‘Our Dishonest President’: L.A. Times editorial eviscerates Trump

Since Donald Trump began his stunning ascent from real estate mogul and reality television star to wall-building, Muslim-ban-promising Republican candidate to GOP nominee to president, there have been plenty of piercing editorials about him and his policies.

But perhaps none have been as scathing as the one published Sunday by the Los Angeles Times.

“It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters,” the Times editorial board wrote in the first of a four-part op-ed titled “Our Dishonest President.”

In September, the same editorial board called Trump “unqualified and unsuited to be president” and said his election would be “catastrophic for the nation.”

“Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck,” the paper said Sunday.

The Times pointed to Trump’s executive order on immigration among “dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart.”

“But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency,” the Times said. “What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself.”

More from the editorial:

He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.

While Trump’s policies are “variations on classic Republican positions,” the paper argued that they become “dangerous” in the hands of the Donald.

“Many Republicans, for instance, support tighter border security and a tougher response to illegal immigration,” the Times explained, “but Trump’s cockamamie border wall, his impracticable campaign promise to deport all 11 million people living in the country illegally and his blithe disregard for the effect of such proposals on the U.S. relationship with Mexico turn a very bad policy into an appalling one.”

The editorial board said that the four-part series will examine three of the president’s “troubling traits”:

loading...

• “Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based.”
• “His utter lack of regard for truth.”
• “His scary willingness to repeat alt-right conspiracy theories, racist memes and crackpot, out-of-the-mainstream ideas.”

Trump, who frequently reacts to negative media coverage about him via Twitter, has yet to respond to the editorial.

But perhaps due in part to coverage of the op-ed by pro-Trump websites Breitbart.com and the Drudge Report, “Our Dishonest President” was among the top trending terms in the United States on Sunday afternoon.