Former Reagan official: Trump ‘a risk we can’t take’

America can’t afford to gamble on a Donald Trump presidency, according to a former solicitor general under President Ronald Reagan.  

“This is a man about whom the best you can say is that he doesn’t believe anything he says,” Charles Fried wrote in a CNN op-ed titled “Donald Trump is a risk we can’t take” on Tuesday. “After that, it’s downhill all the way.”

{mosads}“Hillary Clinton will give us a decent, competent, understandable government,” he wrote.

“That’s plenty good enough for me, and considering the truly dreadful alternative, it’s good enough for increasing numbers of my fellow Republicans.”

Fried praised Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, for criticizing Trump, the GOP’s nominee, over his association with far-right ideology.

“This is not just an accidental association,” Fried wrote. “It is his chosen signature. Remember, he was an enthusiastic birther and has gone on to embrace every sinister paranoid fantasy since.

“These are not just ghosts you can raise just when it seems convenient or a particular crowd may thrill to them and then when the time comes to govern you can waive aside and pretend you never summoned them. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. And these fleas carry the disease of virulent hatred and discord.”

Clinton’s campaign has aggressively courted Republicans dissatisfied with Trump. Last week, she accused Trump of representing a “radical fringe” that is taking over the Republican Party.

“Of course, there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment,” Clinton said on Aug. 25 in Reno, Nev. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it and giving it a national megaphone — until now.”