The Los Angeles Times on Sunday launched a four-part editorial series that said Trump’s lack of respect for democratic institutions and his “utter lack of regard for truth” threatens the safety of the U.S. and the world.
The Times’ first installment, “Our Dishonest President,” said Trump’s policies are already hurting people, but said that is not the most frightening thing about Trump.
“What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself,” the Times wrote. “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.”
“Where will this end?” the paper asked. “Will Trump moderate his crazier campaign positions as time passes? Or will he provoke confrontation with Iran, North Korea or China, or disobey a judge’s order or order a soldier to violate the Constitution?”
“Or, alternately, will the system itself — the Constitution, the courts, the permanent bureaucracy, the Congress, the Democrats, the marchers in the streets — protect us from him as he alienates more and more allies at home and abroad, steps on his own message and creates chaos at the expense of his ability to accomplish his goals?” it asked.
The paper called out Trump as someone who “regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction.”
“It’s difficult to know whether he actually can’t distinguish the real from the unreal — or whether he intentionally conflates the two to befuddle voters, deflect criticism and undermine the very idea of objective truth,” it said.
The paper’s second installment on Monday, “Why Trump Lies,” said there is evidence that Trump “may not see much practical distinction between lies, if he believes they serve him, and the truth.”
“He targets the darkness, anger and insecurity that hide in each of us and harnesses them for his own purposes,” the paper said. “If one of his lies doesn’t work — well, then he lies about that.”
“His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency,” the Times said. “He gives every indication that he is as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.”
The op-ed ended by encouraging people to stand up to Trump.
“Investigate. Read. Write. Listen. Speak. Think,” the paper said. “Be wary of those who disparage the investigators, the readers, the writers, the listeners, the speakers and the thinkers. Be suspicious of those who confuse reality with reality TV, and those who repeat falsehoods while insisting, against all evidence, that they are true. To defend freedom, demand fact.”
