A member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has urged Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton to avoid a potentially disastrous Donald Trump presidency.
“Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House,” Dorothy Rabinowitz, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the newspaper, wrote in an opinion piece.
Under the headline “Hillary-Hatred Derangement Syndrome,” the article mounts a blistering attack on Trump and the “Never Hillary forces” who are willing to support the Republican nominee in order to prevent his Democratic opponent taking office.
“They are aware of his casual disregard for truth, his self-obsession, his ignorance, his ingrained vindictiveness,” Rabinowitz writes.
Her evisceration of Trump highlights the divide among conservative media over Trump’s campaign, which last month brought in an executive from the right-wing website Breitbart News as its CEO. It also follows the USA Today editorial board’s declaration that Trump is “unfit for the presidency,” the first time the paper has taken sides in a presidential race.
A bastion of the conservative establishment, the Journal’s editorial board has repeatedly blasted Trump. Last month, it called on the Republican Party to give up on him unless he changed his act.
But Rabinowitz and her colleagues are also no fans of Clinton, whose ties to President Obama they find troubling.
Despite Trump’s unpopularity, “huge numbers of Americans are no less appalled by the possibility of a Clinton presidency that would in effect be another Obama term,” she wrote in July.
In her attack this week on Trump, Rabinowitz also accuses Clinton of “reflexive, factually distorted, and inflammatory sermonizing” on institutional racism in the U.S. justice system.
“Even so,” she writes, “such proclivities pale next to the occasion for cringing that would come with a Trump presidency.”
The Wall Street Journal’s attacks on Trump had stoked speculation that its owner, Rupert Murdoch, was trying to drive the Republican nominee out of the race. Murdoch said in July that Trump was “embarrassing” the country.
But Murdoch has since softened his tone. And the Republican nominee has been appearing frequently on Murdoch’s Fox News while turning down most other major networks and news organizations.