Endorse Trump to save your newspaper

As a retired newspaper editorial writer, I offer a little advice to newspaper editorial writers in deep red states: endorse Trump. It will be fun. It will be daring. It will impress former readers who finally agree with the local newspaper.

The experience also will be educational as the writer struggles to find reasons to support the president. The writer might actually discover Russiagate really was a phony scandal, Obama really did have the FBI spy on him, and Jesse Jackson really did give The Donald two Rainbow Coalition awards back in the day.

We are told — by newspaper writers — that newspapers are vital to democracy but they do not act that way.

Forbes reported four years ago: “Biden Trounces Trump In Final Tally Of Major Newspaper Endorsements: 47 To 7.” Rare was the newspaper even in a deep red state that endorsed him. Why would you subscribe to a newspaper that is so out of touch with its readers?

Endorsing Hillary in 2016 and Biden in 2020 in West Virginia and other states was virtue signaling meant to impress press awards judges and not to persuade readers.

How did the chubby Dixie Chick put it?

Oh yes, Natalie Maines told an audience in London on March 10, 2003: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

Well, there went that career.

(After I wrote this, I learned they played for the DNC last night. The chubby one is now butch. They dropped Dixie from their name.)

In 2020, the Houston Chronicle went Dixie Chick in its endorsement of Joe Biden:

Character, without question, is the starkest divide between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. For all his faults — and there are a few — the latter possesses a rare ability in these polarized times to see the humanity in those who cross his path, even from the opposing side.

At 77, Biden is a politician who Washington, for all its trying, has been unable to break. Even his political foes preface criticisms with caveats of grace or shrewdly aim their arrows askew — at his gaffe-prone speech, at his younger son, and at his tenuous affiliation with the “radical left,” conveniently forgetting that Biden, a lifelong moderate, already fought the fringe and won.

Biden’s humble roots in Scranton, Penn., the personal hardship he endured after a car crash killed his wife and daughter, the 120-mile commutes back and forth to Washington so he could tuck his sons in bed each night — these are experiences Americans can relate to and they help Biden relate to us.

Still, many who plan to vote for Trump, some with pinched nose, act as though character itself were a luxury — nice if you can get it, but not essential.

We disagree. Character, in this election, is everything.

Character, personified from the get-go by George Washington’s voluntary relinquishment of power after two terms as America’s first president, is the set of virtues upon which all others depend. What is a promise to an ally or a warning to an adversary if it can’t be trusted?

It is America’s character — the Sunday-best version of it in our hearts or the ideal we’re still striving toward — that swells our chests at a Fourth of July parade, not tweaked trade deals rebranded as new, not games of chicken with China, not even a Supreme Court coup.

Trump’s deficiencies of decency are not a matter of style. These days, they are a matter of life and death.

Lack of character is what got us into this national nightmare that has killed 213,000 Americans, infected more than 7.6 million and put tens of millions out of work. And character is the only thing that will get us out.

I am no medical doctor but I don’t see how a lack of character gave us covid, which at that point had killed far fewer than 0.1% of all Americans. And the number included a dubious category called died with covid.

In vouching for Biden, the newspaper had to overlook the fact that he had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race because he plagiarized the biography of a British politician and was caught in webs and webs of lies.

We also knew at the time that his drug-addicted son had used his father’s position as vice president to collect bribes from foreigners.

The 2016 Democrat candidate, whom the paper also endorsed, had used a fake charity to collect donations from foreign oligarchs and governments. Only a decision by Jim Comey, the director of the FBI, not to recommend prosecution spared her. Donald Trump was most correct in saying that if he were president, she would be in jail for her felonies.

Real ones, not the New York City ones.

I get that editorial boards like to pretend that they are leading the rubes to the promised land, but when was the last time the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times endorsed a Republican for president? Sure, they praise Reagan now that he’s dead and out of office, but why did they tell us Carter and then Mondale were better?

15 years ago, the Houston Chronicle reported, “The Houston Chronicle’s circulation declined 13.2% daily and 7.8% on Sundays, the Audit Bureau of Circulation reported Monday, as a difficult economy and higher subscription costs pushed down the number of newspapers sold.

“The Chronicle remained the seventh-largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States.

“The Chronicle’s daily circulation was 427,223 in the six-month reporting period that ended March 31, while Sunday circulation was 583,364.”

That came after the newspaper broke tradition and endorsed a Democrat for president — which it has done ever since.

Circulation has dropped by two-thirds since then. According to Wikipedia, the paper is down to 142,785 subscribers.

The editorial writers get to brag about making a conservative paper liberal while the printers, ad salesmen and circulation department staff face layoffs as conservative readers flee.

That’s just one of the many — too many — newspapers in red states that ignore their readers and wonder why subscriptions are collapsing. Endorsing Donald Trump would tell former readers that the days whine and propaganda may be coming to an end.