Sitting at a wide round table in a restaurant a local politician on a tear ended by saying Kamala Harris ‘is dumb as a rock.’

A tall thin man with a rectangular face sitting beside him, glanced at a lady sitting across the table lips pursed, curious, smiled. “Madeline?”

Short thick dark hair with wisps of gray Madeline calmly said Kamala Harris wasn’t her cup of tea but at the same time Trump’s vein of nastiness, and lies, sowed problems of their own – worse, Trump’s lies had turned out to be contagious. Mimicking Trump people repeat lies. She added it’s an old saying that truth is the foundation of the gospels, that Christ is the heart of truth, and that lambs become lost sheep when truth flies out the window.

Not stopping to ask himself whether Trump’s lies do harm the politician – laughing Harris’ father was a Marxist – rolled right over her.

Growing up on a farm beside a small Virginia town the south molded me. As a young lawyer, growing up in the Bronx, New York City molded Roy Cohn. He landed the famous Army-McCarthy hearings; when ‘Fightin’ Joe’ McCarthy accused the army of coddling communists, telling a tall tale sunk McCarthy. Returning home Cohn hung out a shingle practicing law; clever, ruthless, swimming in the shark-infested waters of Manhattan where money mattered, deals mattered, and telling lies to make deals was okay, he mentored young Donald Trump for years.

The road Trump’s leading us down mirrors that world – and sows the same moral problems.

A modern-day liberal Kamala Harris is leading us down a different but treacherous road too.

Neither road looks promising. We pay a price either way. But that’s the choice: Harris or Trump? That leaves one question: Which road does the least harm?