Donald Trump is in Orlando, Florida, to kick off his re-election campaign today. While the 2020 presidential election is still a ways off, and the Democrats haven’t selected his opponent yet, the Orlando Sentinel decided to use the president’s proximity to be the first newspaper in the nation to give its editorial board’s presidential endorsement for 2020.
Their choice? Not Donald Trump.
“After 2½ years we’ve seen enough,” the editorial board wrote. “Enough of the chaos, the division, the schoolyard insults, the self-aggrandizement, the corruption, and especially the lies.” According to a Washington Post database, the president has tallied more than 10,000 lies since he took office, and that is too much for the paper (and most other people, too). “Trump’s successful assault on truth is the great casualty of this presidency, followed closely by his war on decency,” they wrote.
The anti-endorsement continues with a laundry list of Trump’s love of North Korea, his secret meeting with Vladimir Putin, ignoring American intelligence, his impact on the national debt and the U.S.’s standing in the world, the alienation of allies, his attacks on U.S. citizens and companies, and the fact that he would “accept dirt on an opponent from Russia or China” and more.
While the paper’s editors are coming out against another four years for Trump, they are not “defaulting to whomever the Democrats choose” and would happily assess an independent candidate, or a Republican who decided to run, or even Trump if he changed his tune. “The nation must endure another 1½ years of Trump,” they wrote. “But it needn’t suffer another four beyond that.”
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