Increasingly, I feel like the old soldier of General Douglas MacArthur's 1962 West Point speech.  In a poetic passage, the man who led American forces in the Pacific during World War II confessed:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here.  My days of old have vanished – tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. ... Always there are echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

Toward the end of this month, I'll be 70 years old – about the same age as the contenders.  Trump turned 70 in June.  Hillary will be 70 next October.  She graduated from Wellesley College the same year I graduated from Boston University, schools less than 20 miles apart.

I've been involved in this nation's political wars for 52 years, starting with Students for Goldwater.  Over the last five decades, I've been part of the campus conservative, tax revolt, Second Amendment, and pro-life and pro-family movements.  I also wrote a nationally syndicated column for 19 years.  Although I'm proud to have been a conservative since way back when, in truth, I've been fighting for a country more than a cause.

Based on those experiences, in what may be the most consequential election in memory, this I know to be true: Trump won't save America.  (The rot is too extensive and entrenched.)  She could very well destroy it.

Trump won't make America great again.  (That's too big a job for one man in four to eight years.)   But he will begin the process.  Added to eight years of Obama, an unhealthy dose of Hillary could spell the end of the Republic.

He'll secure the borders, whether it's through a wall or just enforcing our immigration laws.  She'll do everything in her power to open the floodgates even further, with blanket amnesties and turning ICE into the Welcome Wagon.  He sees criminals, terrorists, drug dealers, and low-wage workers streaming across the border.  She sees future Democratic voters and another way to permanently alter the contours of our country, turning the United States into Diversity Land.

He has a healthy skepticism about the nature of Islam.  (He's willing to acknowledge the connection between militant Islam and terrorism.)  She sees Muslim immigration as look-at-how-tolerant-we-are.  She refuses to say the words "radical Islamic terrorism."  If she wins, tens of thousands of additional refugees from the Middle East next year (almost all of them Muslims) will be just the beginning.

She believes in gun prohibition as the universal panacea for crime and terrorism.  He believes in the Second Amendment.  She believes that the Supreme Court's Heller decision, which recognized an individual right to gun ownership, "was wrongly decided."

She believes that the role of the courts is to "make America a fairer place" (her definition of fairness).  He believes in judges who interpret the Constitution and apply it to the cases before them.  If she wins, we'll lose the Supreme Court for a generation or more.

She believes in a right to abortion up to the moment of birth.  He would defund Planned Parenthood and appoint judges who will defend the unborn.

His experience has been at job creation.  He's built hotels and changed skylines.  As his oldest son says, he's always signed the front of paychecks.  Her experience is at job destruction – taxes, regulations, and hello-suckers trade deals.

He wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with more competition, leading to more choices and lower costs.  With her patented smirk, she tells us that the current monstrosity was called "Hillarycare" before it was called Obamacare.  Her answer to soaring premiums and rising deductibles is massive subsidies and gradual movement toward a single-payer system – socialized medicine without the window dressing.

He sides with law enforcement; she has an elitist disdain for the men and women on the front lines of the war on crime.  He speaks of rebuilding the inner cities.  She suggests that the current turmoil is due to white racism.  When the Clintons moved into the White House in 1993, 12-year-old Chelsea told her friends that her parents referred to the Secret Service agents sworn to protect the first family with their lives as "our trained pigs."

His confidants include Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Rick Santorum, and Sarah Palin.  Her gang runs the gamut, from hacks and grafters to ideologues like George Soros (who gave her $2.5 million in August) and demagogues like Al Sharpton.

He's been endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee, the National Rifle Association, the 17,000-member National Border Patrol Council, the Fraternal Order of Police (the country's largest police union), and 88 retired generals and admirals.  She's been endorsed by Planned Parenthood, the stridently feminist National Organization for Women, the PAC of the racialist National Council of La Raza, and distinguished rappers like 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and Ja Rule.

He wants to drain the swamp.  She is the swamp.

Hillary and Bill made mega-millions from a quarter-century in Washington.  She bloviates about being stronger together and takes money from those she privately admits fund ISIS – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states.

On November 8, we'll find out if duty, honor, and country trump political correctness, liberal hypocrisy, and media bias.  We'll learn if we're on the road back to being the America of Ronald Reagan or have gone even farther toward becoming the America of Antonio Gramsci, Saul Alinsky, and Tom Hayden.