Dallas Morning News: Donald Trump 'does not deserve your vote'

Dylan Stableford
·Senior Writer

Texas has voted Republican in the last nine presidential elections. But if the Dallas Morning News has its way, the state won’t turn red for Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump is not qualified to serve as president and does not deserve your vote,” the newspaper said in a scathing editorial published on Tuesday, ripping the GOP nominee as an “impulsive” bully and isolationist whose shifting positions on the economy and national security should frighten conservatives in the Longhorn State.

“Trump is — or has been — at odds with nearly every GOP ideal this newspaper holds dear,” the editorial said. “Donald Trump is no Republican and certainly no conservative.”

The real estate mogul’s proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, the paper said, is part of an “authoritarian streak that should horrify limited-government advocates.”

Equally troubling, Trump favors “sound bites over sound policy,” the paper argued:

Trump pledges to make our military “so big, so powerful, so strong that nobody — absolutely nobody — is going to mess with us.” But what does he want to do with that military? He says he supports killing the families of Muslim terrorists and allowing interrogation methods “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” And if the military balks at obeying such orders? “If I say do it, they’re gonna do it,” he says.

It’s not easy to offer a shorthand list of such tenets, since Trump flips from one side to the other, issue after issue, sometimes within a single news cycle. Regardless, his ideas are so far from Republicanism that they have spawned a new description: Trumpism.

“We have no interest in a Republican nominee for whom all principles are negotiable,” the paper added, “nor in a Republican Party that is willing to trade away principle for pursuit of electoral victory.”

According to Real Clear Politics’ average of the latest polling data, Trump currently holds an 8-point advantage over Hillary Clinton in Texas, a state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1976. And the Morning News, which endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich during the Republican primary, stopped short of endorsing Clinton.

But James Glassman, who served as the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in the George W. Bush administration, is urging fellow Republicans appalled by Trump to vote for Clinton.

“I have voted for every Republican nominee for president since 1980, but I will not this time,” Glassman wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “Mr. Trump’s appalling temperament renders him unfit to be president, and his grotesque policy formulations mock the principles of liberty and respect for the individual that have been the foundation of the Republican Party since Abraham Lincoln.”

“This is, whether we like it or not, an election between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton,” Glassman added. “And that means that if you want to stop Mr. Trump, you have no choice but to vote for Mrs. Clinton. There’s no sitting this one out.”