As Donald Trump continues to not-prepare for his next debate, his campaign continues to break new ground in sucking.
With just a little over a month until election day, Donald Trump has racked up zero major newspaper endorsements, a first for any major party nominee in American history.
In American history, we repeat. Donald Trump has achieved something never before thought possible among the country's most prominent newspapers: A nationwide consensus that regardless of party affiliation, one of the two candidates is simply unacceptable.
[I]t’s not just the papers but also writers who are taking a stand. Last month, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s traditionally conservative editorial board endorsed Clinton, calling Trump the candidate of “white supremacists and swastika devotees.”
Whether all of this is enough to sway Republican voters to ditch their candidate is one question; a bigger one remains whether the shame of having to vote for Trump will cause voters to just stay home rather than trudging to the ballot box. If that's the case, downballot Republicans would find themselves very bad off indeed.
That still seems an unlikely scenario, however. If the drubbing Trump is getting on the editorial pages transferred to similarly negative coverage on television, where far more people are paying attention, it might, but the news networks continue to pretend Trump is a credible candidate regardless of how much of his erratic behavior or obvious ignorance they have to tiptoe around to do it. The editorial pages may be overwhelmingly of the opinion that the man is unfit for the office, but the "straight news" pages still are going out of their way to dodge Trump's manifestly incompetent responses to questions or unshakable obsession with personal vendettas against those who he feels, during any given week, have done him wrong.
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News analysts and issue experts have become quite certain that a President Donald Trump would be somewhere between a buffoonish clown and a danger to the republic, but that conclusion is reserved entirely for an op-ed statement tucked into the back of newspapers. Americans are far more likely to flip on, say, CNN, where they will be treated to the spectacle of one lunatic pro-Trump figure after another (ex-campaign head Corey Lewandowski, the profoundly dishonest Katrina Pierson, the execrable forced stupidity of Jeffrey Lord) insisting that Trump's every bleat and warble is genius wrapped in the vernacular of the Common Folk, who do not particularly care if their president knows one damn thing about governing and who deeply appreciate the opportunity to revisit the whole question of whether perhaps the real problem with America is all the Not White Folk.
You know, "balance." Perhaps Donald Trump openly lies to crowds, but perhaps the worse crime is pointing it out when he does. Perhaps Donald Trump's responses to policy questions are manifestly incompetent, but perhaps asking policy questions is un-American to begin with. And so forth.
So I remain skeptical that Trump's obvious incompetence and inherent dangerousness will result in the sort of nationwide Republican drubbing that putting up such a buffoonish candidate ought to deserve. Electing Trump would be dangerous to our nation, most longtime political observers seem to agree, but the networks still fret that reporting that honestly themselves could be dangerous to the bottom line. We are at an impasse.