Which candidate will do the least harm?

Ace of Spades links to a USA Today column on the election by Glenn Reynolds, and adds,

Five of the last six popular presidential votes went to Democrats. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but got in by a hair.

When that stat changes to "six of the last seven" and "seven of the last eight," what do you think the federal bureaucracy will do? They already are almost all liberal government-happy Democrats. Now they'll know that Republicans will barely ever win the Executive, and that the way to guarantee job security is to do... little favors for the Democrats whenever possible.

The #NeverTrumpers -- who are really Hillary supporters; they want Hillary to win, because they think then they can purge the Trumpkins and start winning elections as a party drawing the support of 25% of the country -- seem to think elections are just about intraparty jockeying, palace intrigues, and "principle."

They seem to not notice elections are actually about forming a government and staffing it with actual people, people the president chooses, and then directing (and hopefully restraining) a sprawling bureaucracy that not only can destroy you, but increasingly desires to.

But I guess the important thing is being able to write pungent, emotional opinion pieces for NR.

Reynolds argues,

If you want checks and balances, vote Trump.

The civil service, though supposedly professional and nonpartisan, has become a Democratic Party monoculture.

Trump is a blowhard who seems to have something of a man-crush on Vladimir Putin. His business dealings are as shady as you’d expect a New York real-estate developer’s to be, his campaign has been a madhouse, and even on the positions of his that I like, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that he’ll actually deliver.

Hillary, on the other hand is, well, a crook. Her period at the State Department was marked by pretty much out-and-out influence peddling, the Clinton Foundation seems to be little more than a money laundry, and when she’s asked to explain herself, she sounds like a Mafia boss’s lawyer, only less believable.

Reynolds notes that

Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.

So if the choice in 2016 is between one bad candidate and another (and it is) the question is, which one will do the least harm. And, judging by the civil service’s behavior, that’s got to be Trump. If Trump tries to target his enemies with the IRS, you can bet that he’ll get a lot of pushback — and the press, instead of explaining it away, will make a huge stink. If Trump engages in influence-peddling, or abuses secrecy laws, you can bet that, even if Trump’s appointees sit atop the DOJ or FBI, the civil service will ensure that things don’t get swept under the rug. And if Trump wants to go to war, he’ll get far more scrutiny than Hillary will get — or, in cases like her disastrous Libya invasion, has gotten.

So the message is clear. If you want good government, vote for Trump — he’s the only one who will make this whole checks-and-balances thing work.

Read more here.