NYT: Harris Is the Only 'Patriotic Choice for President'

The New York Times has endorsed Kamala Harris as "the only patriotic choice for president." The endorsement isn't surprising from a newspaper that hasn't backed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Politico notes, though much of the endorsement focuses on Donald Trump, not his opponent. "Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy," the editorial board wrote, citing his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and his refusal to commit to honoring the results of this one.

• "It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump," the editorial board wrote, describing him as "morally unfit" for the office. "He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities—wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline—that he most lacks."

• The editorial board said Harris is correct about the "clear danger" of returning Trump to office. "He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system," they wrote.
• The board said Trump did manage to "add to the public conversation" as president. "In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China's rise," the board wrote. "Yet even when the former president's overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes."

• The editorial board said that beyond Harris being a "necessary alternative," there is an "optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general."
• The board wrote, however, that voters are right to seek "more details about the vice president's plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies," saying, "Leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power."
• The board said that in the four years since it made its case against re-electing Trump, "many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds." The editorial said: "We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first. Kamala Harris is the only choice."

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