The New York Times issued a scathing editorial imploring voters to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. | Getty NYT to undecided voters: Don't hand Trump the White House

The New York Times on Monday urged undecided voters to rethink their consideration of Donald Trump for president, warning them of supporting a candidate “far more consumed with himself than with the nation’s well-being.”

Days after endorsing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the newspaper issued a scathing rebuke of the Republican presidential nominee — hours ahead of his first one-on-one debate with Clinton.


In an editorial published Monday, the Times’ editorial board reminds voters that the real estate mogul began his campaign 15 months ago offering “wealth and television celebrity as credentials, then slyly added a list of fearmongering about Mexican ‘rapists’ flooding across the Southern border.”

“From that moment of combustion, it became clear that Mr. Trump’s views were matters of dangerous impulse and cynical pandering rather than thoughtful politics,” the board wrote. “Yet he has attracted throngs of Americans who ascribe higher purpose to him than he has demonstrated in a freewheeling campaign marked by bursts of false and outrageous allegations, personal insults, xenophobic nationalism, unapologetic sexism and positions that shift according to his audience and his whims.”

Now is the time for undecided voters — as well as those “hoping for some dramatic change in our politics and governance,” the board said — “to take a hard look and see Mr. Trump for who he is. They have an obligation to scrutinize his supposed virtues as a refreshing counterpolitician. Otherwise, they could face the consequences of handing the White House to a man far more consumed with himself than with the nation’s well-being.”

From his business “record rife with bankruptcies and sketchy ventures” to his refusal to release his tax returns to his embrace of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and potential business ties to the Kremlin, the Times outlined “how Mr. Trump is selling himself and why he can’t be believed.” The list includes Trump’s waffling on policy issues, his intimation that he might try to persuade creditors to accept less than the U.S. government owes and a tax-cut plan that would cost trillions of dollars in revenue, among others.

The Times mocks what it calls his ludicrous secret plan to destroy the Islamic State, noting that Trump has no national security experience and bobs and weaves on whether he would commit ground troops, and insists his heart lies “with the anti-immigrant, nativist and racist signals that he scurrilously employed to build his base.”

“A change agent for the nation and the world?” an italicized subhead reads. “There can be little doubt of that. But voters should be asking themselves if Mr. Trump will deliver the kind of change they want,” the Times cautions.

Adding that voters should be wary of Trump’s “silence about areas of national life that are crying out for constructive change,” such as schools, poverty and racial progress, the Times concludes: “Voters attracted by the force of the Trump personality should pause and take note of the precise qualities he exudes as an audaciously different politician: bluster, savage mockery of those who challenge him, degrading comments about women, mendacity, crude generalization about nations and religions. Our presidents are role models for generations of our children. Is this the example we want for them?”