It is no coincidence that at this point of confluence between the newspaper industry’s decline and Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, conservative newspaper editorial boards are discovering that the Hillary Clinton of right-wing fever dreams bears almost no resemblance to reality.

The Arizona Republic, which has “never endorsed a Democrat over a Republican for president” in 126 years, now finds that “Clinton has the temperament and experience to be president.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, which “has supported Republicans for president for a century,” admits that “Clinton is a known commodity with a proven track record of governing.” And the Dallas Morning News, which “has not recommended a Democrat for the nation’s highest office since before World War II,” lets on that “Clinton has spent years in the trenches doing the hard work needed to prepare herself to lead our nation.”

These are apt and welcome admissions against ideological interest, motivated explicitly by Trump’s moral ugliness and unfitness for the presidency. But their timing is heavily suggestive of a lesson learned too late: that we should be faithful to reality in criticizing ideological foes and not tolerate others’ efforts to demean and slander them out of convenience.





These editorials, written by experienced conservative journalists, are implicit admissions that the overwhelming majority of horrifying, conspiratorial things conservatives and Republicans have said about Clinton over the years—from accusing her of murdering Vince Foster, to orchestrating and covering up the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, to endangering U.S. national security with her email setup—have been instrumentalist agitprop. Liberals have understood all along that Clinton’s depiction in right-wing circles is a grotesque caricature. But not everybody has been in on the scam. And it’s troubling that a true-to-life rendering only emerged now, six weeks before an election in which the very integrity of American democracy is at stake.

This is not to hang the threat that Trump might win on the editorial boards of the Republic, Enquirer, and Morning News. The reach and influence of newspaper endorsements has eroded steadily in recent years as media markets have fragmented, politics has polarized, and big city papers have floundered and disappeared.