Trump Time Capsule #55: 'Unique Threat to Democracy'; Russian Role?
The editorial page of the Washington Post, though chronically hawkish in foreign policy, usually ends up endorsing the Democratic candidate for president. But it doesn’t usually end up doing something like what it did today. To the best of my knowledge, it has not previously run an editorial like this:
It didn’t say this about Richard Nixon in 1972, when the Post was beginning the Watergate investigations that would help lead to his resignation. As far as I can tell, it didn’t issue similar Red Alert warnings about Barry Goldwater in 1964.
But this year it has. Sample:
Donald J. Trump, until now a Republican problem, this week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions.
Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew.
Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril.
And this conclusion:
We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.
Good for the Post — and continued shame on the “responsible” Republicans who are acting as if this were a normal candidate in a normal year.
On the DNC hack front, I don’t know enough about the merits to say much right now. But precisely because this story by Patrick Tucker is in Defense One — a non-political publication (and part of the Atlantic family) that concentrates on defense and defense technology — it is worth particular attention. This is how it begins. The blue part is my highlighting; the yellow is in the original:
Update: David Sanger of the NYT, the rare writer whom Donald Trump has gone out of his way to praise (and also a friend of mine, a Venn-diagram overlap that might never happen again), provides more evidence of possible Russian involvement in a story here. Eg: “Researchers have concluded that the national committee was breached by two Russian intelligence agencies, which were the same attackers behind previous Russian cyberoperations at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year.”
No one knows how the hacking story will play out, nor whether press endorsements like the Post’s make any difference in a cycle like this year’s. The point for the historical record, once again, is that these things are exceptional. Newspapers usually say they “prefer” one candidate to another — not that one of them is a “unique threat to democracy.” Foreign governments are sometimes assumed to have favorites in an election, but not to be intervening in them directly. (With the exception of the 1968 and 1980 elections, but those are separate stories for another day.)
And this is all on the record as Trump continues to edge closer in the polls.