If Hillary Clinton is more capable than Donald Trump of wielding U.S. military and financial dominance to endanger lives at home and abroad, does that make Trump the “lesser evil” in the 2016 presidential election?

Yes, suggests political economist Michael Hudson.

“You sort of prefer [Trump], … right?” asks Ross Ashcroft in a Renegade Inc. interview with Hudson. “Because … you don’t want a resourceful, intelligent and influential type in the job because the job’s so powerful.”

Hudson replies: “Well, both Hillary and Donald Trump say the election is about the lesser evil. So, if that’s true, who’s the greater evil? Hillary has a whole crowd behind her—the neocons, who basically want to be very confrontational toward Russia and continue what she was doing in Libya to Syria. … Or you have Donald Trump, who doesn’t really know who he can appoint and whether he can get enough people to work with him.

“So, if the direction of America is to try to hold on to a unipolar world—[to be] militarily confrontational—[then] you want a president who is least able to do evil. And there’s no question, Trump is the lesser evil because he’s such a narcissist.”

When Truthdig contacted Hudson by phone to point out that the financial sector and the military-industrial complex are sufficiently organized to pursue their interests regardless of who holds the presidency, Hudson replied: “Well, maybe they’re equal evils. Neither candidate—nor Obama, nor George Bush, nor Bill Clinton—has had any independent policy at all. They’re just front people to give the public the illusion that they’re voting.”

Read a rushed transcript of Hudson’s exchange with Ashcroft, below.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly

Ross Ashcroft: You’ve got two candidates in the U.S. and one is very pro-Wall Street, specifically Goldman Sachs. She might as well be on the payroll. In fact, she is on the payroll. And the other is a rent-seeker-in-chief, and he’s built real estate and used the banks. So you’ve got Trump and you’ve got Clinton. Both of them are in bed with Wall Street, fundamentally. But the people get it now.

Michael Hudson: Well, I think Hillary Clinton has a 79 percent disapproval rating, and Trump has an 81 percent disapproval rating. So you have the two most unpopular politicians in the United States as the choice. So basically, the voters in the United States are given a choice: “Yes,”—“Yes, please,” and “Yes, thank you.” I think Trump missed his big chance to make a populist push. Instead of saying he’s going to cut taxes on Wall Street, he can say, “Look, I stiffed the banks. I went bankrupt four or six times. I screwed the banks and they didn’t get paid and I can screw the banks for you people. Vote for me. I know how to do it.”

Ashcroft: Yes, he’s missed that.

Hudson: I think that would have been his winning ploy.

Ashcroft: You should be his campaign strategist.

Hudson: Well, except I don’t think I’d have many friends if I worked for Donald Trump. And we don’t know that if he agreed with me today what he’d do tomorrow. That’s part of the problem. He doesn’t play well with colleagues.

Ashcroft: You sort of prefer him though—would that be right? Because he doesn’t play well with colleagues, because he’s awkward, because he’s a loner, because—because you’re saying you don’t want a resourceful, intelligent and influential type in the job because the job’s so powerful.

Hudson: Well, both Hillary and Donald Trump say the election is about the lesser evil. So, if that’s true, who’s the greater evil? Hillary has a whole crowd behind her—the neocons, who basically want to be very confrontational toward Russia and continue what she was doing in Libya to Syria—militarily confrontational. Or you have Donald Trump, who doesn’t really know who he can appoint and whether he can get enough people to work with him. So if the direction of America is to try to hold on to a unipolar world—militarily confrontational—you want a president who is least able to do evil. And there’s no question, Trump is the lesser evil because he’s such a narcissist, and really sort of a blank slate. And I’d rather take a “pig in a poke” than someone who—you already know what Hillary will do. She’ll do what the husband does. And it’s—the Clintons have corrupted the Democratic Party. That’s what Bernie Sanders ran on against her—

Ashcroft: And did very well.

Hudson: And did very well. But then he didn’t realize that there really cannot be any progress by the labor unions, or consumers, or the 99 percent as long as the Democratic Party is controlled totally by Wall Street and by the Robert Rubin gang that they brought in. And they’re really like a mafia gang. If you think the financial sector and the banking sector as crime—and after all, remember, they’ve paid billions and billions of dollars in civil fines without a single banker being sent to jail—that’s what a criminal wants to do. When the criminals take control of the justice system and take over the police force and bribe the judges—all the Hollywood movies in the 1930s were that—then you’ve got the criminals in control. And you’ve got the financial sector criminalized. That’s what my colleague Bill Black at the University of Missouri at Kansas City has been emphasizing, and he’s convinced all of us that the business plan of the big banks—Citibank, Bank of America, we’ve just got, and Wells Fargo, with all of the huge frauds that are coming out—that was their business plan: fraud. And people are afraid to say that fraud is banking. They’re afraid to say just exactly what the evidence is because it’s considered impolite to talk about reality.

Ashcroft: What sort of president then will Hillary Clinton be?

Hudson: A dictator. She… a vindictive dictator, punishing her enemies, appointing neocons in the secretary of state, in the defense department, appointing Wall Street people in the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, and the class war will really break out very explicitly. And she’ll—as Warren Buffet said, there is a class war and we’re winning it.

Ashcroft: As in the one percent are winning it.

Hudson: The one percent are winning it. And she will try to use the rhetoric to tell people: “Nothing to see here folks. Keep on moving,” while the economy goes down and down and she cashes in as she’s been doing all along, richer and richer, and if she’s president, there will not be an investigator of the criminal conflict of interest of the Bill Clinton Foundation, of pay-to-play. You’ll have a presidency in which corporations who pay the Clintons will be able to set policy. Whoever has the money to buy the politicians will buy control of policy because elections have been privatized and made part of the market economy in the United States. That’s what the Citizens United Supreme Court case was all about.

Ashcroft: So that’s another example of rent-seeking.

Hudson: Yes, political payoffs. And that’s the largest rent-seeking of all. Basically, for paying one penny, you get a whole dollar’s worth of special privileges. And rent is really payment for a privilege. It’s for a privilege that’s created from the private sector. And basically as Balzac said, every great fortune originates in a great theft that isn’t considered a great theft anymore because it’s all viewed as part of the market. It’s viewed as if that’s how the world works. So you’ll have a theft taking place and the Clintons will say, “That’s just how the world operates and GDP is going up because we’re getting richer, enough to offset the degree by which you 99 percent are getting poor.”