The Case Against Donald Trump
BY THE
EDITORIAL BOARD
The
Editorial Board is a group of opinion journalists
whose views
are informed by expertise,
research,
debate and certain longstanding values.
It is
separate from the newsroom.
THE VERDICT
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest
threat to American democracy since World War II.
Mr. Trump’s
ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around
the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of
his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation
together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the
profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a
breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man
unworthy of the office he holds.
The
editorial board does not lightly indict a duly elected president. During Mr.
Trump’s term, we have called out his racism and his xenophobia. We have
critiqued his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and
relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and
maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his
malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused to convict
the president for obvious abuses of power and obstruction, we counseled his
political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating him at the ballot box.
Nov. 3 can
be a turning point. This is an election about the country’s future, and what
path its citizens wish to choose.
The
resilience of American democracy has been sorely tested by Mr. Trump’s first
term. Four more years would be worse.
But even as
Americans wait to vote in lines that stretch for blocks through their towns and
cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a full-throated assault on the integrity of
that essential democratic process. Breaking with all of his modern
predecessors, he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power,
suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate outcome, and that if he does
not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of the American people in the
courts or even on the streets.
Kathleen
Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor, wrote about the editorial board’s
verdict on Donald Trump's presidency in a special edition of our Opinion Today
newsletter.
The
enormity and variety of Mr.Trump’s misdeeds can feel overwhelming. Repetition
has dulled the sense of outrage, and the accumulation of new outrages leaves
little time to dwell on the particulars. This is the moment when Americans must
recover that sense of outrage.
It is the
purpose of this special section of the Sunday Review to remind readers why Mr.
Trump is unfit to lead the nation. It includes a series of essays focused on
the Trump administration’s rampant corruption, celebrations of violence, gross
negligence with the public’s health and incompetent statecraft. A selection of
iconic images highlights the president’s record on issues like climate,
immigration, women’s rights and race. And alongside our judgment of Mr. Trump,
we are publishing, in their own words, the damning judgments of men and women
who had served in his administration.
The urgency
of these essays speaks for itself. The repudiation of Mr. Trump is the first
step in repairing the damage he has done. But even as we write these words, Mr.
Trump is salting the field — and even if he loses, reconstruction will require
many years and tears.
Mr. Trump
stands without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern
history. In 2016, his bitter account of the nation’s ailments struck a chord
with many voters. But the lesson of the last four years is that he cannot solve
the nation’s pressing problems because he is the nation’s most pressing
problem.
He is a
racist demagogue presiding over an increasingly diverse country; an
isolationist in an interconnected world; a showman forever boasting about
things he has never done, and promising to do things he never will.
He has
shown no aptitude for building, but he has managed to do a great deal of
damage. He is just the man for knocking things down.
As the
world runs out of time to confront climate change, Mr. Trump has denied the
need for action, abandoned international cooperation and attacked efforts to
limit emissions.
He has
mounted a cruel crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration without
proposing a sensible policy for determining who should be allowed to come to
the United States.
Obsessed
with reversing the achievements of his immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, he
has sought to persuade both Congress and the courts to get rid of the
Affordable Care Act without proposing any substitute policy to provide Americans
with access to affordable health care. During the first three years of his
administration, the number of Americans without health insurance increased by
2.3 million — a number that has surely grown again as millions of Americans
have lost their jobs this year.
He
campaigned as a champion of ordinary workers, but he has governed on behalf of
the wealthy. He promised an increase in the federal minimum wage and fresh
investment in infrastructure; he delivered a round of tax cuts that mostly
benefited rich people. He has indiscriminately erased regulations, and answered
the prayers of corporations by suspending enforcement of rules he could not
easily erase. Under his leadership, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
has stopped trying to protect consumers and the Environmental Protection Agency
has stopped trying to protect the environment.
He has
strained longstanding alliances while embracing dictators like North Korea’s
Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom Mr. Trump treats with a degree of
warmth and deference that defies explanation. He walked away from the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, a strategic agreement among China’s neighbors
intended to pressure China to conform to international standards. In its place,
Mr. Trump has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions of dollars
in tariffs — taxes that are actually paid by Americans — without extracting
significant concessions from China.
Mr. Trump’s
inadequacies as a leader have been on particularly painful display during the
coronavirus pandemic. Instead of working to save lives, Mr. Trump has treated
the pandemic as a public relations problem. He lied about the danger,
challenged the expertise of public health officials and resisted the
implementation of necessary precautions; he is still trying to force the
resumption of economic activity without bringing the virus under control.
As the
economy pancaked, he signed an initial round of aid for Americans who lost
their jobs. Then the stock market rebounded and, even though millions remained
out of work, Mr. Trump lost interest in their plight.
In
September, he declared that the virus “affects virtually nobody” the day before
the death toll from the disease in the United States topped 200,000.
Nine days
later, Mr. Trump fell ill.
The
foundations of American civil society were crumbling before Mr. Trump rode down
the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his presidential
campaign. But he has intensified the worst tendencies in American politics:
Under his leadership, the nation has grown more polarized, more paranoid and
meaner.
He has
pitted Americans against each other, mastering new broadcast media like Twitter
and Facebook to rally his supporters around a virtual bonfire of grievances and
to flood the public square with lies, disinformation and propaganda. He is
relentless in his denigration of opponents and reluctant to condemn violence by
those he regards as allies. At the first presidential debate in September, Mr.
Trump was asked to condemn white supremacists. He responded by instructing one
violent gang, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by.”
He has
undermined faith in government as a vehicle for mediating differences and
arriving at compromises. He demands absolute loyalty from government officials,
without regard to the public interest. He is openly contemptuous of expertise.
And he has
mounted an assault on the rule of law, wielding his authority as an instrument
to secure his own power and to punish political opponents. In June, his
administration tear-gassed and cleared peaceful protesters from a street in
front of the White House so Mr. Trump could pose with a book he does not read
in front of a church he does not attend.
The full
scope of his misconduct may take decades to come to light. But what is already
known is sufficiently shocking:
He has
resisted lawful oversight by the other branches of the federal government. The
administration routinely defies court orders, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly
directed administration officials not to testify before Congress or to provide
documents, notably including Mr. Trump’s tax returns.
With the
help of Attorney General William Barr, he has shielded loyal aides from
justice. In May, the Justice Department said it would drop the prosecution of
Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn even though Mr.
Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In July, Mr. Trump commuted the
sentence of another former aide, Roger Stone, who was convicted of obstructing
a federal investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 election campaign. Senator Mitt
Romney, Republican of Utah, rightly condemned the commutation as an act of
“unprecedented, historic corruption.”
Last year,
Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of
his main political rival, Joe Biden, and then directed administration officials
to obstruct a congressional inquiry of his actions. In December 2019, the House
of Representatives voted to impeach Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors.
But Senate Republicans, excepting Mr. Romney, voted to acquit the president,
ignoring Mr. Trump’s corruption to press ahead with the project of filling the
benches of the federal judiciary with young, conservative lawyers as a firewall
against majority rule.
Now, with
other Republican leaders, Mr. Trump is mounting an aggressive campaign to
reduce the number of Americans who vote and the number of ballots that are
counted.
The
president, who has long spread baseless charges of widespread voter fraud, has
intensified his rhetorical attacks in recent months, especially on ballots
submitted by mail. “The Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY
DETERMINED,” he tweeted. The president himself has voted by mail, and there is
no evidence to support his claims. But the disinformation campaign serves as a
rationale for purging voter rolls, closing polling places, tossing absentee ballots
and otherwise impeding Americans from exercising the right to vote.
It is an
intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in
government by the people.
Other
modern presidents have behaved illegally or made catastrophic decisions.
Richard Nixon used the power of the state against his political opponents.
Ronald Reagan ignored the spread of AIDS. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying
and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush took the nation to war under false
pretenses.
Mr. Trump
has outstripped decades of presidential wrongdoing in a single term.
Frederick
Douglass lamented during another of the nation’s dark hours, the presidency of
Andrew Johnson, “We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in
the hands of a bad man, we shall be safe.” But that is not the nature of our
democracy. The implicit optimism of American democracy is that the health of
the Republic rests on the judgment of the electorate and the integrity of those
voters choose.
Mr. Trump
is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve,
protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Now, in
this moment of peril, it falls to the American people — even those who would
prefer a Republican president — to preserve, protect and defend the United
States by voting.
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