Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump after speaking at a Turning Point Action campaign rally Thursday in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Americans expect certain qualities in their president. Loyalty. Honesty. Decency. Respect for the law. Commitment to the equality and dignity of all people.
Donald J. Trump thoroughly fails to embody any of these qualities.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this editorial page that its board does not endorse him for election this year, just as we didn’t in 2016 or 2020. Time has only reaffirmed our sense that he is entirely unfit to hold the most powerful position in the world, to lead this nation, and to serve — as presidents certainly should — as a role model for its future leaders.
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Mr. Trump is so unfit in so many ways that we are devoting significant space to inventory some of the main reasons for that assessment.
If there is one paramount reason to reject Mr. Trump, it’s his attempt to subvert a free and fair election in 2020.
Mr. Trump — in whose mind any election he doesn’t win is unfair — had claimed even before voting started that the 2020 election was rigged, and after his defeat to Joe Biden he refused to concede. Without evidence, he continues to insist he was cheated out of victory. His incendiary claim sparked a deadly insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, by supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to block certification of the election at his behest. Even as police were being beaten by the mob. Mr. Trump for hours watched the melee on TV without trying to stop it.
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He now calls the hundreds of people jailed for this violence “hostages,” and says he will pardon them if reelected.
Jan. 6 may have been Mr. Trump’s most blatant betrayal, but it was not his only one.
He was impeached — though not convicted thanks to his partisan allies in the Senate — for holding up military aid to Ukraine in 2019 in an attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into opening a baseless investigation into Mr. Trump’s anticipated Democratic rival, Mr. Biden.
He openly sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin against the U.S. intelligence community on the question of whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
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He has repeatedly denigrated the U.S. military, calling those who died in combat “suckers” and “losers,” according to his onetime Chief of Staff John Kelly; he trivialized their sacrifice by suggesting that prisoners of war weren’t........