The New York Daily News editorial board published a nearly 8,000-word long “political obituary” for Donald Trump Friday that said it hopes the candidate is buried in the upcoming election.
“History will mark the presidential contest of 2016 for demagoguery that distorted America’s electoral process from a competition of ideas into, on the one hand, a reach for power based on a cultish thirst for vengeance, and, on the other, a bipartisan drive to save the American presidency itself,” wrote the editors in its massive manifesto. “Herewith, we fervently pray, is the political obituary of Donald Trump and all that he stands for.”
“Trump’s reckless willingness to damage trust in the electoral process — in order to save face and hold leadership of the paranoid wing of U.S. politics — is the most pressing reason why voters must defeat him in a landslide,” it said. “To take full stock of Trump must be to understand the urgency of barring him from the White House, as well as to reckon with how an authoritarian fabulist has gotten so close to leading the globe’s beacon of democracy.”
The article, titled “Bury Trump in a Landside” makes the case against the Republican presidential nominee in 16 chapters filled with unflattering titles and illustrations. “Trump the Demagogue” features a cartoon of a combative Trump dressed like Adolf Hitler as he registers Muslims, a reference to the national database he once promised to start if elected president. In another section focusing on his alleged tax evasion, Trump is shown sitting on top of a huge pile of bull manure.
The final chapter describes Trump as an enemy of democracy, featuring him holding the severed head of the Statue of Liberty like a trophy while brandishing a curved sword in the manner of the radical Islamic terrorists he has promised to destroy.
The editors endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president in July. The typically populist paper has flip-flopped between the major parties in the recent past, endorsing Republican George W. Bush in 2004, Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, and Republican Mitt Romney in 2012.
“Donald Trump is ending his campaign in an ever more inflammatory and destructive assault on American democracy. The end of his presidential dreams must come under an avalanche of anti-Trump votes on Nov. 8,” concludes the piece.
