President Donald Trump. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

The Los Angeles Times skewered President Donald Trump in an editorial on Sunday, calling him "untethered from reality" and "full of blind self-regard."

The editorial was the first of four the paper plans to run in a series called "The problem with Trump."

On Sunday, the paper slammed Trump for his crackdown on immigration and so-called sanctuary cities, his repeal of President Barack Obama's regulations aimed at curbing climate change, his failure to push the GOP's replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, and his proposed inflation of the Pentagon's budget despite a promise to reduce the country's role in international conflicts.

But the editorial board's criticism went further in focusing on Trump personally.

"What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself," the editorial said. "He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation."

It added: "His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation," while effective on the campaign trail, were "nothing short of disastrous" in the Oval Office.

The editorial said that while many traditional conservatives favor often-touted Trump policies like stricter immigration laws and tighter border security, "Trump’s cockamamie border wall, his impracticable campaign promise to deport all 11 million people living in the country illegally and his blithe disregard for the effect of such proposals on the US relationship with Mexico turn a very bad policy into an appalling one."

The paper also ripped into what it described as "Trump's shocking lack of respect" for longstanding pillars of American democracy, like judicial independence, the free press, intelligence agencies, and the electoral system itself. "His contempt for the rule of law and the norms of government are palpable," the editorial said.

The editorial also challenged Trump's honesty, saying, "Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction."

It added that Trump further encouraged his supporters to thumb their noses at fact-based evidence, science, nonpartisanship, and the media and to reject those institutions in favor of ideology and conspiracy theory.

Despite saying "nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this trainwreck," the editorial expressed hope that Trump would be reined in and urged members of Congress – particularly Republicans — to stand up to what it called Trump's "reckless and heartless agenda," adding that "everybody has a role to play in this drama."