On the cusp of Donald Trump’s official nomination for president next week, The New York Times’ editorial board delivered an excoriating rebuke of the presumptive GOP nominee, saying he is unfit to serve a second term as president.
“Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people,” wrote the Times’ editorial board, which is separate from its newsroom. “Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.
“He is, quite simply, unfit to lead.”
Published Thursday morning, four days before the start of the Republican National Convention, the opinion piece also criticizes the GOP and its endorsement of Trump:
A once great political party now serves the interests of one man, a man as demonstrably unsuited for the office of president as any to run in the long history of the Republic, a man whose values, temperament, ideas and language are directly opposed to so much of what has made this country great.
The board pointed to the extraordinary fracturing within the Democratic Party right now over President Joe Biden’s re-election bid and lamented Republicans’ failure to have such a debate among their ranks “about the manifest moral and temperamental unfitness of their standard-bearer.”
The editorial also called on voters to “pay attention to what he did as president and allow yourself to truly inhabit what he has promised to do if returned to office.”
The screed against Trump isn’t likely to sway any of his hard-core fans, but it might carry weight in what is shaping up to be a close, high-stakes election. The Times is often accused by the right and the left of being biased against their side, but it’s generally seen as a liberal-leaning newspaper, whether that’s true or not. And the paper can influence the public conversation, as evidenced by the assumed impact of its near-obsessive coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016.
