut down his Twitter account he’d likely be in the same position today.

All he had to do was convince the electorate that he has the minimal emotional stability to be president: he failed. No doubt every advisor including Ivanka shouted at him not to attack a Gold Star family and to drop the imbroglio with the Khans. But he could not.

LET NO ONE CONCLUDE however that I am resigned with equanimity to Hillary Clinton’s election. “The evil that men do lives after them” says Shakespeare’s Mark Antony and the negative impact ofClinton’s Supreme Court appointments will remain long after she is gone. We are only one or two Supreme Court decisions away from it becoming impossible for Orthodox Jews to maintain our internal communal structure — i.e. determine behavioral standards for admission to our yeshivos and seminaries or for those who teach our children. Hillary’s appointments could put us over the brink.

The Democratic Party’s nomination battle this year proved that the party has no bench of upcoming talent. Otherwise it could never have settled on Hillary the second most reviled politician inAmerica. Unless the Democrats continue choosing candidates who are the “first ever something or other” Tim Kaine the senator fromJ Street is in the on-deck circle. Kaine has received more money fromJ Streetthan all but one other senator.J Streetwas one of the chief cheerleaders for theIrandeal and continuously advocates for more American pressure onIsrael. The group has never heard a criticism ofIsrael including support for the BDS movement that it considers beyond the pale.

OF LATE a number of conservative stalwarts including the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and my friend Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal have argued that Donald Trump inhabits an entirely different and lower moral universe than Hillary Clinton. She they claim is just another run-of-the-mill corrupt politician without discernible principles. That’s absurd.

True no parent who cares about his child’s moral health should ever hold up Donald Trump as an exemplar. But from a Torah point of view Hillary’s sins are far more disqualifying for high office. King Shaul sinned in his capacity as king when he listened to the people and did not slay the Amalekite king Agag. And he lost the kingship. King David sinned as a private person and did not lose the malchus.

BothClinton’s e-mail scandals and the interwoven relations of the Clinton Foundation and the State Department during Hillary’s time as secretary of state are sins in her public capacity. FBI director James Comey detailed how Hillary’s every explanation defense and offer in mitigation of her use of a private server to conduct State Department business including the transmission of highly classified information was a lie (see “Too Big to Jail ” July 15 2016). Congressman Trey Gowdy asked Comey repeatedly when the latter testified before Congress whether particular statements ofClinton’s were true. And in each case the answer was that they were not.

Next Gowdy — who like Comey is a former prosecutor — asked Comey how prosecutors use such patterns of lies. Answer: to prove criminal intent. We can be sure thatClintonwill continue to “short-circuit” mentally — i.e. lie — whenever she is pressed on her e-mails because what Comey found is too damning to either admit or explain away.

Last Tuesday Judicical Watch made public 44 previously unreleased State Department e-mails from Clinton’s tenure in office including requests from Clinton Foundation director Douglas Band to senior Clinton aides in the State Department requesting favors or appointments for Foundation donors. And the next day another watchdog group pried loose more e-mails between the State Department and a Clinton Foundation fundraiser discussing Clinton’s intervention with Indonesian authorities on behalf of a local bank and which Foundation donors should be hit up for new contributions in gratitude for that intervention.

The Clinton Foundation is the most audacious pay-to-play scheme of theClintons — preceded by the Clinton Defense Fund during Bill’s presidency and his presidential library afterwards — because it is conducted directly in the public eye.

Large donations to the Clinton Foundation or obscene speaking fees for Bill or Hillary buy access for foreign governments likeSaudi Arabia corporations like Boeing and individual wheeler-dealers. The Foundation allows Hillary to circumvent restrictions on individual givers or foreign governments to her political campaigns.

In Clinton Cash Peter Schweizer lays out the entire sordid pattern of influence peddling including how the Clinton State Department facilitated Russia gaining control of 20 percent of the United States’ uranium reserves at the same time that million-dollar donations were pouring into the Foundation from controlling shareholders of a Canadian mining company sold to Russia.

TheClintonshave been under continuous investigation going back to theLittle Rockstatehouse their time in the White House and their various election campaigns. Because Hillary never ended up behind bars some assume that those investigations have been big “nothing burgers.” Not true. The smoke is too thick to see.

A brief trip down memory lane: Cattlegate — Hillary parlayed a $5000 initial investment into a 1000% profit. All her trades were placed by the attorney of Tyson FoodsArkansas’s biggest employer through a brokerage firm which was subsequently fined heavily for its involvement. Whitewater — theClintons’ partners in the Whitewater Development Corporation James and Susan McDougal and Hillary’s former Rose Law Firm partner Webster Hubbell who was subsequently appointed associate attorney general of theUnited States all went to jail. The Clintons escaped a similar fate when Susan McDougal refused to answer questions — she was subsequently pardoned by Bill — and crucial Rose Law Firm billing records went missing only to turn up in the Clintons’ private White House quarters 19 months later. Travelgate — the entire White House travel office staff was fired and the multi-million-dollar business transferred toClintoncronies. After multiple investigations all the original employees were reinstated. Abuse of power — the Clinton White House requested FBI background checks on 900 Republican politicians; IRS audits were initiated againstClintonopponents and Bill’s female accusers.

TheClintoncampaigns have also been fecund sources of scandal. A Department of Justice report found evidence suggesting “a level of knowledge within the White House — including the president’s and first lady’s offices” — concerning millions of dollars of Chinese government money funneled into Bill’s reelection campaign the Clinton Defense Fund and the Democratic National Committee.

Most brazen of all was Pardongate the 450 pardons issued by Bill Clinton as he left office. The ex-wife of one recipient a longtime denizen of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List contributed $600 000 to theClintonlibrary and $135 000 more to Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign. Hillary’s brother Hugh Rodham collected $700 000 in legal fees from two lucky recipients a drug lord and a scam artist. Fifteen members of FALN a Puerto Rican terrorist group responsible for 13 deaths in a bombing campaign were freed at the request of a New York Puerto Rican politician in the midst of Hillary’s Senate campaign. Former president Jimmy Carter called the pardons “shameful.”

SO GIVEN THE CHOICE what should a voter do? Steven Hayward in the Weekly Standard advocates a campaign to ensure an extremely low turnout for president so that whoever enters office cannot claim a mandate for his or her policies.

Then we can repair to our shuls just as our ancestors in czaristRussiadid to pray that Hashem grant wisdom to our leaders.

MY SON THE CRITIC

One of my sons added a caveat to my piece last week about the desirability of forming friendships with nonobservant Jews. He told me that I was being very na?ve about the possibilities of doing so and that I had greatly underestimated the degree to which Torah Jews live in a world totally alien to most other Jews.

Friendship he said depends on having something in common — the more central those common elements are to each friend’s existence the deeper the potential for friendship. And while it is true as I noted that all Jews have a great deal in common as descendants of those who received Torah at Sinai and possessors of a common soul root recognition of that commonality is not shared by most Jews.

During his 15 years as an avreich my son recalled he was obsessed by the issue of bittul Torah and constantly worried that he was guilty. Try explaining the concept of bittul Torah much less why it is so important to a Jew who has never learned Torah at all and does not live with a sense of the preciousness of each moment and the necessity of using it for the purposes for which we were granted life.

My son offered another even more fundamental example of how alien we seem to our nonobservant brethren. Olam Haba is never far from the consciousness of every Torah Jew: What is the impact of what I’m doing or contemplating on my eternal reward? Olam Haba is a constant reality with which he or she lives and which has an impact on every action. In many ways it is the central fact of our existence as Torah Jews.

But if a fellow Jew does not live with an awareness of Olam Haba then our lives center around very different things and we remain foreign to one another. And that puts limits on how deep our friendship can go. If we don’t feel that there is something alien about us to one another perhaps we should ask ourselves why.