The Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election for the first time since 1988, triggering an apoplectic wave of garment rending, wailing and gnashing of teeth among the publication’s fellow-travelling staff, who took it as the greatest ideological betrayal since Gorbachev finally took Reagan’s advice and tore down the wall.

Look, no one is about to seriously question the Washington Post’s ideological purity or commitment to the Democratic Party; the publisher cited “tradition,” and he was not inaccurate — the paper’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates is a recent one, beginning with Jimmy Carter, and occurring only once before that, with Eisenhower (the last Republican the Post ever saw fit to endorse). Returning to a less-overtly partisan tradition may be the paper’s attempt to salvage some journalism from its run-down halls.

But maybe, just maybe, it is also an acknowledgement that, well, there is really no one worth endorsing this election.

This presidential race began, lo those many months ago, with the two worst candidates the country could find as front-runners. It ends with one of the faces being different, but not much else.

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Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are, in different ways, extraordinarily unqualified for the post of Commander-in-Chief — Trump owing to his demagogic and obnoxious personality, Harris on account of her utter emptiness.

A friend related to me someone, I’m not sure who, pointed out recently in 1776 the population of the nascent United States was around 2.5 million, and managed to produce Washington, Hamilton, Adams and all the rest; today we are at more than 340 million and these are who we come up with.

Granted, neither one is probably quite as bad as their opponents claim; no, Trump is not a “fascist” — that word has been thrown around with such promiscuity in the last few decades as to render it meaningless; sort of how some on the right carelessly toss around terms like “Marxist,” so when its use is actually applicable it has already lost all meaning. A narcissist and a demagogue, yes, but not a “fascist” or a “threat to American Democracy.” If American democracy (meaning our institutions) are that fragile, we have far bigger problems to worry about than a second Trump presidency.

What about Harris? Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review wrote a series of columns during the past several months in which he eventually, and rather vulgarly, taxonomized Biden, Trump and Harris, respectively, as an “a**hole”, a “lunatic,” and an “idiot.” I’ll be a little more charitable. I don’t think she is an idiot, but she has certainly not displayed any sliver of assurance she has a firm grasp of the issues she will be expected to deal with should she win the election. In even friendly forums she has proven either unwilling or unable to elucidate in anything approaching detail her plans for the republic. If the former — if she is deliberately concealing her desired direction — then it is not campaign discipline, it is deceit. If the latter, she is woefully, and dangerously, unqualified.

I have long argued the selection of president ought to be based primarily on questions of international affairs and relative foreign policy. It is a lot easier to fix bad tax policy or clean up after the wrong Transportation Secretary, for instance, than it is to get China to un-invade Taiwan or convince Iran to give up the bomb after they develop it. On this front, too, both candidates have serious weaknesses. The history of the Biden-Harris administration is one of proceeding from one foreign policy blunder to another, starting with the chaotic disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal, to pushing Britain into giving the Chagos Islands (where the Diego Garcia military base happens to be located) to a Chinese ally, and in between continuously keeping one hand of the Ukrainians and Israelis tied behind their backs as they fight existential wars against two of our worst adversaries. The most welcome elimination of Hamas Terrorist-in-Chief Yaha Sinwar would not have happened if the Israelis had given in to the Biden administration’s demands.

On the other hand, Trump’s populist affinity for isolationism — not to mention his affinity for admiring totalitarian heads of state — does not bode well. His foreign policy was a mess until John Bolton came in and cleaned it up — and Bolton is now on the outs, so it’s impossible to know from whom Trump will take advice on this matter, and a little frightening to speculate.

It’s accepted as a political aphorism there are few, if any, truly undecided voters out there. But I think it is likely there remain a great number of Americans who are looking at their choices, and wondering if it might be better for the republic to just give it up and start over again.

So what’s a conservative to do? The dilemma reminds me of a cartoon in The New Yorker during the 1956 campaign, in which the diehard Eisenhower supporter, facing the ballot box, remarked “I like Ike, period.”

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.